Rent All About Eve (1950)

Great Film - All About Eve review by RW

This is an all-time Great Film about post-WW 2 theatrical society in New York. The cast is brilliant with Bette Davis & George Sanders leading from the off. You are in for a real treat.

The Wings Take Wing - All About Eve review by CH

Mary Orr. Margola Cranston. These are not names that immediately come to mind when thinking of one of the most famous movies: All About Eve.

This sprang from a short story “The Wisdom of Eve” in which Mary Orr, having heard of a real-life incident, created a character, an actress Margola Cranston who would be upstaged by the eponymous help Eve, a smooth-talking serpent. This was clear from the opening sentences, as it would be in the awards dinner which begins the film where Bette Davis, as Margot Channing is swept aside by the machinations of Anne Baxter. This scene is notable for its use of two voice-overs, a device anticipated by Mary Orr's own opening: “A young girl is on her way to Hollywood with a contract for one thousand dollars a week from a major film company in her pocketbook. In a year or two I am sure Miss Harrington will be as much of a household word to you as Ingrid Bergman or Joan Fontaine.”

That destiny is the result of Eve's inveigling her faux-innocent way into the lives of these thespians whose bravado and insecurities mirror her own. So much for the brief plot of the story, published in Cosmopolitan in 1946; the film, just four years later, turns upon so much more, with pleasingly baroque screenplay and direction both by Joseph L. Mankiewicz. He had to hand elegant sets in which to swathe not only Bette Davis but a cast so good that the phrase “supporting players” does not do justice to the ensemble effect, one in which the ever-acerbic Thelma Ritter is never cowed by her employer's tongue.

And one has to treasure the creepily polite columnist played by George Sanders, whose clothes and intonation make him Noel Coward with an edge. Not to mention, though one must, the few minutes with Marilyn Monroe (if minutes they are, they linger in the memory).

The dialogue - “a bumpy night”, and all that - is well known, but the thing is that it gains so much from being heard, and seen, as a whole. Such is the pacing that one does not realise, until it is over, that the film has lasted for two hours and twenty minutes. One could dwell upon in-jokes, such as a jocular reference to the film's own producer and to Eugene O'Neill, but that would be geekish, contrary to a film carried aloft by passion - with a stunning final moment.

Who knows where a short story might lead? Not only this, but Mary Orr made a play from it and it became a long-running musical, Applause. Twentieth-Century Fox got a great deal from her for its $5000, even if she had been inspired by life itself, a quality evident upon every inch of this film.

“She loves me like a father, also she’s loaded.” - All About Eve review by LJ

A middle aged star is threatened by a young fan seeming to insert herself into her life. Unfortunately this story is harmed by its own fame because I went into it already knowing the twist. However it does have a satisfying ending.