Slow curtain, the end.

All About Eve

There are quite a lot of genres you can apply to „All About Eve“: drama, comedy, tragedy. To me, the tragedy prevailed for some reason. Surely I was able to laugh and acknowledge how the film was full of extremely well-done jokes and deadpan witty commentaries, but for some reason, I could identify myself way too well with the tragic character of Bette Davis. I’m not even old, mind you. Her monologue sounded like it could have come right from my own mouth, although my situation is actually entirely different from hers, if I think about it. I could now go on ranting how I had to think about the movie a lot before I went to sleep, but that is ultimately not of importance.

What I think is important, however, was what a surprisingly good movie it was. I got to know about it the first time when I watched „All About My Mother“, in which Bette Davis looked like your generic bitch. Plus, I wasn’t particularily interested in the premise, I didn’t care about how some young girl enters the stage world with her intrigues. To be exact, I still don’t find that particular aspect of the movie interesting, I have found the character development in Margo and her friends much more noteable.
If one has to compare Bette Davis’s and Anne Baxter’s performance, I’d definitely lean towards the former. I even had the feeling that Anne Baxter didn’t even get that much screentime, but there was this one scene was fabulous. It was the one where she confronts Karen and turns from her apologizing face to her evil face. However, Bette Davis played her role with such energy and honesty, it was immensely believable and attractive in some ways. I believe it is not my personal bias towards the Margo Channing character but also Bette Davis’s energetic acting that made me get into that character so much. Ultimately, I think it was a good ending for her. Even though she „lost“ the battle, she has gained a purer and much more honest love than Eve Harrington could ever have. That is where the movie stops being tragic and where it left me with a pleasant feeling: You might want to say whatever you want, but a ‚normal‘ relationship as the root of happiness is not that far-fetched. I liked how Margo has attained happiness while Eve is only happy on the surface, but in fact bound to a man she doesn’t love and who blackmails her.

Since I knew the majority of the story of „All About Eve“ before watching the film, I can definitely say that this is a movie where it’s all about the execution and the performance of wonderful actors. In the audio commentary they said something along the lines of „Cukor befriended women, Mankiewicz fucked them.“ That is fairly interesting, and I think the movie is a great example of the topic of womanhood, and far from being the low bitchfest I have feared it to be 3 years ago.