Many cherish the literate script above all and All About Eve has a substantial fan following who feast on the film’s crackling repartee (author Sam Staggs calls it “the bitchiest film ever made”) and many quotable lines including the famous “Fasten your seatbelts.
Others have emphasized the contrast between the “healthy” heterosexual relationships of the two lead couples (Davis and Gary Merrill, and Celeste Holm and Hugh Marlowe) and the “unnatural” read-between-the-lines queerness of the ambitious Eve Harrington (Anne Baxter) and newspaper critic Addison DeWitt (George Sanders, who took home the film’s only acting Oscar). Some reviewers have emphasized the similarities between the lead role of Margo Channing (Bette Davis) and Davis’ own situation as an aging actress beset with insecurities at a low point in her career, seeing the film as a commentary on Hollywood’s cult of youth. But it really is one of the all-time greats and so rich in themes that if you showed it to ten different people each could come up with a different interpretation of what it is really “about” and all could be right. It’s hard to know what to say about All About Eve because the truth-it’s one of the greatest films of all time-sounds like hyperbole. Mankiewicz’s film delivers the latter in spades, providing an acerbic look behind the glitzy façade of show business and unflinching analysis of power relations which suggests that postwar America had not yet achieved the moral perfection it so wanted to claim. Real-life is never that simple: Disney’s Cinderella was the top-grossing US film in 1950 and MGM’s Annie Get Your Gun and Father of the Bride were in the top ten, but so were All About Eve and Sunset Boulevard, suggesting that American filmgoers of the era had an appetite for dark satire as well as sunny comedy. It’s tempting when looking back on the recent past to embrace simplifying assumptions so the postwar years become the age of the confident male breadwinner, the happy homemaker, and endless Doris Day movies. It’s a fitting presentation package for this superbly-restored 950 film which was a blockbuster success (14 Oscar nominations, six wins) in its day and remains a must-see among cinephiles today.
The disc fits solidly in a slot in the back cover, preceded by 24 pages of notes and commentary as well as some great production stills and publicity photos recalling the keepsake programs which used to be sold in conjunction with roadshow movies.
The first thing you notice about Twentieth Century Fox’s Blu-ray release of All About Eve is the book-like slipcase, an eminently suitable form of packaging for this most literate of films.
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