The plot of All About Eve is based on a short story and radio play by the actress and writer Mary Orr, who adapted it from a real life incident told to her by actress Elisabeth Bergner. Joseph Mankiewicz recommended that Darryl F. Zanuck buy the film rights to Orr's story in 1949.
Adapting it for screen, the director originally cast Claudette Colbert as Margo Channing, the aging theatre actress ousted by her understudy, Eve Harrington (played in the film by a young Anne Baxter). Colbert dropped out of production after slipping a disc while making another film, and was replaced by Bette Davis, herself experiencing the problems of being a 42-year-old actress in Hollywood.
The film centers around the manipulative Eve Harrington, a young and ambitious would-be actress, who lies and cheats her way to stardom. Focusing her ambition on a great theatrical stress, Margo Channing, Eve maneuvers her way into Margo's life by fabricating a story about her widowhood and her fascination with the actress's career. Inviting Eve into her home, Margo soon realizes that she is being conned – unfortunately she realizes this before any of her friends and colleagues. Paranoid about her age (40) and her relationship with a man eight years younger than she, Margo begins to alienate her friends who think she is jealous of the young, beautiful Eve.
Bette Davis gives a brilliantly acerbic performance as the talented Margo Channing. Witty, cynical, but underneath very vulnerable, Margo both envies and understands Eve's manipulations – and fears them. When Eve begins to turn her attentions to Margo's director boyfriend, Bill Sampson, any sympathy that Margo feels turns to hostility.
Karen Richards (Celeste Holm), the wife of playwright Lloyd Richards (Hugh Marlowe), rather unwittingly allows Eve her first break as Margo's understudy, and later creates the circumstances that allow Eve to go on stage in Margo's role for the first time. Obviously talented as well as devious, Eve receives critical acclaim for her performance and her career takes off.
Bill (Gary Merrill) loves Margo, but cannot convince her that he wants to stay with her. Although the couple breaks up temporarily, and Bill rejects Eve's advances, Bill returns to Margo after she receives bad press from the insidious critic Addison De Witt (beautifully played by George Sanders). Addison recognizes in Eve some of his own manipulative selfishness and begins an affair with her. When he realizes that Eve is playing him off against Lloyd Richards he threatens to expose her. Eve, who has been having an affair with Lloyd, tells him to return to his wife, the long-suffering Karen.
Eve is a brilliant success in a play written by Lloyd and directed by Bill, and wins the Sarah Siddons award for best performance. Mankiewicz frames the film with the awards' ceremony which opens and almost ends the film. While Eve hypocritically thanks her "friends," the people she has used and discarded to get to where she is, Margo, Karen, Bill, and Lloyd look on in mixed misery, admiration, and cynicism.
Eve returns home alone to her sumptuous flat, full of mirrors and discovers Phoebe, a new "Eve," waiting to replace her. The film thus ends on this note of cynicism – that for every new star created there is someone younger, more talented, more ambitious waiting to replace him/her.
All About Eve has an impressive cast who executed some of their best performances in the film. Among the credible cameo performers is a young Marilyn Monroe, who portrays a young bimbo starlet, the role that would haunt her for the rest of her life. Bette Davis and Gary Merrill met and fell in love on the set of the film, and eventually married. The chemistry and charisma between them is almost tangible and is very believable in the film.
Although All About Eve is a respected and much quoted film, at the time of its release it was too radical and too truthful to be openly welcomed by the theatrical world. In her role as Margo Channing, Bette Davis probably gave one of the best performances of her career, but despite being nominated for Best Actress in the Academy Awards, the younger Judy Holliday won for her role in Born Yesterday. Today, however, All About Eve is recognized and acknowledged as a classic.
Release Date: 1950
Rating: Not Rated
Starring: Bette Davis, Anne Baxter, George Sanders, Celeste Holm, Gary Merrill, Hugh Marlowe, and Marilyn Monroe
Director: Joseph L. Mankiewicz
Writer: Joseph L. Mankiewicz
Source Citation: Pillai, A. "All About Eve." International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers. Ed. Nicolet V. Elert and Aruna Vasudevan. 3rd ed. Vol. 1: Films. Detroit: St. James Press, 1997. 28-30.
********** Check out the complete list ofMovieRetriever's 100 Greatest Movies here! ********** Sign up for a My MovieRetriever account today,
post a comment, and let us know what YOU think. **********
Няма коментари:
Публикуване на коментар