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Waves of Love

Anthony Macris February 08

In Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s All about Eve, Anne Baxter plays an ambitious young starlet ‘on the make’ to Bette Davis’ ageing star, determined to usurp her and take her place at the head of the theatre scene at all costs. It is, above all things, a meditation on fame, celebrity and brutal narcissism, as well as the driving nature of love. In the September Meanjin, Anthony Macris pays tribute to this 1950s classic – a brief extract is below, and you can now read the full essay on our editions page.



You’re not meant to watch a film like All about Eve on your living room sofa, a few metres away from the television screen, the DVD purring away. You’re meant to watch it as it was screened at its premiere at the Roxy on Broadway, in its day the world’s most resplendent picture palace theatre.

Who’s there on the red carpet? There’s Bette Davis of course, quietly confident she’s going to win, after a hiatus of more than a decade, yet another Oscar for best actress. There’s Anne Baxter, her co-star and rival for the same award. There’s George Sanders, husband of Zsa Zsa Gabor, and nominee for best supporting actor. And there’s the director, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, already riding high on last year’s A Letter to Three Wives (1949), for which he won Oscar for both best director and screenwriter, and which has made him the golden boy of Hollywood. He’s fervently hoping he’s about to deliver yet another hit, and one that will earn him a place in film history. And that is exactly what happens. Come Oscar time, All about Eve breaks the record for the most nominated picture in Academy history: fourteen in all. (Even today, ’it is a record that is yet to be beaten.) And once again, Mankiewicz wins Oscars for best screenwriter and director. Davis and Baxter both lose, due to a split vote. All up, the film wins a respectable six awards.

The dramatic premise of All about Eve is elegantly simple. An ambitious young actress, Eve Harrington (Baxter) enters the life of an ageing theatre star, Margo Channing (Davis), and attempts to usurp her place. In the course of the ensuing story, deftly plotted by Mankiewicz, Eve manipulates everyone around her. She tries to steal Margo’s upcoming role in a major play, as well as her lover, a famous director, then the playwright who writes Margo’s plays (and is married to Eve’s friend and mentor, Karen).

The film is set in the world of New York theatre in the late 1940s, more or less the period in which it was made, and takes us behind the scenes in the spirit of ‘backstage’ films.[2] All about Eve’s main characters are theatre people, and Mankiewicz explores the nuances of this social and professional microcosm with a psychological complexity rarely before expressed in a Hollywood film of the studio era. In particular, Mankiewicz was interested in analysing the character type of the actor, one that came increasingly to preoccupy him. In an interview Mankiewicz explained his obsession with actors. Speaking about All about Eve, he said: ‘Most importantly, I guess, I wanted … to dramatize, if even briefly, my concept of the actor and his/her early flight into the “identity-proxy” or “personality-substitute” or “ego-alias” or whatever the hell else I’ve dubbed it.’[3]

The actor at the core of his cast is Bette Davis, who plays Margo Channing. Margo is a major Broadway star, in one of Broadway’s most successful plays (slyly titled Aged in Wood). She’s stylish, sharp-tongued, beautiful, brooding. The play is directed by her boyfriend, Bill, one of Broadway’s leading directors, and written by Lloyd, one of its leading playwrights.

Into this tidy, self-congratulatory world comes Eve Harrington, the star-struck ingénue with a shady past and a fawning manner that barely conceals her vaulting ambition. She’s discovered one night by Karen near the stage door, where she has waited yet again, hoping for a glimpse of her idol. Karen duly introduces her. Before the evening is out, Eve has made herself Margo’s private secretary, and by the time the film has ended, Eve has not only secured, over Margo, the lead in Lloyd’s new play, but has also won the coveted Sarah Siddons Society Award for new talent.

Thus All about Eve’s milieu is relationships, those between colleagues and lovers, friends and married couples. It is a finely calibrated analysis of how ambition figures in these contexts. These are people who work together, create together, force themselves on one another, and are forced upon one another. As you watch the spectacle of Eve’s unbridled ambition play itself out in this coterie you wonder how, without each other as stepping-stones, they would rise to meet their goals. How, without each other to react against, they would exist at all.



Notes

2. A Hollywood subgenre that first sprang up in the form of 1920s musicals and evolved to include ‘showbiz’ dramas. Back

3. Quoted in Gary Carey, More about All about Eve, Random House, New York, 1972, p. 22. Back


 

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