All About Eve (no 46)

 

by Allan Fish

(USA 1950 138m) DVD1/2

Fasten your seatbelts…

p  Darryl F.Zanuck  d/w  Joseph L.Mankiewicz ph  Milton Krasner  ed  Barbara McLean  m  Alfred Newman  art  Lyle Wheeler, George Davis

Bette Davis (Margo Channing), Anne Baxter (Eve Harrington), George Sanders (Addison de Witt), Gary Merrill (Bill Sampson), Hugh Marlowe (Lloyd Richards), Celeste Holm (Karen Richards), Gregory Ratoff (Max Fabian), Thelma Ritter (Birdie), Marilyn Monroe (Miss Caswell), Barbara Bates (Phoebe), Walter Hampden (Aged Actor),

The Academy Awards have never been shy at throwing up ironies, but one of the most subtle was its choice of best film for 1950.  It was always going to a be a clash of the heavyweights; Mankiewicz’s acerbic look at the New York theatre All About Eve and Wilder’s equally acerbic study of the underbelly of Hollywood Sunset Boulevard.  Both are still, over half a century on, rightly considered masterpieces of the silver screen, but are so different.  Sunset Boulevard is real cinema, with moody noir photography and clever use of studio backlots and exteriors.  Eve is pure theatre, the direction is theatrical, the photography though pleasing has no real imagination to it and one back projection in particular (as Sanders and Baxter walk away from a theatre) is awful.  So why did the Academy not give the award to one of their own?  Maybe because Wilder had already won for The Lost Weekend, maybe because it wanted to be seen to be honouring that fellow artform from the east coast from which it had pilfered so much of its talent.  The cynic in me tends to believe that Hollywood didn’t like seeing its underbelly exposed, the studio system criticised and its history mocked.  After all, when you think back over the best films about Hollywood, from The Bad and the Beautiful to either version of A Star is Born to The Player, none won any of the major Oscars.  But to bemoan Wilder’s loss is to ignore Mankiewicz’s masterpiece, which owes its classic status to its script, one of the most acidic ever written, and its cast.  Never, with the possible exception of Kind Hearts and Coronets, has a film so simply filmed been made so great by its script and actors. 

            The story is the stuff of cliché; girl seemingly worships star actress, becomes one of her entourage, lives with her, but slowly reveals her true desires; to topple her from her drama queen throne, by hook or, generally, by crook.  But who cares when the clichés are presented with such style and wit.  (There are too many great quotes to even attempt to recite them here.)  Mankiewicz had previously been a producer in his youth (of such films as Fury and The Philadelphia Story), before turning to writing and direction.  His first film in this dual capacity was the ultra-civilised A Letter to Three Wives, which also used a similar triple perspective flashback structure.  All About Eve was an advancement in that it was confident enough not to use so many cinematic tricks because Mankiewicz realised that the power of the theatre was in its players.  Therefore we see the players in the same manner – if much more intimately, tantrums and all – as the audiences would.  The performances are suitably demonstrative; there’s no underplaying here, but no-one could be accused of overacting because it’s in tune with the proceedings. 

            The performances are the thing, then, and they are superb.  Okay, so Marlowe and Merrill are a bit lightweight as the playwright and director respectively, but the girls are all on the money; Holm as the loyal but sharp when she needs to be wife of the playwright, naïve but not above a touch of subterfuge herself; Ritter as the ultra-cynical maid; Baxter as the scheming wannabe (some have accused her of being a little underdone as Eve, but that as far as I can see is precisely the point, it goes with her fake timidity); and, topping them all, Davis in her best role in her best film.  She’s magnificent, haughty, proud, insufferable, kind, considerate and thoughtful.  She’s one of cinema’s great paradoxes, God bless her.  But star turn must go to Sanders as the venal Addison, skulking around the fringes like a fur-collared Big Bad Wolf, spitting epigrams to make Oscar Wilde envious and when he says “I’m nobody’s fool, least of all yours“, you applaud him all the way to the ticket office to shout “Encore!”  Paging Gertrude Slescynski!