Background
All
About Eve (1950), is a realistic, dramatic depiction of show
business and backstage life of Broadway and the New York theater.
The devastating debunking of stage and theatrical characters was
based on the short story and radio play The Wisdom of Eve by
Mary Orr. A cinematic masterpiece and one of the all-time classic
films, this award winner has flawless acting, directing, an intelligent
script and believable characters. The film is driven by Mankiewicz'
witty, cynical and bitchy screenplay - through the character of
Addison DeWitt, Mankiewicz represented his point of view and opinions
about show business. Thematically, it provides an insightful diatribe
against crafty, aspiring, glib, autonomous female thespians who
seek success and ambition at any cost without regard to scruples
or feelings. The acclaimed film also comments on the fear of aging
and loss of power/fame.
It was nominated for fourteen awards - more than any
other picture in Oscar history, until Titanic (1997) duplicated
the same feat forty-seven years later. The skillful film won six
Oscars: Best Picture, Best Supporting Actor (George Sanders), Best
Director (Joseph L. Mankiewicz), Best Screenplay (Joseph L. Mankiewicz),
Best Sound Recording, and Best B/W Costume Design. Four actresses
in the film were nominated (and all lost). It holds the record for
the film with the most female acting nominees:
- Best Actress (two) - Bette Davis and Anne Baxter
- Best Supporting Actress (two) - Celeste Holm and
Thelma Ritter
Bette Davis' leading (but not title) role as Margo
Channing has generally been considered her greatest career performance
and her most memorable, signature role. [Other choices for the role
included Claudette Colbert, Gertrude Lawrence and Marlene Dietrich.]
Her part as an aging, 40-year old Broadway actress fit the 42-year
old Davis perfectly, at a time when acting roles were drying up for
her. Davis played opposite co-star Gary Merrill - with whom she had
an affair during filming, and soon married (it was her fourth - and
last - marriage, that lasted from 1950-1960) after waiting for each
other's divorce.
The film was adapted and transformed into a Broadway
play called Applause in 1970, with Lauren Bacall (later replaced
by Anne Baxter!) as Margo Channing. Eddie (Ed) Fisher's sole scene
was cut from the final version, although he still received screen
credit as Stage Manager. The film is often noted as a "three
suicide movie," for the deaths of George Sanders, Marilyn Monroe
(although it may have been an accidental overdose), and Barbara Bates.
The Story
The film opens with the image of an award trophy, described
in voice-over by an off-camera, muted voice:
The Sarah Siddons Award for Distinguished Achievement
is perhaps unknown to you. It has been spared the sensational and
commercial publicity that attends such questionable 'honors' as
the Pulitzer Prize - and those awards presented annually by that
film society.
We are informed about the setting - where we are and
why. The elite of the theatrical world attend the annual presentation
of the enviable Sarah Siddons Award for dramatic achievement in the
theatre:
This is the dining hall of the Sarah Siddons Society.
The occasion is its annual banquet and presentation of the highest
honor our theater knows - the Sarah Siddons Award for Distinguished
Achievement...The minor awards, as you can see, have already been
presented. Minor awards are for such as the writer and director
[playwright Lloyd Richards and director Bill Sampson are briefly
viewed] since their function is merely to construct a tower so
that the world can applaud a light which flashes on top of it.
And no brighter light has ever dazzled the eye than Eve Harrington.
Eve. But more of Eve later, all about Eve, in fact.
The cynical, caustic, acid-tongued New York drama
critic Addison De Witt (George Sanders) introduces himself before
going further:
To those of you who do not read, attend the theater,
listen to unsponsored radio programs or know anything of the world
in which you live - it is perhaps necessary to introduce myself.
My name is Addison De Witt. 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.
The narrator, De Witt introduces (in voice-over) a
number of other main characters in the ceremony's audience at the
same table, including Karen Richards (Celeste Holm), wife of playwright
Lloyd Richards (Hugh Marlowe):
She is the wife of a playwright, therefore of the
theatre by marriage. Nothing in her background or breeding should
have brought her any closer to the stage than Row E, Center. However,
during her senior year at Radcliffe, Lloyd Richards lectured on
the drama. The following year, Karen became Mrs. Lloyd Richards.
The next individual at the table to be introduced
is Max Fabian (Gregory Ratoff), the theatrical producer of the play
which has won the award for Eve:
There are in general two types of theatrical producers.
One has a great many wealthier friends who will risk a tax deductible
loss. This type is interested in art. The other is one to whom
each production means potential ruin or fortune. This type is out
to make a buck.
Finally, there is Broadway actress Margo Channing
(Bette Davis):
Margo Channing is a Star of the Theater. She made
her first stage appearance, at the age of four, in Midsummer
Night's Dream. She played a fairy and entered - quite unexpectedly
- stark naked. She has been a Star ever since. Margo is a great
Star. A true star. She never was or will be anything less or anything
else.
Miss Eve Harrington (Anne Baxter), an actress who
we soon learn "all about"
in flashback, is being honored as the youngest recipient ever to win
the Sarah Siddons Award as Best Actress - "such a young lady,
young in years, but whose heart is as old as the theater. Some of us
are privileged to know her. We have seen beyond the beauty and artistry
that have made her name resound through the nation." From the
reactions of audience members who have been introduced - false smiles,
unmoving faces, cynical looks, and unapplauding hands, one senses the
sham of the awards ceremony for Eve:
We know her humility, her devotion, her loyalty to
her art, her love, her deep and abiding love for us, for what we
are and what we do, the theater. She has had one wish, one prayer,
one dream - to belong to us. Tonight, her dream has come true.
