Not Quite All about All about Eve

It’s always a joy to finally watch a classic movie, one you’ve known about forever but never got around to. In this case, I mean All About Eve (1950), one in a storied tradition of starlet v. parvenu films. I’m in a pickle, however. I’m a blogger, someone who writes for practice. My day jobs afford little time for writing for fun. Starting a new job means even less time than usual. What to say, and say briefly, about a 75-year-old Bette Davis showcase? Greater minds with more time have said more than I can.

Caveats in mind, I’d like to highlight one dimension of All About Eve: its scheming narrator, Addison DeWitt (George Sanders). The 50s had a thing for the sexually ambiguous gossip columnist (see 1957’s Sweet Smell of Success). While DeWitt grips a cigarette holder and makes and breaks careers as a critic, the film never stops letting us know that he’s a glorified, as Ehud Barak said of Jeffrey Epstein, collector of people. He’s a creature of the night, of soirees and swanky dining clubs, as much as he is an aesthete. While the two actresses battle it out, DeWitt—the man with the pen—is always in control. He trades in information, gets people to do what he wants.

And what does he want? Power. His cynicism knows no bounds. Though he rarely comes on screen, at least until the end, his narration lends him a spectral presence. All About Eve isn’t really about Eve any more than it is about Bette Davis’ aging starlet, Margo. DeWitt reminds us that any film about show business worth its salt always has its eyes on the moneymen and gossipmongers. Whether it’s David Lynch or System of a Down, the lesson ought to be “you should’ve never trusted Hollywood,” that hell maw for the naïve. Here, no one is naïve, only playing at it, and yet the house still wins.

You’d think in the age of (post-?) MeToo, we’d see more of this, have more movies about the system and the bodies it puppeteers. Color me chuffed to find that the 50s seems to have understood the lesson better than we do.