Face to face: Anne Baxter and Bette Davis in All About Eve Photo: History Picture Archive/Alamy Stock Photo
This year, that honor belongs to Oppenheimer with 13 nominations, just one short of the nomination record set by Titanic (11 wins) and La La Land (6 wins). This trio may look like carefully crafted Oscar bait—weighty themes, grueling performances, stunning production values, insider Hollywood references that tickle the Academy's G-spot—but there's another member of the exclusive Club of Fourteen who is perhaps the standout character.
There are no thermonuclear dynamics, no looming icebergs, no songs and dance exhibits: only brilliant wit and a rich note of domestic noir. His action even had the courage to be staged on Broadway. However, it won six awards at the 1951 ceremony, including Best Picture, and was ranked 16th on the American Film Institute's 1998 list of the 100 best American films. That film, of course, was All About Eve.
“It’s all about women… and their men!” was the slogan on the film's poster upon its release in 1950. But All About Eve is actually about much more enduring things: ambition, artificiality, venality, and the subtle art of faking it 'til you make it. It's the story of Eve Harrington (Anne Baxter), a bedraggled wannabe in a threadbare trench coat who hangs around the stage door of Broadway diva Margo Channing (Bette Davis, as commanding but as vulnerable as you could wish for). Confessing, she spins what sounds like a suspiciously polished sob story—a dreary tale of growing up in Wisconsin where “everything was beer,” starting a small theater troupe “like a raindrop in the desert”—and begins to turn Margot on her head. life.
Along the way, she also destroys Margot's inner circle, from the playwright she elevates (Hugh Marlowe) to the director she loves (Gary Merrill) to the best friend she fights with and trusts (Celeste Holm). As she progresses and panders her way up the dirty pillar, from assistant to indispensable factotum and understudy, eventually displacing Margot, she even ruffles the unforgiving feathers of influential critic and columnist Addison DeWitt (played by George Sanders as Ascot, doodle). -collar embodiment of the word “wasp”).
As «Little Miss Evil» — as a belatedly wiser Margot addresses Eve — do it? Well, as Devitt himself puts it at the film’s climax: “You’re an incredible person, Eve, and so am I. We have this in common. And also contempt for humanity, the inability to love and be loved, insatiable ambition — and talent. We deserve each other.»
The power of the protégé-usurper-mentor's All About Eve storyline has inspired numerous accolades, from the melodramatic (Pedro Almodóvar's All About My Mother, John Cassavetes' Opening Night) to the arthouse arc (Olivier Assayas' Clouds of Sils Maria, «The Favorite» by Yorgos Lanthimos). ) and camp burlesque (“Magic Mike”). And, lest we forget, Showgirls, in which feisty newcomer Nomi hisses at seasoned dancer Krystal, «There's always someone younger and hungrier coming down the stairs after you.»
What none of these works had, however, was the effortless sophistication of the original and the superb dialogue brought to a flawless brilliance by writer-director Joseph L. Mankiewicz. All About Eve has been named the most quotable film in the world, and while it certainly doesn't lack for quirks — Davis's Fasten Your Seatbelts, It's Gonna Be a Bumpy Night — Thelma Ritter as Margot's assistant Birdie quips to Davis that «She (Eve) studies you as if you were a set of blueprints,” and Marilyn Monroe making a cameo appearance as hapless starlet Claudia Casswell, introduced as “a graduate of the Copacabana School of Dramatic Art,” is a heightened theatricality of the play as a whole that sets it apart.
Bette Davis in 1950 Photo: Hulton Archive
From the first scene, a flash-forward where the victorious Eve receives the so-called Sarah Siddons Award for Excellence in Theatre, to the last, where Eve goes head to head with her eventual winner, the film values the ability to feign authenticity over reality. Not surprisingly, the same doctoral dissertation condemned it as proto-feminist writing, misogynistic rant, homophobic speech and weird fantasy.
No matter where you come from, the world of All About Eve is worth enjoying, and it was one that Mankiewicz, one of Hollywood's most literate and urbane writer-directors, knew well. He was a West Coast transplant who had a lifelong love for Broadway. He has been working in California since the advent of sound films; his older brother Herman, the witty, debonair, co-creator of Citizen Kane and supposed role model for Addison DeWitt (a double-edged homage at best, of course) brought him into the business, and Eve would be his second in a row. staging an Oscar doubleheader after 1949's A Letter to Three Wives.
In fact, Mankiewicz was so entrenched in Hollywood that he was the one who introduced Katharine Hepburn to Spencer Tracy. He may have only been 37 when producer Darryl Zanuck greenlit All About Eve, but he knew how to assemble a cast that could give his scenes even more life than they had on paper—and make them feel effortless. . In her 1962 autobiography A Lonely Life, Bette Davis wrote about Eve: “It was a great script, it had a great director, and it had professionals whose roles they liked. It was a charming piece from the very beginning.”
