All About Eve (1950) Review
9/10
A young woman waits at a stage door, is taken in by an aging star, and replaces her. The film tells you the ending in its opening scene, at an awards dinner, with Eve about to receive the prize and everybody at the table hating her.
So there’s no suspense about the outcome. What the film is about is what a career costs and what people will do to have one, delivered by characters who are all articulate enough to say exactly what they mean and clever enough not to.
Joseph Mankiewicz wrote and directed it, and won Academy Awards for both, having done the same thing the previous year for A Letter to Three Wives. Nobody has repeated that.
Few films make me grin at cruelty the way this one does. Nearly every character talks better than people get to talk in movies now, and I enjoy the insults even when they land on somebody I like. It’s a 9 because I’d happily watch Davis, Sanders and Baxter trade lines for another hour, and the small things holding it back never spoil that pleasure.
The 9 is for a screenplay in which every single line is doing work. Mankiewicz gives good dialogue to everybody, including the people who deserve none. That’s why the film has no villain problem. It’s stagey in places, the framing device creaks slightly, and the Gary Merrill romance is the one thread that doesn’t fully earn itself.
Everybody Is Smart
The commonest failure in a story about manipulation is that the mark has to be stupid for the plot to work. Nobody here’s stupid, and the film would collapse if anybody were. Margo suspects Eve early and says so. Karen sees it and does nothing, for reasons of social discomfort instead of blindness. Birdie, the maid, calls it in the first act, plainly, out loud, in one line about a story having a message: everybody’s going to be sorry. She’s ignored because she’s staff.
Addison DeWitt understands Eve completely, tells her he understands, and helps her anyway, because he wants something and she’s the instrument. Their scene in his apartment is the best writing in the film and neither of them pretends anything for a second. That apartment scene is my favorite stretch of the film. I love watching two people drop every pretense at once, and Sanders plays it with such bored confidence that Eve looks like an amateur for the first time.
So Eve succeeds against a room full of people who can see her coming, and she succeeds because seeing somebody coming isn’t the same as being able to act on it. Margo can’t accuse a young woman of ambition without sounding threatened. Karen can’t warn Margo without admitting her own part. That’s much harder to write than a clever schemer among fools, and it’s infinitely more interesting, because the trap is social instead of intellectual.
Anne Baxter plays Eve with almost no visible strain. That’s the correct choice. She’s not a mastermind. She’s a competent liar who keeps finding that the lies work.
Never win a scene by making somebody dim. If your antagonist only succeeds because the other characters miss the obvious, the reader is ahead of your cast and contempt follows, and contempt is fatal to tension because nobody fears an outcome they can see being mishandled.
The method is to give everybody full intelligence and then remove their ability to act, using social cost instead of ignorance. Margo knows. Karen knows. Birdie says it aloud. Every one of them is prevented from doing anything by what speaking would cost them, and that constraint lets Eve move.
The test is to go through your draft and ask, at each turn of the screw, what the other characters have understood and why they didn’t stop it. If they hadn’t worked it out, you’ve written convenience. If acting would have cost them something concrete, you’ve written a situation.
Margo Is Not the Victim
Bette Davis plays a woman of forty confronting parts that are drying up, and the film is honest that a great deal of her behavior is intolerable. The party sequence is the proof. She’s drunk, cruel, self-pitying and correct about everything, all at once, and the film doesn’t ask you to excuse the first three because of the last. Fasten your seatbelts is the most quoted line in the picture and it’s delivered by somebody about to ruin an evening on purpose.
I think Davis is at her best in that party, and I like that the film lets her be awful. She’s mean to everybody in the room and I’m on her side the entire time anyway. That takes writing of a very high order.
Her arc is deciding what she wants instead of the career, and the film treats that as a real choice with a real cost instead of a consolation prize. She takes the marriage and gives up the part, and the film doesn’t pretend the part meant nothing.
The romance with Gary Merrill’s character is where my attention drifts. He’s a decent man and a flat one, and I never quite believe Margo would give up the stage for him as readily as the script needs her to. It’s the thinnest writing in a script that’s otherwise packed tight.
Davis was thirty-nine, and Warner Bros had dropped her after eighteen years. She took the role at short notice when Claudette Colbert injured her back, and she lost her voice from shouting during a divorce shortly before filming. That’s why Margo sounds the way she does.
