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All About Eve Is All About Brilliant Bitchiness!
All About Eve cover art courtesy 20th Century Fox
DVD Tuesday: Fasten your seat belts — All About Eve elevates backbiting, betrayal and world-class bitchiness to an art form!
There are mean girls and then there are grade-A, world-class, take no prisoners bitches, and no one played them better than Bette Davis. As All About Eve's vain, thin-skinned, high-handed, hard-drinking, chain-smoking Margo Channing, a veteran Broadway headliner whose star is losing its luster, she's an absolute monster of the most entertaining kind.
The role revitalized the 41-year-old Davis' then-flagging career, and she only scored it after Claudette Colbert hurt her back; Davis always said she modeled Margo on the legendary hell-raiser Talullah Bankhead, but she could have found plenty of inspiration closer to home.
Addison DeWitt (George Sanders), Margo's nemesis, is more than her match: Who better than a man who called his autobiography Memoirs of a Professional Cad to play a drama critic whose barbed tongue is dipped in poison? Simon Cowell is an amateur by comparison.
And there's a reason drag queens are still dipping into the Eve well: It's just seething with overwrought zingers, of which "Fasten your seat belts, it's going to be a bumpy ride" is only the most famous. "We're all busy little bees, full of stings, making honey day and night. Aren't we, honey?" "Everybody has a heart, except some people." "I detest cheap sentiment!" "I'll admit I may have seen better days... but I'm still not to be had for the price of a cocktail, like a salted peanut." "Heaven help me. I love a psychotic!" Just add Davis' hard-as-nails drawl and you're halfway to a cabaret act. (Here's a brief taste....)
Directed by Joseph Mankiewicz, who also adapted the screenplay from Mary Orr's short story The Wisdom of Eve, All About Eve is more than the sum of its smart talk and sophisticated nastiness. Its cautionary tale of a wolf in bashful fan's clothing — fresh-faced, butter wouldn't melt in her mouth ingénue Eve Harrington (Anne Baxter) — who unobtrusively insinuates herself into Margo's life and then takes over, is brilliantly cruel and rooted in a certain discomfiting reality. It's mean-spirited fun to watch mousey little Eve charm Margot's friends, seduce her significantly younger husband and usurp her career, but it's also scary: The world is full of Eves who want what other people have (cue Elvis Costello's "Senior Service") and have no compunction about scheming to take it.
And curiously, the thing that seemed most awkwardly old-fashioned when I (a child of the "have it all" age) first saw it — Margo's impassioned diatribe about working women and the mistake of sacrificing love for career — now has a sadly reasonable ring.
The supporting cast includes Celeste Holm as Margo's best friend, a young Marilyn Monroe as disingenuous gold digger Claudia Caswell and acerbic comedienne Thelma Ritter as Margo's no-nonsense dresser: There isn't a bad or even merely OK — performance in the bunch.
Things to consider:
Were Hollywood stereotypes of catty women inherently a tool of disempowerment that made strong women look superficial and petty, or could they subtly illuminate the very real compromises many women were forced to make?
How do you define star quality?
Send your movie questions to FlickChick.
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See Maitland McDonagh and Ken Fox review this week's new flicks on the Movie Talk vodcast.
Previously in DVD Tuesday:
Severance
Sweet Smell of Success
Daughters of Darkness
The Crazies
Blade Runner
Zodiac
Manhunter
A Simple Plan
Taxi Driver
Renaissance
Blowup
Hot Fuzz
300
Ace in the Hole
Eyes Without a Face
Apocalypto
Citizen Kane
La Jetée
Gone in 60 Seconds (1974)
Bob le Flambeur
Near Dark
Perfect Blue
Pan's Labyrinth
Les Girls
The Girl Who Knew Too Much
The Queen
Expresso Bongo
I'm Not Scared
Shocking Grindhouse Double Bill! — Scanners and The Candy Snatchers
Don't Look Now
Re-Animator
Casino Royale
http://community.tvguide.com/thread.jspa?threadID=800073953#comments">Pi
The Prestige
13 Tzameti
The Departed
Suspiria
Kiss and Make Up
Kiss Me Deadly
The Long Good Friday
What Alice Found
The Devil's Backbone
The Descent
The Devil Wears Prada
Pandora's Box
The Thief and the Cobbler
Nashville
Panic in the Streets/Jack Palance Interview
The Pusher Trilogy
Scarface
Slither
Sunset Blvd.
In Cold Blood
Brick
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Nov 5, 2007 3:38 PM
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All About Eve is my all time favorite movie and I'm so glad to have read your take on it. I couldn't agree more with your assesment. There was not one bad casting choice here. I knew about the Colbert possiblity and I just can't even fathom what this movie would have been with her. I love her as an actress, just not in this role.
Well, in all truthfulness, I have been a fan of all of Bette Davis' work - the good, the bad and the ugly. This was just my favorite. I always got the sense that Thelma Ritter's part was larger, but got lost on the cutting room floor. You see so much of her in the beginning, but then she just disappears. And George Sanders - he is just so deliciously evil, but he does all with such glee and a glimmer in his eye!
My take on your question - the older movies actually showcased older women in a better light than they do now. They showed the compromises that women make and the very real fallout from decisions made. I don't feel a sense of blame or elevation - just a story being told by powerful actresses. They follow the route of here is my life, here are the choices I made and this is how they changed my life. The women like some parts and hate others. But most of them make the most of what they have. Frankly, I wished they would make more movies like these. Sigh...
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Nov 5, 2007 4:37 PM
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It's kinda hard to feel bad for Margo when it doesn't seem she'd do anything differently than Eve just to get ahead. I mean, Eve is a little cuckoo... but Margo is just as ruthless. I feel a little sorry for Celeste Holm, but I just want her to break out and wring Eve's neck and she never does!
I wanna chop off your head and watch it roll into the basket.
If you should drop dead tonight, then they won't have to ask me twice.
(yeah, I know it comes from the opposite point of view in the song, but it still fits!)
I think Eve's perfect comeuppance comes at the end when a new "junior dissatisfaction" comes on the scene. So there is some justice after all. Damn, I just never want her to win that award!
I guess I could never imagine sloughing off this mortal coil as George Sanders did. But then again, I will never live such a life! I don't think I would get bored by it like he said he was.
As for star quality, I don't know how to define it. It's some sort of genial hunger for attention that, instead of being repellant, is somehow intoxicating. Just look at Bette in The Petrified Forest or getting interviewed by Johnny Carson and it's there. Yes, in the eyes.
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Nov 6, 2007 12:27 PM
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This is one of my all-time favorite movies. There's not only not a bad or just okay performance, there's not a bad or just okay line of dialogue. I'm not a professional movie critic, but I don't think I'm too far wrong to say that this was one of the greatest scripts in the history of the movies. One reason I've watched it over and over again is just to hear brilliantly literate dialogue again--something that is sorely lacking in today's movies.
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Nov 6, 2007 4:23 PM
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