Joseph L Mankiewicz (1950)

At a still early stage of her campaign to usurp legendary stage actress Margo Channing, the pathologically ambitious Eve Harrington is in conversation with hot-shot New York theatre director Bill Sampson.  He and Margo Channing are also an item offstage:  Eve aims to take over from Margo in that department too.  Bill is about to go to Hollywood to discuss a movie project.  Eve asks him, ‘Why, if you’re the best and most successful young director in the Theater?’  Bill retorts:

‘The Theatuh, the Theatuh – what book of rules says the Theater exists only within some ugly buildings crowded into one square mile of New York City? Or London, Paris or Vienna?  Listen, junior. And learn. Want to know what the Theater is? A flea circus.  Also opera.  Also rodeos, carnivals, ballets, Indian tribal dances, Punch and Judy, a one-man band – all Theater. Wherever there’s magic and make-believe and an audience – there’s Theater. Donald Duck, Ibsen, and The Lone Ranger, Sarah Bernhardt, Poodles Hanneford, Lunt and Fontanne, Betty Grable, Rex the Wild Horse, Eleanora Duse. All Theater.  You don’t understand them all, you don’t like them all, why should you? The Theater’s for everybody – you included, but not exclusively – so don’t approve or disapprove. It may not be your Theater, but it’s Theater for somebody, somewhere.’

At this point in his brilliant script, Joseph L Mankiewicz, the writer-director of All About Eve, might be telling himself, rather than Eve, to get real about the Theatuh.  Mankiewicz then ignores his own advice as utterly as Eve ignores Bill’s.  Mankiewicz’s definition of theatre in All About Eve is neither expansive nor nuanced.  His theatre people are a mythical (and, even in 1950, clichéd) race apart.  They are uniquely insecure, insatiable for applause and admiration like no one else.  They are ‘displaced persons’, who can’t live or love like ‘real’ people.  Eve Harrington’s killer instinct takes her rapidly to the top of the theatrical tree but while she grabs Margo Channing’s acting crown, Eve doesn’t succeed in stealing her man.   Margo and Bill Sampson stay together.  He proposes marriage.  She decides that she’d rather settle down than continue to fight for the starring role that she and Eve have been contesting.   It’s implied that Margo may now have grown up enough to find happiness with another human being.  It’s certain that she has ceased to be the force of theatre that she looked to be at the start of the story.  Mankiewicz critiques theatrical two-facedness and artifice at the same as he exhibits and exults in these qualities.  The result is, in Pauline Kael’s words, ‘one of the most enjoyable movies ever made’.

The film begins at a banquet and ceremony, where Eve Harrington is to receive the Sarah Siddons Award for Distinguished Achievement.  (Most of All About Eve comprises a flashback that describes Eve’s meteoric, unscrupulous rise to fame, before the action returns to the Sarah Siddons banquet, her acceptance speech and what happens when she returns home later that evening.)  The scene is set not only visually but also in voiceover, by one of those attending the ceremony, the theatre critic Addison DeWitt, who introduces himself as an essential theatrical organism:

‘My native habitat is the Theater – in it I toil not, neither do I spin. I am a critic and commentator.  I am essential to the Theater …’

From the off, Mankiewicz, through Addison, makes roguish references to infra dig Hollywood.  The Sarah Siddons award – as ‘the highest honor our Theater knows’ – is sharply distinguished from ‘those awards presented annually by the film society’[1].  Addison DeWitt is reliably caustic and deceptively languid:  he is revealed eventually to be as anxious as anyone else in the theatre to assert his egotism.  He’s the unarguable exemplar of a now familiar movie tyrant – the single, all-powerful critic who can make or break plays and players with a few irresistible words. (He’s also a reminder, one of many in All About Eve, of how tired most of the tropes of Birdman are.)

Mankiewicz’s portrait of the theatre world is a caricature but it cannily taps into our received ideas of that world and his theatrical ventriloquism is multi-faceted.  The remarkably sustained verbal wit issuing from the mouths of not just Addison DeWitt but most of the other main characters too (Eve – a humour-free zone – is the exception) chimes with our own assumptions about smart, brittle theatrical types.  The drama itself often feels like stage drama – not only because of the abundance of words but also because of the deliberateness of characters’ entrances and exits (and entrance and exit lines).   Yet the film is never static – partly because Mankiewicz and the cinematographer Milton R Krasner keep it moving visually, largely because of the dynamism of the performers and the lines they deliver.  All About Eve is steeped in theatrical devices and preconceptions.  It hardly matters if it’s all talk; we feel that, if it is, that’s true to the spirit of theatre too.  It doesn’t matter either when the proliferation of lines is so great that an actor speaking them isn’t ‘inside’ them – the definition of theatre by Gary Merrill’s Bill, quoted above, is one example of this.  Part of us knows that directors, like actors, just like hearing the sound of their own voice.  Even the titles of the plays-within-the-film – the successful playwright Lloyd Richards’s middlebrow Broadway vehicles for Margo – combine plausibility with a whiff of send-up (‘Aged in Wood’, ‘Footsteps on the Ceiling’).

