In a year that brought such cinematic classics as Sunset Boulevard, Born Yesterday, The Third Man, and The Asphalt Jungle, one picture — which was released 75 years ago on October 27 — broke all pre-existing records for Academy Award nominations and went on to win in six categories, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay. The directing and writing awards both went to one man: Joseph Mankiewicz, who only a year earlier had accomplished the same rare feat with A Letter to Three Wives.
The earlier movie was an impressive accomplishment (although it lost Best Picture to All the King’s Men), but All About Eve was even more extraordinary. It didn’t just win the Oscar: it won the BAFTA and the top prize at Cannes, along with a slew of other accolades.
As for Mankiewicz’s script, which was based very loosely on a Cosmopolitan short story, “The Wisdom of Eve,” by an obscure actress and writer named Mary Orr, was widely hailed as perhaps the most literate ever put on screen. Gary Carey writes in the invaluable 1972 book More About All About Eve that it “must surely be the most honored screenplay ever written.” In 2006, when the Writers Guild of America put together a list of the 100 greatest screenplays ever, All About Eve came in at #5 — preceded only by Casablanca, The Godfather, Chinatown, and Citizen Kane. (RELATED: Missing the Mank)
Yes, the splendid cast of All About Eve shouldn’t be discounted: Bette Davis, who had the role of a lifetime as Margo Channing, a Broadway star who’s insecure about her age (she’s just turned 40); Anne Baxter as Eve Harrington, her adoring, doe-eyed young fan who turns out to have theatrical ambitions of her own, as well as an unsettling degree of moxie; Celeste Holm as Karen Richards, Margo’s best friend, who unwittingly brings the calculating Eve into her life; Thelma Ritter as Birdie, Margo’s maid, who has Eve’s number before anyone else does; and George Sanders as Addison DeWitt, a cutthroat Broadway critic who’s decided that Eve will be his, whether she likes it or not.
Aside from Sanders (who won the only acting Oscar for All About Eve), there are other men in the cast — notably Gary Merrill (who would go on to become Davis’s fourth husband) as Bill Sampson, Margo’s boyfriend and director, and Hugh Marlowe as Lloyd Richards, Karen’s husband and Margo’s go-to playwright — but these two characters don’t leap off the screen to the extent that Margo, Eve, Karen, and Birdie do. Neither do they measure up to Addison, rightly described by Carey as the film’s one “dynamically drawn male character.”
“Men react as they’ve been taught to react, in what they’ve been taught is a ‘manly’ way. Women are, by comparison, as if assembled by the wind.”
Mankiewicz readily admitted to being focused on his female characters. “Writing about men,” he told Carey, “is so damned…limited. [Ellipsis in original.] They’re made up, for the most part, of large, predictable, conforming elements. Men react as they’ve been taught to react, in what they’ve been taught is a ‘manly’ way. Women are, by comparison, as if assembled by the wind. They’re made up of — and react to — tiny impulses. Inflections. Colors. Sounds. They hear things men cannot.” Is this true? Well, Mankiewicz thought so — which explains, I guess, why his female characters are so arresting.
Indeed, for all the bravura performances in All About Eve, the film’s triumph begins and ends with Mankiewicz’s script. It tells a story about the theater, and the screenplay itself is nothing if not reminiscent of a “well-made” old-school (i.e., pre-Beckett, Pinter, and Orton) stage play. Dialogue-heavy and packed with wit, it contains no car chases, no violence, no sex scenes, not even a long, quiet patch or two in which we observe somebody walking or thinking or crying. In fact hardly any of it takes place outside. And all of it except the closing sequence is told by way of flashbacks that are narrated by three different characters, making for a rare level of structural complexity that invites comparison to Citizen Kane, co-written (or, some would argue, written almost entirely) by Mankiewicz’s brother Herman.
All About Eve could, in other words, very easily have been a play instead of a film — and in 1970, as a matter of fact, it became a Broadway musical, Applause, starring Lauren Bacall. It won the Tony for Best Musical, but only because the competition was lame (Pippin, Coco). In truth, it was a serious misfire, and Carey explains why: while Eve is, structurally, the central character of All About Eve (hence — duh — the title), Davis’s Margo has always overshadowed her, and when Adolph Green and Betty Comden wrote Applause, they turned it into a vehicle for Lauren Bacall, playing Margo, while drastically reducing the role of Eve. One problem with this absurd decision was that Margo “appears practically not at all in the last third of the film” — forcing Green and Comden to write a second act which has “Margo, after Bill walks out on her, repeat endlessly her need for him in both song and dialogue.”
Mankiewicz lived 43 more years after All About Eve, but never topped it. Part of the reason why is that after around 1950, something — a few things, really — happened to Hollywood. With television becoming a more formidable competitor every year, filmmakers strove to do things that TV couldn’t: they made huge, wide-screen, overpopulated Biblical epics like Quo Vadis? (1951), The Robe (1953), The Ten Commandments (1956), and Ben-Hur (1959); they abandoned the backlot and shot on location, as in The Quiet Man (1952), Roman Holiday (1953), and Gigi (1958); and they knocked out splashy, colorful, all-star, family-friendly nonsense like The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) and Around the World in 80 Days (1956). While many of these films were outstanding, they marked a sea change from the likes of All About Eve.
And the 1960s and 70s, of course, brought with them big-screen fare that was, as they say, gritty — from Easy Rider to Panic in Needle Park to A Clockwork Orange. Yes, this trend resulted in some meritorious work, but it also led to the creation of material — some of it, dare one say, subliterate — that seemed to have been conceived on a different planet than All About Eve. In All About All About Eve — published, remember, in 1972 — Mankiewicz tells Carey that if he had no screenwriting plans for the near future, it was, in part, because in the years since All About Eve Hollywood films had developed a “preoccupation with externals.” That’s a kind way to put it.
Not that Mankiewicz was left behind in the aftermath of All About Eve: on the contrary, he went on to direct the most notorious, overpriced epic ever, Cleopatra (1963), which was 50 percent Shaw, 50 percent Shakespeare, and 100 percent grotesquely expensive, over-the-top spectacle. It was the first film for which an actor – Elizabeth Taylor – was paid a million dollars, and it broke box-office records (but took years to earn back its budget). It was, however, far from Mankiewicz’s proudest moment: in later years, he wouldn’t even mention the picture by name and deleted it from his filmography.
Such, alas, was the new Hollywood: not so very long after Mankiewicz had won an Oscar for writing All About Eve, such scripts had begun to be seen in Tinseltown’s corridors of power as labored, wordy, stagy — in short, insufficiently cinematic. No surprise, then, that of his later screenplays, the most notable were faithful adaptations of familiar material — Julius Caesar (1953), from Shakespeare; Guys and Dolls (1955), from the hit Broadway musical; and The Quiet American (1958), from Graham Greene’s novel — and thus lacked his distinctive touch for dialogue, whereas Suddenly, Last Summer (1959) and Sleuth (1972), both of which he directed successfully, had scripts by other hands. (RELATED: Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair: A Reflection)
Yes, several of these later pictures are gems. But none of them match All About Eve. Few films do.
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