All About Eve (1950): Eitan's Take

A huge fan of Sunset Boulevard -- and its deep plunge into a pool of disturbing narcissism -- as well as one of the few peons who had never seen All About Eve, I wondered how a tale of Broadway could have trumped a tale of Hollywood for Hollywood's biggest prize. I wonder no more. Filled with moments of delicious evil, astounding wit, and some of the greatest charisma ever exuded on screen, All About Eve is, simply, an ingenious film and one well-deserving of its endless, timeless accolades. Not since Casablanca have we watched a winner so sumptuously fleshed out, with characters so nuanced and situations so masterfully controlled for tone and substance. It's rare that I'm so captivated by a small cast of characters; though it's difficult to love most of them (except for the warm and wonderful Karen), they are so fascinating that it's impossible to ignore a single affect or a single word out of their mouths.

Margo Channing is one of cinema's finest characters. A scene early on when she is tricked into collect calling her boyfriend shows her range; she lies in bed, smoking, caught up in thoughts that are never revealed to us. She moans and mumbles to him, forgetting and then remembering to wish him a happy birthday. It's a tragedy in a teapot; ebullient and magnificent on stage, Bette Davis plays Margo reduced to a shriveled wreck in bed, yearning for the man in her life to return, and fretting about things that Margo Channing would think about in silence. It's a well-drawn role that Davis happens to fill better than it was written. Alternating between dreadfulness and sly sexiness, she is the definition of a great actress, revealing everything and nothing. The way she matches wits with Lloyd ("All playwrights should be dead for three hundred years!"), the way she gallops down the stairs at her party before realizing what a sad wreck she's galloping into, the way she stands next to a giant caricature of herself in the lobby of a theatre, the way she spits in her tantrums and marches through life like a tornado in a trailer park... it's magnificence personified.

Anne Baxter is also wondrous as Eve Harrington, a devilish, calculating wretch wrapped in the body of a pixie. I was thinking during the film that it was strange to call it "All About Eve," when the plot mainly revolves around Ms. Channing, but by the end I realized that it's less about the manifestations of Margo's unstoppable ego than it is about the way the machinations of a single cold, spiteful human being set into play a brilliant drama. The villain's greatest trick, to paraphrase Verbal Kint, is tricking us into thinking it's not about her. But it is. It's all about her statue and her cape and her moments of false helplessness and her web of lies and her too-perfectly coiffed hair. The moment where she bows in front of an empty theatre, with Margo's dress clutched to her chest says everything we need to know about this film: the cruel drama of the theatre world is not about the facades that are celebrated, but about the facades that lie buried underneath layers of malice and hate and costly ambition. And, of course it is all about Eve.

Although I feel it could have been darker and more brooding, I now consider myself a complete devotee of this utterly remarkable film and thoroughly deserving Best Picture winner. 10/10.