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Anne Baxter and Bette Davis become deadly rivals in All About Eve |
Margo Channing (Bette Davis) is a gifted actress and one of
the leading lights of Broadway, as well as the on-stage muse of playwright
Lloyd Richards (Hugh Marlowe), close friends with his wife Karen (Celeste Holm)
and in love with her director Bill Sampson (Gary Merill). But Margo is just beginning
to worry, now she has reached her forties, that her parts are drying up. Into her
world arrives Eve (Anne Baxter), a besotted fan who swiftly becomes first her assistant
then her understudy and eventual replacement. Despite her sweet exterior, Eve
is fiercely ambitious determined to find fame and success – and only cynical theatre
critic Addison DeWitt (George Sanders) seems to notice.
All About Eve cemented Mankiewicz as Hollywood’s
go-to for high-brow literary entertainment. Which is odd when you think about
it, because what makes All About Eve work – and enduringly popular – is
that it’s a fantastically quotable soap, played with relish. It’s not a million
miles away from a ten-part, cliff-hangers aplenty Netflix drama. But it stands
out because of Mankiewicz’s craft – when you pen lines as cutting, acerbic,
tender and true as those in All About Eve, is it any wonder that
Hollywood sees you as the next Fitzgerald?
And the dialogue is sparkling, from start to finish. From a
cuttingly dry opening voiceover from George Sander’s Addison DeWitt – beautifully
delivered, crammed with cynicism, cattiness, pride and purring contempt (“Minor
awards are for such as the writer and director since their function is merely
to construct a tower so that the world can applaud a light which flashes on top
of it.”) that it sets the tone for a film where dialogue is king. Mankiewicz is
not much of a visual stylist – only the final shot, a besotted fan starring
into an endless series of mirrors – sticks in the mind, and his approach as a
director is intensely theatrical, but it doesn’t matter when his dialogue sings.
All About Eve works as both a supremely entertaining
peek behind the curtain and also a neat parable about ageing, change and
relevance. Perhaps there are few better examples of the changing of the guard,
than the impact of growing old on a woman in theatre: from girlfriend to mother,
with hardly a role in between. It’s the change Margo is dreading. And as she
grows too old for her leading lady roles, what has she actually to show for it?
Not much in the way of family or happiness.
If Eve looked closer, perhaps she’d wonder if it was worth
it. As Margo makes clear in her dressing room and at a party thrown for Bill,
she’s not got much to look forward to. (It’s not often commented on that the
film’s most famous line, “Fasten your seatbelts it’s going to be a bumpy
night”, is followed by an evening of Margo’s maudlin self-pity). For all her
glamour and fame, it’s clear Margo is unhappy: “So many people know me. I wish
I did” she says at one point, and for all the whirlwind of her life, she’s not
exactly over-burdened by close friends.
It’s easy to forget, because All About Eve is so well known for being a bitchfest – and Mankiewicz’s cutting one-liners are genius – that you forget its lead is a sad and lonely figure, and the film presents a conservative view of motherhood being a crucial role for a woman. We don’t automatically remember this speech’ but it’s crucial for Margo: “There's one career all females have in common - whether we like it or not: being a woman. Sooner or later, we've got to work at it, no matter how many other careers we've had or wanted. And, in the last analysis, nothing is any good unless you can look up just before dinner or turn around in bed - and there he is.”
Margo is the signature part for Bette Davis, but memory has
distorted it. You can expect it to be a parade of sharply barbed attacks, but
it is much more than this. Yes, she does these with aplomb (“I wouldn't worry
too much about your heart. You can always put that award where your heart ought
to be”), but under the regal grande dame, there is a rather vulnerable woman,
scared about where her life is going and terrified of being unloved. For all
the Davis fireworks, it’s an affecting – and perhaps this is why it became such
a gay icon, during those years of people forced into the closet –vulnerable and
lonely performance.
That vulnerability contributes to the sense of vampire story. Eve arrives in the dead of night, inveigles her way into Margo’s life and then slowly takes that life over. Eve is almost draining Margo’s life force, leaving her even more aware of the lonely impact of her choices. There’s the suggestion of sexual obsession in Eve – standing on stage, holding Margo’s costume in front of her and imagining the applause, Eve seems as much besotted with Margo as she does with becoming her. And of course Eve is a unknowable fake. Anne Baxter’s gentle, butter-wouldn’t-melt sweetness is just the right side of phoney. Only Thelma Ritter’s (very funny) bitchy dresser detects dictates her invented backstory about a deceased husband is baloney (“What a story! Everything but the bloodhounds snappin' at her rear end.”).
Later Birdie will comment Eve is studying to become Margo – and that’s spot on. As Eve moves further up the ladder, Baxter drops her gentleness and becomes increasingly steely. “A contempt for humanity, an inability to love and be loved, insatiable ambition - and talent. We deserve each other” Addison will tell her – and he’s spot on. Eve’s driving motivation is ambition, and anyone is fair game if it will help her move up the greasy ladder of theatrical success.
Eve uses everyone. She manipulates Karen into making Margo
missing a performance – then invites the press in advance to her performance,
which is met with raves. Afterwards Eve gives an interview in which she
lacerates Margo as a bitter has-been holding her back. It’s enough for Karen –
and Celeste Holm is very good as this gently supportive woman, with the firmest
principles of anyone on show here – but the men can’t let go. It takes an
attempted seduction to drive away Bill, but the weaker Lloyd seems to be sucked
into her web (the film is coy about the implied affair). It should be clear
that Eve is a force draining energy out of everything she can, determined to get
to the top.
And we know she gets there: after all we’ve seen her win the
Sarah Siddons prize! But Eve has none of Margo’s soul. The film ends with her meeting
the even more vainly empty Phoebe, who Addison immediately recognises is intent
on the same scheme as Eve was. And so, the whirligig of time brings in its
revenges. Eve has learnt everything from Margo, except how to be a human: she
has all her technique and none of her heart. The film even manages to feel a
bit sorry for her – a woman who has achieved everything she wants, and finds it
makes her neither happy nor popular.
It’s the heart of Mankiewicz’s film, perhaps even its
warning message. What is the point of all this greatness, if all you have to show
for it are false-friendships with poisonous pals like Addison? It’s the moral
message behind a film filled with one-liners and wonderful speeches, a
masterclass in theatrical writing for cinema. Bette Davis is superb, funny and
heartfelt. Baxter is quietly terrifying. Ritter and Holm are superb and Sanders
is so well case in this role, you wonder if Mankiewicz somehow invented him specially
for it. All About Eve may be grand, soapy entertainment – but soap has
never been smarter than this.
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