Original poster for All About Ever Posted by Getty
It's uncharacteristically high praise from Davis, but «fascinated» belies the film's less-than-evil development. Mankiewicz's screenplay was adapted from Mary Orr's short story «The Wisdom of Eve,» published in the May 1946 issue of Cosmopolitan magazine. Orr's friend, the Austrian-British actress Elisabeth Bergner, told her about Martina Lawrence, a street child who stood at her stage door for months during a run of The Two Mrs. Carrolls. “They brought the girl in,” Mankiewicz said, “and she became the secretary. The play was closed and they were redoing it. Lawrence read it, and even Bergner's husband, Paul Chinner, said it was wonderful.»
Mankiewicz, demonstrating his theatrical skills, liked to claim that he based Margot Channing on Peg Woffington, an Irish-born 18th-century grand dame of the stage and longtime mistress of David Garrick, the era's most famous actor, but Thespian Bush Telegraph insisted that the real model Margot was Davis's infamous contemporary Tallulah Bankhead. It was rumored that some of Margot's most colorful aphorisms («Shooting and repose are for libraries,» «I hate cheap sentiment»), as well as Davis's use of Tallulah-esque throat scraping (which she blamed on a throat disease) did nothing to dispel .
Davis, who had suffered a series of failures, later showered Mankiewicz with gratitude: “After the picture came out, I told Joe that he had brought me back from the dead.” But the person she was really indebted to was Claudette Colbert, originally cast as Margot Channing, who kicked her back out shortly before filming began. In the ensuing melee, Zanuck wanted Marlene Dietrich to replace Colbert, while Mankiewicz believed Gertrude Lawrence would fit the bill—at least until she raised vocal objections to the character's chain-smoking and drinking at center stage. party scene.
Charm: Gary Merrill, Anne Baxter and Bette Davis Photo: Haynes Archive/Popperfoto
That was the case for Davis, although, she says, “10 directors called Joe and said he was crazy working with me, that it would be suicide.» One of them, Edmund Goulding, who directed Davis in four films, was especially furious: “This woman will destroy you, she will grind you into a fine powder and blow you off the face of the earth.”
In this case, Mankiewicz was happy to sit and puff on her ubiquitous pipe, without spraying it, on the sidelines while Davis did her thing. He later admitted that it was impossible to imagine anyone else in the role: «I asked Claudette to read the line: 'Fasten your seat belts, it's going to be a bumpy night,'» he said. “She did it and it was expensive. When Bette said the same thing, it was like a storm warning.»
Davis herself pretended to be confused by such comparisons. «I'm so different from Margot Channing as a person that it's not even funny,» she said. “She's a good actress from time to time. I forget that I'm an actress when I'm not working. There is an image of me that is not me — not me at all. If you were really a bitch, you wouldn't play these roles.»
Bitch or not, the rest of the cast rose to meet Davis at her zenith. Sanders called his 1960 autobiography Memoirs of a Professional Lout, but neither before nor since had he savored such venomous lines. “We are a breed different from the rest of humanity, we the theatrical people,” he intones, further characterizing the film’s tribe as “emotional misfits,” “precocious children,” and “originally displaced individuals.”
Meanwhile, Thelma Ritter was a stage veteran and a latecomer to the movies; she bestows Olympian disdain on Birdie and is the only one who does her due diligence on Eve from the start («What a story — everything but the bloodhounds snapping her butt»). Both Baxter and Holm were recent supporting actress Oscar winners: Baxter for 1947's The Razor's Edge and Holm for Gentleman's Agreement a year later. And va-va-voom Monroe: “I don’t want to cause trouble. All I want is a drink,” and so her career began.
“Forty,” Margot Channing laments at one point in the film on her upcoming big birthday, “and I haven’t gotten around to admitting it yet.” All About Eve will be 75 years old next year, and if it has aged as gracefully as Château d'Yquem, it's because its milieu delivers every joke perfectly.
Too Close for Comfort: Celeste Hill, Bette Davis and Hugh Marlowe Photo: John Springer Collection
In the end, the Oscars — costume design, sound recording and supporting actor for Sanders, as well as best picture, screenplay and direction — left the actresses empty-handed. In delightful Eve fashion, it's believed that Davis and Baxter lost out because the latter insisted on being included in the Best Actress list rather than the Supporting Actress list, thereby dividing any potential votes; More proof, if any was needed, that the film's truth is timeless.
If you see nominees on the red carpet this weekend casting nervous glances over their shoulders in tuxedos and dresses, it won't be anything to be afraid of. — something as prosaic as the AI chasing them on their tail. It will be the knowledge that just beyond their sight lurk the Eves (and Steves), hungrily eyeing their greatest chance—something that Mankiewicz has dissected incomparably.
He ends «All About Eve» with a young woman, Barbara Bates' fiery Phoebe, invading Eve's apartment, grabbing her Sarah Siddons trophy and marching in front of the mirror in a discarded raincoat. “She bows and the mirror reflects an exponential number of Evas,” Mankiewicz said. “The world is always full of Eves.”
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