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Created Apr 27, 2014 09:26PM PST • Edited Apr 22, 2023 08:16PM PST

1. Quality

2. Summary

   Perfect 5.0

   All About Eve is surely one of the greatest Best Pictures most people have never seen. It won six Oscars: Best Picture, Best Screenplay & Best Director to the extraordinary Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Best Costume Design to Charles Le Maire & Edith Head the Costume Doctor, Best Supporting Actor to George Sanders, and one for Best Sound Recording. Then this: Marilyn Monroe caught her big break in All About Eve.

   Most impressively, All About Eve is the only movie in history with four actresses nominated for Oscars.¹

   • Bette Davis & Anne Baxter for Best Actress: Baxter plays Eve. It’s all about her and her obsession with Margo Channing, the Queen of Broadway, who is iconically played by the legendary Davis. Eve introduces her story in the star’s dressing room, triggering a first glimpse of Bette Davis Eyes.
   • Celeste Holm & Thelma Ritter for Best Supporting Actress: The elegant Holm plays Margo’s BFF, a Radcliffe graduate and wife of Margo’s celebrated playwright. The seasoned Ritter gets most of the laughs as Margo’s tart maid and former cast-mate, the only one unafraid of the grand dame.

   Is Mankiewicz’s Hollywood creation a love letter to the Theater or a poison pill? Both. In any case, it’s jawdroppingly good: polished, shallow and deep, studded with iconically entertaining moments.

   • “Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy night.” – Margo’s classic line at her own party.
   • Marilyn Monroe appears 45 minutes in as a plus-one at Margo’s party, “a graduate of the Copacabana School of Dramatic Art”, aka a nightclub product. Marilyn was 24 and wore a Charles Le Maire designed tight white dress, her blonde locks sophisticated in tight golden curls.
   • It doesn’t go five minutes without a jaw dropping line, delivered theatrically well. To wit:

   All the religions in the world rolled into one, and we’re gods and goddesses. — Margo Channing ²

   Mankiewicz closes his immortal movie with a Star Turn, as yet another ingénue pictures herself Queen of Broadway. Brilliant all the way to that end, All About Eve will be exceptionally entertaining in 2050 and 2150, just as it was in 1950. Talent, fame, ambition, revenge, glamour, glory and wit never go out of style.

   ---

   ¹ Per Wikipedia, plus its 14 Oscar nominations were unmatched until Titanic nearly half a century later.

   ² No wonder show business disdains religion. As Woody Allen later said, they create their own morality.

4. Acting

   Really Great 4.5

   Bette Davis as Margo Channing

   Her eyes really are extraordinary, even by moviestar standards. The song didn’t lie. Her performance is big, bold and brilliant. Playing a 40-something actress railing about no longer being able to play 20-somethings, she’s not only the Queen of Broadway, she’s the Queen of Denial, living royally in her Big Apple Palace, complete with courtiers and vassals. Has there ever been a greater character played on screen? Equaled, yes. Exceeded, no. Bette Davis and Margo Channing are twin names that live forever in show business Valhalla.

   Anne Baxter as Eve Harrington

   Baxter isn’t iconized today as Davis is, yet she played the title character, even if the title is somewhat ironic. Baxter deftly goes from apparent naif to jaded grand dame. Her greatest role in a long career, it is rivaled only by the truly royal glamour of Queen Nefretiri opposite Charlton Heston & Yul Brenner in Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments. More interestingly, she was Frank Lloyd Wright’s granddaughter.

   George Sanders as Addison DeWitt

   Sanders won an Oscar for his performance as a theater critic about town, an apparently closeted gay guy according to those who know the type. Sanders is terrific in any case, dashing and dishing. Sanders died on a final bender in the south of Spain. Quite appropriate, don’t you think?

   Celeste Holm as Karen Richards

   Lovely Celeste Holm peaked early in her career with All About Eve, an Oscar nominated performance of a glamour girl the likes of which will set up an actress for a multi-decade career.

   Thelma Ritter as Birdie

   Thelma Ritter has 40 acting credits on IMDb, none bigger than All About Eve. She’s terrific, funny as hell as Margo Channing’s maid and onetime peer. You get a tiny taste of her at the very end of the nearby Bumpy Night video.

   Stellar Non-Oscar Players

   • Gary Merrill as Bill Sampson
   • Hugh Marlowe as Lloyd Richards
   • Marilyn Monroe as Miss Claudia Casswell
   • Gregory Ratoff as Max Fabian
   • Barbara Bates as Phoebe

5. Male Stars Really Great 4.5

6. Female Stars Perfect 5.0

7. Female Costars Perfect 5.0

8. Male Costars Really Great 4.5

10. Film

    Perfect 5.0

    Hail Joseph L. Mankiewicz!! Oscars for Writing and Directing All About Eve and Best Picture too. Has any auteur ridden higher? Deservedly so. He sites his story in the rich milieu of the New York Theater World, with Hollywood glimmering just off camera. Then he crafted a story with a subtle beginning, wonderfully bumpy middle and glorious end … followed by another beginning. Studded with countless great lines and shot with verve and vigor in timeless B&W, Mankiewicz’s film has equals but no superiors.

    1950: Mankiewicz wasn’t alone in delivering an iconic motion picture about an aging actress. Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard, the iconic film noir about silent star Norma Desmond, was another box office hit in the central year of the mid-century.

    Then there’s the name Eve. All About Eve followed The (wonderful) Lady Eve by almost a decade.

11. Direction Perfect 5.0

12. Play Perfect 5.0

13. Music Perfect 5.0

14. Visuals Perfect 5.0
15. Content

16. Edge

    Risqué 1.6

17. Sex Titillating 1.6

18. Violence Gentle 1.5

19. Rudeness Salty 1.6

21. Reality

    Glib 1.4

    A time capsule from Mid-Century Modern Manhattan, All About Eve is about the ultimate career woman of the time, with an ambitious younger woman leaning in.

    Is that grammatically correct, ending a sentence with “leaning in”?

22. Circumstantial Surreal 2.1

23. Biological Natural 1.0

24. Physical Natural 1.0