The viewer’s reaction to Margo Channing is bound up with our expectations of what a Bette Davis character will be like.  We quickly find our bearings as we watch Margo in her seat at the Siddons dinner – getting her cigarette lit, pushing away a hovering bottle of wine.  The detonating delivery of her acid putdowns is also part of the Davis persona but Margo’s self-assertion, and the outrageous demands she makes of those close to her, acquire a gradually more desperate edge.  Once she’s unwisely taken Eve on as a secretary and finds this stage-struck nobody running her life, Margo’s smiling, bitchy insincerity is increasingly grounded in fear.  Bette Davis is powerfully expressive too on the relatively rare occasions that Margo is wordless.  Bill spends his birthday in Hollywood, while Margo is in New York.   Self-preoccupied Margo has forgotten the birthday but deadly competent Eve has (without telling her employer) arranged a phone call with Bill – in the middle of the night, New York time.  Margo is woken by the phone ringing; she’s only half-awake while she and Bill talk.  Once she’s put the phone down, she realises what has happened:  alone in the dark, Bette Davis’s face memorably registers Margo’s fear of what lies ahead.  It’s likely that Davis’s own career dip in the second half of the 1940s gave depth to her characterisation here.  In any event, Margo Channing is one of her finest creations.

There is a problem with the film, though, and the problem is all about Eve – or, at least, about Anne Baxter, who plays her.   This isn’t an immediate difficulty.  When Lloyd Richards’s wife Karen first brings her to Margo’s dressing room, Eve’s naïve, self-effacing manner charms everyone except Margo’s watchful, sharp-tongued dresser-factotum Birdie Coonan, who is instantly suspicious.  We see that the adulation-addicted ‘theatrical’ egos in the dressing room – Lloyd, as well as Margo herself – are seduced by Eve’s fulsome praise of their talents.  As for Karen, we can accept that she, while not vain like them, has been impressed by so often seeing Eve at the stage door of the theatre where ‘Aged in Wood’ is playing:  the young woman is evidently an unusually loyal and determined fan of Margo.  Even so, it doesn’t require Birdie’s hard-nosed perception to see through Anne Baxter’s unctuous, charmless Eve.  As the story progresses, it becomes increasingly hard to understand how Karen Richards remains blind to what the transparently manipulative title character is up to.  And there’s a further problem.  Just as one accepts that Margo Channing is a great theatre star because Bette Davis is a great movie star, so Anne Baxter’s limitations as a screen actress make it harder to believe that Eve is prodigiously gifted on the stage.  Baxter’s best moments come in the later stages of the film, once Eve (real name Gertrude Slojinski) has progressed far enough to drop the hypocrisy and let her harsh rapacity come through.

All About Eve features three other remarkable contributions from actresses.  In spite of the implausible aspects of Karen Richards’s attitude and actions, Celeste Holm is splendid in the role – not least when Karen is finally wise to Eve and the pair have a gripping exchange of words in a powder room, from which Karen returns vanquished.  Celeste Holm’s ability to come across as simultaneously sparkling and sane makes her intriguing and delightful to watch.  Thelma Ritter is unsurprisingly spot-on as the candid Birdie Coonan,  (Although she’s also a creature of the theatre, Birdie was, according to Margo, a ‘fifth-rate vaudevillian’ – this may have helped her to be less illusioned than the successful people around her.)  Marilyn Monroe is funny and vulnerable in the small role of an aspiring ingénue actress – a ‘graduate of the Copacabana School of Dramatic Art’, as Addison DeWitt drily explains.  George Sanders is perfectly cast as Addison.  Otherwise, the men in the film are overshadowed by the women, though Gary Merrill (whom Bette Davis married a few weeks before All About Eve was released) is good in Bill Sampson’s less talky moments.  Hugh Marlowe is Lloyd Richards and Gregory Ratoff the dyspeptic, babyish Broadway producer Max Fabian.

It’s a pity we don’t see more of Thelma Ritter and that Bette Davis virtually disappears in the last part of the film.  (It runs 138 minutes but they pass exceptionally quickly.)  Davis’s disappearance, while it threatens anti-climax, is, of course, absolutely right according to the moral of Joseph Mankiewicz’s story:  Margo Channing is no longer in the limelight.  The transience-of-theatrical-glory point is reinforced in the movie’s final episode, when Eve skips a post-awards ceremony party and returns home alone.  (She needs to pack:  now that she’s the toast of Broadway, Eve is heading for Hollywood.)  She finds an intruder in her apartment – a high-school girl (Barbara Bates), who managed to slip in when the maid wasn’t looking, has fallen asleep and is now startled awake by Eve’s return.  The girl breathlessly introduces herself as Phoebe, Eve’s greatest fan.  Eve left her Sarah Siddons award in the cab bringing her and Addison DeWitt back from the ceremony.  He now appears at the door of the apartment, which is opened by Eve’s unexpected guest.  Addison hands over the hefty-looking statue (of Siddons as the Tragic Muse), smiles at the girl’s admission that Phoebe isn’t her real name and goes on his way.  Now Eve has disappeared from view too.  The film’s final image is of Phoebe – or rather many Phoebes.  In Eve’s bedroom, she holds the Distinguished Achievement award and stands at the mirror, bowing to acknowledge the applause she already hears in her head.  Her reflection appears in the several sections of the dressing-table mirror and, in Mankiewicz’s triumphant final flourish, those mirrors and the reflections of Phoebe multiply.  Alfred Newman’s agreeably sprightly music for the film now morphs into apotheosis.  This is slightly alarming but greatly amusing – like the whole of All About Eve, one of my desert island films.

10 May 2016

[1] It’s worth noting that All About Eve was nominated for fourteen Oscars (a total which remained unmatched until Titanic in 1997) and won six (including Best Picture, Director, Screenplay and Supporting Actor – for George Sanders).  Worth noting too that the Sarah Siddons award was a fictitious one when All About Eve appeared but that, soon afterwards, life began imitating ‘ersatz art of a very high grade’ (Pauline Kael again).  Winners of the Sarah Siddons award, presented by Chicago theatre-goers since 1952, have included two of the stars of All About Eve, Bette Davis and Celeste Holm (but not Anne ‘Eve’ Baxter).