All About Eve Review

Mankiewicz opens at an awards dinner, with George Sanders' critic Addison DeWitt introducing the room in voice-over, then flashes back through the memories of the people around the young woman receiving the prize. The structure is a trap: we watch Anne Baxter's Eve Harrington, meek and grateful, move into Margo Channing's home, dressing room and understudy slot, and spend the film catching up with what the narrators already know.

Bette Davis, cast only after Claudette Colbert hurt her back, plays Margo without fear of looking her age: vain, funny, jealous, self-dramatizing and wiser than anyone credits. Her warning at the party, fasten your seatbelts, it's going to be a bumpy night, is the most quoted line in a script made of them. Sanders won the Oscar as the man who sees through everybody, Thelma Ritter gets the best cracks as Margo's maid Birdie, and Marilyn Monroe turns up as a graduate of the Copacabana School of Dramatic Art.

Milton Krasner photographs it cleanly and not much more; this is a writer's film, and the camera waits for the next line. It drew a record fourteen Oscar nominations, four for its actresses, and won six, including Best Picture. The last scene is one of the great cynical codas.