All About Eve

Thee best backstage backstabbing story since Brutus met Julius Ceasar.

Our hero is Bette Davis, as Margo Channing an Actress with a capital A, which includes Aging.
One villain is the ambitious Eve but the bigger villain is George Sanders, playing… George Sanders…
this time as the delightfully named Addison deWitt, a bad Broadway Critic with a lust for power.
He is influential but he oversteps his boundaries, by a mile.

This is the point made by Joseph Mankiewitz, who wrote the screenplay and also directed it.
After a bad review, I’m guessing.
While we witness envy, ambition and greed from the principal players, none is quite as envious, ambitious, greedy or malicious as the Critic.
The screenplay was based on a short story by Mary Orr published in 1946. Mankiewitz added several characters to the original plot, including Addison deWitt and Birdie, played by Thelma Ritter.

Sanders with his unctuous British accent narrates the tale of actress Eve Harrington's rise to fame.
His story informs us that he is largely responsible for her success and also shows the emotional chaos that accompanies this trajectory. He may be boasting about it, or not realize at all that he reveals himself as the most petty character in this ego slinging multi-match.

And what fun it is as the actors spit out dialogue both trenchant and witty in a story that binds them all and makes each player a link in each other’s chain of events. Nicely plotted and paced.

The script is only dated by two elements surrounding Margo. Both of these rang true at the time of its release, 1950, but today Margo’s fretting about not being a Woman because she doesn’t have a Husband is laughable; and her “advanced age” – 40! – is no longer the kiss of death for an actress.

Often cited on Top 100 lists, All About Eve is a lesson in screenwriting, in dialogue, in gorgeous black and white photography, in directorial certainty, and theatrical psychology, that is - the psyches at play in the Theatre. And life.

My favourite part is the dressing room scene, quite early in the proceedings.

Bette Davis is really taking off her make-up, chain smoking, alternately dismissing then kissing up to her Biggest Fan. The excellent Thelma Ritter as Birdie her assistant/voice of reason is hilarious in this scene. There is a moment when she pops in during an intense discussion. The action/dialogue (in a great screenplay dialogue IS action) stops as Ritter tiptoes in, looks just as askance at them as they do at her before she takes her place among them. It’s just a great moment in a film loaded with them.

Most definitely Highly Recommended.