All About Eve

Rating:
Summary: Funny Business a Woman's Career...Classic Venom Well Served
Review: According to the playwright character in this film, great stars never age. Granted, the line was said to appease a self-pitying star, nonetheless, it rings true when the talent is there to back it up. The same can be said about great scripts; they just get better and more resonant over time. Such is the case with director/screenwriter Joseph Mankiewicz's "All About Eve", one of the wittiest and most entertaining movies about backstage shenanigans in the theater world. As clever now as it was when released in 1950, this movie has Howard Hawks' "Twentieth Century" as the only possible competition in this genre. It's hard to imagine that anyone but Bette Davis was slated for the character of Broadway stage legend Margo Channing, but according to Hollywood lore, Mankiewicz was actually stuck with the last-minute selection of Davis after Claudette Colbert sprained her back. And thus a legendary performance was born with Davis' diva posturing perfectly balanced by her curdled insecurities and acid-tongued, pulled-from-her-bootstraps comments. This is movie acting of the highest order.

"All About Eve" is rather ironically named, as Anne Baxter in the title role, with her honey-toned voice covering a spine and apparently a soul of steel, does not actually dominate the movie until the last half-hour. All the women in this film are uniformly excellent - Davis; Baxter; Celeste Holm's officious playwright's wife, Karen (she of the "unyielding good taste"); Thelma Ritter's caustic and observant maid, Birdie; Marilyn Monroe's seemingly vacuous ingenue, Miss Caswell, a "graduate of the Copacabana School of Dramatic Arts" (she is so naturally charismatic her stardom seems assured); and in her bid for 15 minutes of fame, Barbara Bates as Eve's hungry wanna-be successor. Except for George Sanders' career-defining performance as the acid-tongued columnist, Addison DeWitt, the men fare less well perhaps because the roles are cast with such journeymen actors as Gary Merrill and Hugh Marlowe, who seem no more than competent as the temperamental director, Bill Sampson, and put-upon playwright, Lloyd Richards, respectively. I still wish William Holden was available to play Bill...at that point in his career, he would have been ideal, but he was too busy catering to Gloria Swanson in "Sunset Boulevard" at the time.

Mankiewicz's script contains so many classic scenes that it's hard to pick which one is best, a nice dilemma for a viewer to have, though one of my favorites is Margo's astute confessional to Karen about being a woman. The use of multiple narrators works perfectly as they piece together Eve's climb to stardom providing consensus to the perception of what a shrewd manipulator she is. The ending seems a bit extended to show how such ambition seems almost genetic and successive in character, nonetheless, the film is a deserved classic.

The transfer to DVD is good though not exceptional. The extras include an informative half-hour, making-of documentary; less helpful voiceovers (including one provided by a vibrant, 80+ year-old Celeste Holm) on alternative soundtracks; and some vintage footage of staged interviews with Davis and Baxter.