All About Eve

The 1950 Best Picture Oscar went to All About Eve, a gloriously bitchy camp-fest that has been a gift to female impersonators everywhere. It has perhaps the wittiest screenplay ever written, and also has one of my favorite film characters of all time. It is an endlessly fascinating film, and at the time it set the record for most nominations for a single film (14), which was tied by Titanic 47 years later.

Based on a short story that was published in Cosmopolitan called "The Wisdom of Eve," the film concerns a young woman who at first blush appears to be a wide-eyed fan of a famous but aging Broadway actress. Eve Harrington (Anne Baxter) has seen every performance of the show starring Margo Channing (Bette Davis), and the playwright's wife, Celeste Holm, brings her in off the alley by the stage door to meet her heroine. She tells a sad story and appears to be so pathetic that everyone warms to her, and she's soon within the inner circle that includes playwright Lloyd Richards (Hugh Marlowe) and director Bill Sampson (Gary Merrill). Soon, though, she has wormed her way deeply into Channing's life, and maneuvers to usurp her.

Watching all this from a respectable distance is critic and columnist Addison DeWitt (George Sanders, who won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar). He is a brilliant character, one that was created not by the original story author, Mary Orr, but by writer-director Joseph Mankewiecz. A cynical effete, his every line of dialogue drips with a certain disdain.

While Sanders is great fun, Bette Davis is the heart of this picture. Her star had been fading, and after Claudette Colbert broke a vertebrae skiing Davis was the last-second replacement. She credits the film with resurrecting her career. It's hard to imagine anyone else playing the part of this vain, self-absorbed creature of Broadway, as it's probably this role more than any of her others that has defined the Bette Davis persona. When, at a cocktail party, she turns to the assembled guests and says, "Fasten your seat belts, we're in for a bumpy night" who else could have spoken those words with her flair?

Also in the cast were Thelma Ritter (four of the women in the film received Oscar nominations, including Ritter, Davis, Baxter and Celeste Holm) and a very young Marilyn Monroe, as a would-be starlet who knows what she needs to do to get ahead (the sexuality is brimming under the surface, but never spoken aloud--there's all sorts of speculation that Eve was supposed to be a Lesbian). Life imitated art when Merrill and Davis wed after the picture was completed.

Mankewiecz won Oscars for writing and directing, and he is the only person to do that in back to back years (he did it in 1949 for A Letter to Three Wives). His direction is very restrained in All About Eve, as the film is really an elaborately filmed play. There is little camera movement or spectacle (although it does utilize a freeze frame, which was a relatively novel conceit at the time). As his son points out in the documentary, that it would tie Titanic, a film that recreated the sinking of a luxury liner, with 14 Oscar nominations when it's greatest special effect is Bette Davis sashaying down a flight of stairs is kind of amazing.