With a towering, self-mocking performance by Ms. Davis and almost equally memorable performances by the rest of the ensemble, "All About Eve" stands as a testament to screen writing of high wit and bitter sarcasm.
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"Fasten your seat belts; it's going to be a bumpy night!" --Bette Davis
No doubt about it, 1950 was a very good year for show business movies. Billy Wilder skewered Hollywood in "Sunset Boulevard" and Joseph L. Mankiewicz did the same for Broadway in "All About Eve." Of the two films, I prefer the darker humor of Wilder's outlook, but there's no question the witty dialogue and biting performances in Mankiewicz's picture hit home. In fact, "All About Eve" was nominated for a record fourteen Academy Awards (tying "Titanic"), winning six: Best Picture, Director (Mankiewicz), Screenplay (Mankiewicz), Supporting Actor (George Sanders), Sound Recording, and Costume Design (Edith Head and Charles Le Maire). Furthermore, it remains a favorite with critics and the public alike, placing sixteenth in the American Film Institute's "Top 100 Films," twenty-first in "Entertainment Weekly's 100 Greatest Films," and fiftieth in the Internet Movie Database's "Top 250 Movies." If you've never seen the film, you should.
The movie's plot is slight, almost nonexistent. As it is present at all, the plot is a framework for conveying the script's scintillating dialogue, which is really what the movie is about. Its modest storyline is told in flashback from an awards ceremony wherein various participants tell us in confidence about the guest of honor, a young Broadway actress named Eve Harrington (Anne Baxter), and her rise to theatrical stardom. The history they convey is as old as show business, concerning Eve's shrewd and cunning manipulation of people and events to suit her own needs as she climbs ruthlessly but effortlessly to the top of her profession. It's a story so familiar we see it repeated, ironically, at the end of the film.
Regardless of Eve, the real star of the show is Bette Davis as Margo Channing, a woman who in the movie has been the grande dame of the New York stage for as long as anyone can remember. In truth she's only just turned forty, but in show business, especially for women, forty is positively ancient and the age at which most actresses begin to lose their ability to play pretty young things. This is one of those unfortunate and hypocritical truths about movies as well as the stage: that men are able to continue well into their advancing years playing dashing heroes and romancing beautiful younger ladies, while women have a shelf life far shorter than their male counterparts. Maybe it's because show business has always been dominated by males that a fifty-eight year old James Bond (e.g., Roger Moore in "A View to a Kill") is fully acceptable, but a similarly aged Laura Croft would hardly be considered. In any case, things haven't changed a lot for actresses since "All About Eve" was made in the mid twentieth century, and the film's premise is as secure as ever.
Davis's Margo is the quintessential demanding, egotistical, popularity-obsessed big-time star. She devotes her life to the theater, not even having time for marriage, but she now faces middle age and a declining number of leading roles. Supremely self confident on the outside and a bundle of insecurities on the inside, Miss Davis was tailor-made for the part, although it's a role a lot of actresses Davis's age wouldn't have touched. Miss Davis was herself a reigning queen of Hollywood for the previous decade and a half, and having turned forty only a year or so before shooting began, she was looking at a slump in her own career. The movie put her back on top of the business, although she failed to win the Academy Award she so deserved. Her costar, Anne Baxter, insisted upon being nominated in the Best Actress category, too, rather than Supporting Actress, thereby cancelling out the number of votes either woman might have collected. Baxter later admitted she had made a mistake.
Eve (Baxter) is the secondary character, despite the movie's somewhat ironic title. Eve in the beginning is a seemingly sweet, naive young woman who starts at the bottom of the show business ladder as a mousey, devoted, starstruck fan; she volunteers to do anything for her idol, Margo. Eve intimates that she's a simple girl from Wisconsin, who gets caught up in her love of the theater. She insinuates herself into the lives of the theater people she meets and soon becomes Margo's personal assistant, then her understudy. But, of course, she's a devious understudy scheming to take over a part, and in the end, a life. Baxter conveys her role as easily as Miss Davis does hers, just as each of the actors in the film convey their parts in roles that would appear to have been written for them. Interestingly, the accompanying documentary tells us that there were other actors first considered for most of the roles, but fate intervened and serendipitous casting prevailed.
Among the supporting cast members, it is probably George Sanders as the cynical, acid-tongued theater critic Addison DeWitt who stands out most. He is said to best represent the views of writer-director Mankiewicz himself. DeWitt is the consummate snob, a man with a bigger ego than any of the actors, a man who believes he is the most important person in the theatrical world, and perhaps rightly so because he has the power to make or break any actor, director, writer, or show on Broadway. It's his opening narration and his barbed sarcasms that keep the movie's participants and themes in perspective, and Sanders well deserved his Oscar for the part.
Given the insular nature of the Broadway theater scene, it isn't hard to imagine how a single, powerful critic can, indeed, make a difference. The New York area is relatively small and its theater audience fairly close-knit, well-heeled, and literate. What's more, things probably haven't changed that much in half a century. The movie industry, however, is significantly different in that no single critic can have that kind of influence nationwide, especially when you consider that most Americans today are too lazy even to listen to a televised movie review, let alone read one.
Other cast members include Gary Merrill as Margo's director, Bill Sampson (misidentified as "Bill Simpson" in the movie's closing credits). Sampson is much younger than Margo but they're in love, and by the film's end they have decided to marry. In another example of life imitating art, Davis and Merrill really did fall in love and were married for a short time in the fifties.
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