Mankiewicz’s enduring classic about the glamour of showbiz, warts and all, marked by loyal friendships and diabolical schemes, remains one of the wittiest and spriteliest of Classical Hollywood dramas.
Review #2,663
Dir. Joseph L. Mankiewicz
1950 | USA | Drama | 138 min | 1.37:1 | English
Not rated – likely to be PG13
Cast: Bette Davis, Anne Baxter, George Sanders, Celeste Holm, Gary Merrill
Plot: A seemingly timid but secretly ruthless ingénue insinuates herself into the lives of an ageing Broadway star and her circle of theatre friends.
Awards: Won Best Actress & Special Jury Prize (Cannes); Won 6 Oscars – Best Picture, Best Director, Best Supporting Actor, Best Screenplay, Best Costume Design, Best Sound; Nom. for 8 Oscars – Best Leading Actress (x2), Best Supporting Actress (x2), Best Cinematography, Best Film Editing, Best Art Direction-Set Decoration, Best Original Score
Distributor: Fox
Accessibility Index
Subject Matter: Moderate – Showbiz, Acting; Friendship & Betrayal
Narrative Style: Slightly Complex
Pace: Normal
Audience Type: Slightly Mainstream
Viewed: Criterion Blu-ray
Spoilers: No
All About Eve has been Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s best-known film for decades, his calling card so to speak, which saw him working at the peak of his powers.
He won the Oscars for Best Director and Best Screenplay for this film, and in fact, after winning the very same set of awards the year before for A Letter to Three Wives (1949).
From getting compliments from Bette Davis (not exactly the easiest Hollywood star to work with) for one of the smoothest shoots she had ever been in, to its title inspiring Pedro Almodovar’s All About My Mother (1999), All About Eve is an enduring piece of Classical Hollywood cinema about the glamour of showbiz, warts and all.
Set in the world of theatre (Mankiewicz doesn’t hide its parallel allusion to filmmaking), Davis’ Margo is a highly-respected veteran of the stage who is introduced to the eponymous Eve (Anne Baxter), a superfan who just wants to meet her idol. Yet, in its opening sequence, we see Eve receiving one of the highest honours available to a stage actor.
“Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy night!”
Relying majorly on flashbacks and narration, which sets up the self-propulsive story of how a ‘fan’ would eventually steal the limelight from her favourite star, All About Eve is as much about the inner circles of loyal friendships and creative collaborations as it is about diabolical schemes and dastardly exploits.
Although the film sometimes feels its length, it is surely one of the wittiest and spriteliest films of its time. While Mankiewicz’s gift for dialogue has made All About Eve endlessly quotable, it is perhaps the film’s tight focus on the locus of its narrative’s milieu—of actors, writers, directors, fans and critics—that gives it a meta-filmic resonance, much like Billy Wilder’s more visually expressive Sunset Boulevard which was also released in the same year.
Both films are about a performance of personal desires; the difference is that Eve Harrington was much more clandestine about it than Norma Desmond.
Grade: A-
Trailer:
Music:
Eternality Tan 
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[…] performances from a cast that include Joseph Cotten, Tim Holt, silent film star Dolores Costello, All About Eve’s Anne Baxter, and particularly, Agnes Moorehead, who earned one of the film’s four Oscar […]
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