That’s one of the more useful accidents in film history. The rasp gives the character a wear that a healthy voice couldn’t, and Davis has said she kept it deliberately.
It revived a career that was over and she was nominated, losing to Judy Holliday, which the Academy has never entirely lived down.
Addison DeWitt Is the Real Antagonist
George Sanders plays a theater critic with no discernible interest in theater and total interest in power, and he’s the only character in the film who gets everything he wants. He’s also the only one who never lies. Every threat he makes is honest, every assessment is accurate, and his final scene with Eve is a man calmly explaining that he now owns her and expecting no argument. The film’s structure hides him. Eve appears to be the antagonist because she’s the one doing the climbing, and Addison is the one who selected her, positioned her, and takes possession at the end. His narration frames the film. That’s worth noticing. He’s the one telling you this story, and he tells it as a man who finds all of them slightly ridiculous.
Sanders won the Academy Award and reportedly considered the role easy, which given how much of the film’s intelligence sits in his delivery is either modesty or a joke.
The dynamic between him and Eve is the coldest thing in the picture. Two people who understand each other perfectly, neither pretending to like the other, in a permanent arrangement neither can leave.
The Ending Is a Circle
Eve wins, gets the award, goes home to her apartment, and finds a young woman asleep in a chair who has let herself in, missed her train, and is a great admirer.
The film doesn’t comment. It shows you that the machine is still running and that Eve is now standing exactly where Margo stood in the first act, and the girl says almost the same things Eve said. The last shot is the girl in Eve’s evening cloak, holding the trophy, bowing to a mirrored dressing screen that multiplies her into an infinite receding line of herself.
It takes about four seconds and it’s one of the coldest images in American cinema. There’s no dialogue over it and no music cue telling you how to feel. The young woman is Phoebe, and she’s played by a twenty-three-year-old Marilyn Monroe in an uncredited early role. That wasn’t the plan and is now impossible to watch neutrally.
That final image chills me more than anything Eve does on the way up. I admire Mankiewicz for trusting the audience to finish the thought without a word of help, and Phoebe bowing to herself in that wall of mirrors makes it eerier still.
Nothing in the ending suggests Eve deserves it. The point is that deserving has nothing to do with the mechanism.
The cyclical ending works because the audience has watched the whole cycle once, in full, at close range. We’ve seen exactly how Eve did it, so we need no explanation whatsoever of what the girl in the apartment intends, and the film can deliver the entire second cycle in four seconds of silence.
The construction requirement is that the first pass must be complete and specific. If the reader has only seen a summary of how the pattern works, the repetition will read as a gesture. If they’ve watched every step, the repetition is a full second story compressed into an image.
The test is to ask whether your final beat could be understood by somebody who skipped to it. If yes, it’s a statement and you haven’t earned much. If it would be meaningless without everything before it, you’ve built a proper ending, and you can afford to make it very short.
Why It Has Not Dated
Almost nothing in it depends on 1950. The theater setting is specific, but the mechanism, a younger professional studying an older one and then replacing them, is permanent.
The film is also unusually honest about women’s careers in a way that studio-era pictures generally weren’t. Margo’s problem is that the industry has a use-by date for her that it doesn’t have for her fiancé, and the film states that plainly and doesn’t resolve it.
Karen’s position is the modern one. She’s the wife of the playwright, intelligent, with no career of her own, and the film gives her the narration for a considerable stretch and a real moral crisis about her own complicity. It was based on a short story by Mary Orr called The Wisdom of Eve, itself based on an anecdote about the actress Elisabeth Bergner, and Orr received no screen credit for years. That’s a detail with its own irony. Fourteen Academy nominations is still the record, tied by Titanic and La La Land. Four of those nominations were for actresses in the same film, which split the vote and is why Davis and Baxter both lost.
It won six, including Best Picture, and the American Film Institute has it in the top twenty of everything.
Should you watch All About Eve?
Yes, and watch it for the script, since the plot is announced in the first five minutes. It’s stagey and talky, and I’d push it past 9 if the framing device didn’t creak and the Gary Merrill romance carried its weight. Those are small complaints. The party sequence and the Addison apartment scene are as good as English-language screenwriting gets, and I’d put Sanders up against any screen antagonist the studios ever produced.