And henceforth, we shall dream the same of her.
As the glamorous Eve rises in a regal manner to triumphantly
accept the award, the voice-over continues - as she reaches out for
the award, the shot freeze-frames:
Eve. Eve the Golden Girl, the Cover Girl, the Girl
Next Door, the Girl on the Moon. Time has been good to Eve. Life
goes where she goes. She's the profiled, covered, revealed, reported.
What she eats and what she wears and whom she knows and where she
was, and when and where she's going. Eve. You all know All About
Eve. What can there be to know that you don't know?
In the remainder of the film, events from early October
to June which led to the award ceremony are unfolded through the
thoughts and actions of each important character that is in attendance.
Karen Richards, the playwright's wife ("a lowest
form of celebrity"), and Margo Channing's best friend, relates
that Eve began her life in the theater as an innocent, forlorn, star-struck
fan, haunting the theater where her idol appeared, watching every
performance and waiting in the back alley to see her idol arrive
and leave. She worships one of Broadway's mega-stars, actress Margo
Channing, who is appearing in producer Max Fabian's play Aged
in Wood - directed by the star's lover Bill Sampson (Gary Merrill).
Eve ("another tongue-tied gushing fan") is given the opportunity
to meet her idol backstage following an evening performance.
Inside the theatre, the starry-eyed, stage-struck
girl wanders around: "You can breathe it, can't you? Like some
magic perfume." In Margo's backstage dressing room, Karen is
envious of Margo's theatrical success: "You're talented, famous,
wealthy, people waiting around night after night, just to see you,
even in the wind and the rain." But Margo doesn't think much
of her fans and audience:
Autograph fiends, they're not people. Those are little
beasts that run around in packs like coyotes...They're nobody's
fans. They're juvenile delinquent, they're mental defective, and
nobody's audience. They never see a play or a movie even. They're
never indoors long enough.
Karen begs Margo to see one of her adoring "indoors" fans: "Oh,
but you can't put her out. I promised. Margo, you've got to see her.
She worships you. It's like something out of a book...You're her
whole life." Eve, seen in the alley's shadows as "the mousy
one with the trench coat and a funny hat," is ushered into the
dressing room and introduced to Margo - with unflattering cold cream
on her face.
Margo's maid, friend and companion Birdie Coonan (Thelma
Ritter) reacts negatively to Margo's put-on performance in Eve's
presence: "When she gets like this - all of a sudden, she's
playin' Hamlet's mother"- after which Margo suggests that
Birdie retreat to the bathroom. The young girl Eve responds passionately
toward Margo's current and past plays: "I've seen every performance...I'd
like anything Miss Channing played in...I think that part of Miss
Channing's greatness lies in her ability to pick the best plays."
In a classic scene, wet-eyed Eve uses her captivating,
acting abilities to tell her dressing room audience the hard-luck,
melancholy tale of her life story which began in Wisconsin as an
only child. "But somehow, acting and make believe began to fill
up my life more and more. It got so I couldn't tell the real from
the unreal. Except that the unreal seemed more real to me."
Her father was a poor farmer, so to help out, she
quit school, moved to Milwaukee, and became a secretary - in a brewery. "...it's
pretty hard to make believe you are anyone else. Everything is beer." There
was a little theatre group there - "like a drop of rain on the
desert." Purportedly, she married Eddie, a radio technician,
and during the war, he flew in the Air Force in the South Pacific.
She learned she was a war widow when she was in San Francisco. Stranded,
she remained there, found a job, and lived off her deceased husband's
insurance. She saved herself from devastation by attending Margo's
performances:
And there were theatres in San Francisco. And then
one night, Margo Channing came to play in Remembrance and
I went to see it. Well, here I am.
She had followed her acting idol from San Francisco
across the country - with theatrical aspirations of her own to become
a big star on Broadway. Eve's calculated, guileless manipulation
of Margo's vanity and sentiments help her maneuver her way into Margo's
life. Everyone is taken by lovely Eve's shy charm, helplessness,
naivete, lack of pretention and passion. But Birdie reacts sarcastically
and skeptically to Eve's fabricated, ingratiating "make-believe" image
and stories:
What a story! Everything but the bloodhounds snappin'
at her rear end.
Margo criticizes her maid for showing outspoken callousness
toward Eve:
There are some human experiences, Birdie, that do
not take place in a vaudeville house - and that even a fifth-rate
vaudevillian should understand and respect!
Margo's fiancee-to-be, theatrical director Bill Sampson,
a show business veteran and one of Margo's inner circle, is on his
way to Hollywood for a month-long stay and a one-picture deal: "Zanuck
is impatient. He wants me, he needs me." The earnest young woman
Eve, who professes to admire Margo, quickly endears herself to the
stage star, earning her a place in the star's inner circle. Margo
encourages her to "stick around" for flattery's sake.
In flashback, Karen remembers that eventful evening: "And
I'll never forget you, Eve." Sampson defines the word theater for
Eve:
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 and Poodles
Hanneford, Lunt and Fontanne, Betty Grable, Rex the Wild Horse,
Eleanora Duse - they're all theater. You don't understand them,
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...It's
just that there's so much bourgeois in this ivory greenroom they
call the theater. Sometimes it gets up around my chin.
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