All About Eve

Arguably the best backstage melodrama of them all, this story of a young actress on the make seems to have been dipped in acid before the cameras rolled. Bette Davis is the uncomfortably peaking diva Margo Channing, and it’s probably her finest role: formidable and narcissistic but also vulnerable and all too aware that age is against her. Anne Baxter is the young ingenue who inserts herself into Margo’s circle, and George Sanders very nearly steals the show as the sardonic critic Addison De Witt.

In 1950, the movies recognised stardom as a pathological disorder. Exhibit A was Sunset Blvd, exhibit B All About Eve. Set in the Broadway jungle rather than among the ’sun-burnt eager beavers’ of Hollywood, Joseph L Mankiewicz’s film dissects the narcissism and hypocrisy of the spotlight as sharply as Wilder’s, but pays equal attention to the challenges of enacting womanhood. Anne Baxter is Eve Harrington, the wide-eyed stage-door hanger-on who insinuates her way into the world of Bette Davis’ sacred monster, Margo Channing; butter-might-just-melt meets gin-hold-the-tonic. The fan who makes an audience of the stars, Eve is soon attracting her own admirers, as well as barbs worthy of Mankiewicz’s ’30s newsroom pedigree. Edith Head’s costumes stress the antagonism: Eve enters in a sexy-modest trenchcoat-and-trilby combo, and could anyone but Davis pull off a ball gown with pockets? Meanwhile, the real threat – Marilyn Monroe – sits at the party’s edge, shining, angling for another drink.

Ben Walters, Time Out