Revisiting Rewatchables, week 21: "All About Eve"
“Fasten your seatbelts, it's going to be a bumpy night!” – this is one of the most famous quotes in cinema history (see the link below). It’s the advice Margo Channing gives to her guests at a climactic party. No matter how often I have seen this scene, it is still fresh and fabulous. It is the point in the film where Margo finally realises that Eve (the one in the title) is not to be trusted.
But let’s start at the beginning. Quite a few of my rewatchable films take place behind the scenes of theatres or film sets. Make-believe that shows (or pretends to show) the workings of make-believe is fascinating not only to me, I suppose. One of the grandest of these behind-the-scenes-films is “All About Eve”, written and directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz.
Everything is larger than life: the performances, the verbal battles fought, the stakes. At the centre of the film is Margo Channing, played by Bette Davis, an actress forced to realise that she has reached a crossroads in her career and that younger actresses are nipping at her heels. One of those young actresses is Eve Harrington, played by Anne Baxter. She presents herself as an adoring fan of Margo’s, just happy to be in her presence. Eve is so shy, meek and demure, so eager to please. Butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. – Of course it wouldn’t melt. She is as cold as ice underneath her goody two shoes façade, which is something we slowly begin to realise while her victims remain unaware of her true nature for a long time.
Eve wants Margo’s place on the stage, and in the end, she reaches her goal. She gets to play a part written for Margo and her performance earns her a prestigious award. But Margo wasn’t defeated. She had realised that she was too old for the part and had decided not to accept the role. Not that Eve would care about the reasons, but Margo had looked at the signpost at her crossroads and chosen the right direction.
Eve might seem triumphant but she has made one mistake. She allowed herself to fall into the clutches of Addison DeWitt, a famous theatre critic (the superb George Saunders). She thought she could use him by spinning him her yarns, but he sees right through her, in fact tells her to her face that he will expose all of her lies and her scheming if she doesn’t do what he tells her to do. She belongs to him now, he tells her.
Addison DeWitt: That I should want you at all, suddenly strikes me as the height of improbability. But that, in itself, is probably the reason. You're an improbable person, Eve, and so am I. We have that in common. Also, our contempt for humanity and inability to love, and be loved, insatiable ambition, and talent. We deserve each other.
And if that wasn’t punishment enough, the film has an ominous little coda. When Eve returns home after the award ceremony, she finds in her flat a young woman, Phoebe, an ardent fan of hers. When Addison turns up to bring Eve the award that she had forgotten in the cab, it is Phoebe who answers the door:
Addison DeWitt: And what's your name?
Phoebe: Phoebe.
Addison DeWitt: Phoebe?
Phoebe: I call myself Phoebe.
Addison DeWitt: And why not? Tell me, Phoebe, do you want someday to have an award like that of your own?
Phoebe: More than anything else in the world.
Addison DeWitt: Then you must ask Miss Harrington how to get one. Miss Harrington knows all about it.
It is inconceivable that the part of Margo Channing wasn’t written for Bette Davis but in fact it was Claudette Colbert who was supposed to play Margo. Just days before shooting was to start, she had an accident and the producer, Darryl F. Zanuck, and director Mankiewicz had to look for another actress to take over the part. They finally settled on Bette Davis and history was made.
Rewatching the film again, I was struck by a number of things. For one the audience is as deceived by Eve as the other characters. We get small inklings that things might not be as Eve says – a glance, the way she checks how others react – but we’re way behind Birdie, Margo’s dresser. Birdie has an instinctive reaction to Eve’s tale of woe: “What a story! Everything but the bloodhounds snappin' at her rear end.”
The other thing that struck me this time around is that we do not get any lines from the plays that are talked about in the film. We get to see a curtain call for the one play and a scene during rehearsals of the other play but that scene is without sound. There is another famous quote from the film where Margo and the playwriter bicker:
Lloyd Richards: I shall never understand the weird process by which a body with a voice suddenly fancies itself as a mind. Just when exactly does an actress decide they're HER words she's saying, and HER thoughts she's expressing?
Margo: Usually at the point where she has to rewrite and rethink them, to keep the audience from leaving the theatre!
And later Lloyd Richards praises Eve for speaking his lines the way he had intended them to be spoken, but we never hear those lines. We never see Margo or Eve act, we’re just told about them.
The third thing that struck me was the use of music. During the aforementioned climactic party, as Margo finally ascends the stairs, the pianist starts to play “Stormy Weather”. It fits the party and it fits the scene it underscores.
And finally, there is Marilyn Monroe. She has a small part but she carries her weight next to Bette Davis and all the others. I wonder what the film would have been like if Marilyn Monroe had played Eve. She was young enough and obviously savvy. This is a what-if we never got to experience.
The dramas in “All About Eve” are bigger than life but they were bigger than life behind the scenes as well. Reality and fiction create a “gesamtkunstwerk” with Bette Davis as the magnificent centre. The film was nominated for 14 Academy Awards and it won in six of the categories (best film, best director, best screenplay, best supporting actor, best costume design and best sound recording). Ironically enough, the fight between Eve and Margo continued at the Oscars, because Anne Baxter insisted on being nominated for a best actress award instead of the best supporting actress award, which meant that both Bette Davis and Anne Baxter competed in the same category and blocked each other. The winner that year was Judy Holliday.
The film is just about perfect. Just about because I'm not sure I really like the poetic justice ending. Eve gets her own Eve, and we are left to imagine how Phoebe will start to invade Eve's life. A parasite attaching herself to another parasite. Somehow, the ending is too neat for me. I would have liked to see an ending where Eve is finally alone, drops all pretence and reverts to being Gertrude Slojinski, which is her real name. Who is this Gertrude when she doesn't play the part of Eve Harrington? Is there an authentic core to her? But, given the fact that Gertrude/Eve is a sociopath, a lying, conniving, scheming miserable little so-and-so, a human impersonator, there might be no real Gertrude to show up even when she is on her own. Maybe that is what makes Eve such a great actress. We never get to see her act on stage, but everybody who has seen her is enraptured. Her life is acting a part. She is a brilliant actress but completely heartless, driven only by ambition. Margo on the other hand is flawed and vulnerable. That makes her human. I know which of the two I'd prefer during “a bumpy night”.
In a comment to one of the various excerpts of the film available on YouTube somebody wrote that whenever they catch “All About Eve” on TV by accident they have to finish watching it. I know exactly how this person feels. It is the same with me. If you have never seen “All About Eve” – go and watch it.