All About “All About Eve” (34 page)

Hampden appeared in several silent movies. In 1939, after a twenty-two-year absence from the screen, he returned to Hollywood for
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
. The following year he appeared in
All This, And Heaven Too
, in which he delivers this admonition to Bette Davis: “Admit the sinful passion that led to this murder. Denounce this man who betrayed you.”

Their paths had crossed before, as Bette reminded Hampden one day on the set of
All About Eve
. A very young girl had tried out for the part of a princess in a play that Hampden was casting in New England. When the aspiring actress walked onstage, Hampden took one look and said, “That homely little girl? Good heavens, no!” The homely little girl grew up to be Bette Davis.

A little later,
All About Eve
started to acquire a more solid reputation. It was variously described as “triumphantly literary in tone,” “a true and savage indictment of the theatre,” “an elegant comedy of manners,” “théâtre filmé,” suggesting a film whose sequences are acts and whose curtains are fade-outs; and “ersatz art of a very high grade, and one of the most enjoyable movies ever made.”

All of this is true to some extent. But there is more. For a film to endure as a classic, its layers of meaning—we might almost call them its personalities, or selves—must somehow materialize so that later audiences discover more than the original audience found. For example,
The Wizard of Oz
(1939) didn’t skyrocket until the fifties, when it was shown repeatedly on television and embraced by a new generation.
Casablanca,
released in 1942, languished with other war movies until 1957, when the Brattle Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts, across from Harvard, revived it forever.
Vertigo
, a disappointment to many Hitchcock cultists in 1958, seems still in the process of ripening for some insatiable future audience.

Before videocassettes made it possible to scrutinize a film frame by frame and line by line, only the most tenacious cinephile-scholars could explicate movies with the “close readings” available to critics of literary texts. Perhaps that’s why
All About Eve
, and lots of other movies besides, remained largely unexplored, a rich Brazil of untapped resources.

“We tried to make a picture that would be practically a textbook on the old ways of making pictures.” This statement comes from screenwriter Dudley Nichols, referring to his work with John Ford on
Stagecoach
. It might also have been said by Mankiewicz regarding
All About Eve
. That’s because
Eve
is a textbook film that looks backward to the sophisticated comedies of the thirties, to the flashback structure of
Citizen Kane
, to a virtual chorus line of backstagers and romanticized accounts of show-biz tragedy and triumph. In the opposite direction,
All About Eve
predicts an improbable litter of movies strung out over the years, ranging from
The Bad and the Beautiful
(1952) and
Imitation of Life
(1959) to
Bullets Over Broadway
(1994) and Almodóvar’s
All About My Mother
(1999).

The most textbookish technical device in
Eve
is the freeze-frame that Mankiewicz uses to stop the action when Eve Harrington reaches for her Sarah Siddons Award. This device goes all the way back to 1895, when Thomas A. Edison’s
The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots
used a freeze-frame to mark the decapitation. D. W. Griffith elaborated the freeze-frame in 1909 in
A Corner in Wheat
. To contrast the quick- moving rich with the slower-moving poor, Griffith formulated a
tableau vivant
where the movement of the poor becomes so slow that it stops altogether. It was Joseph L. Mankiewicz, however, who popularized the freeze-frame. It’s used in
Fury
(1936), directed by Fritz Lang and produced by Mankiewicz. It’s used again in
The Philadelphia Story
(1940), directed by George Cukor and produced by Mankiewicz, who claimed that the final freeze-frame of Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn in a startled embrace was his inspiration and not Cukor’s.

So the freeze-frame in
All About Eve
was not a Mankiewicz first, although he lived to see it become a cliché. Truffaut appropriated it for
The 400 Blows
(1959), then the Czechs took it up, among them Milos Forman in
Black Peter
(1964) and Ivan Passer in
Intimate Lighting
(1965). Since the late sixties, when George Roy Hill froze the final frame of
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
, Hollywood has done it to death.

Though Mankiewicz didn’t invent the freeze-frame, he used it better than any director since. That’s because he had a precise reason to stop the action as Eve Harrington reaches to accept her award. Having hooked the audience by presenting this young actress at her moment of triumph, and having shown a Greek chorus of sorts—Eve’s sour-faced former friends at the Sarah Siddons banquet—Mankiewicz knows it’s time to start over, this time at the beginning.

A more literal-minded director would have launched the film—where else?—at the start of the story. But an artist has other options. Mankiewicz began at the end, with Eve and her ill-gotten award, then doubled back to reveal the story from three different perspectives. Later directors often used the freeze-frame as nothing more than a chic, lazy conclusion to their films. Few of them had the imagination to vary the freeze-frame as Mankiewicz did, for rather than leaving the image frozen he injected visual rhythm by cutting to a close-up of George Sanders, then back to the static frame of Eve with outstretched arm.

Apart from this one innovative device, however,
All About Eve
is technically conservative. Bernard Dick, in his book on Mankiewicz, observed succinctly that “the camera moves when it should, and Mankiewicz cuts when he must.” This observation is in line with Mankiewicz’s own credo: “The best direction is where the viewer detects no camera movement and no effect of cinematic technique.” And yet when Mankiewicz structured his film in flashbacks, narrating the story from three points of view—Addison’s, Karen’s, and Margo’s—he used a tricky technique that requires a bravura command of film. Shifting point of view to come at a story from all angles via flashback is the grand method of Orson Welles in
Citizen Kane
, of Kurosawa in
Rashomon
. Billy Wilder adapted this structure for
Sunset Boulevard
(one long flashback from one point of view) and Preston Sturges used a variation of it in
Unfaithfully Yours
, where a wild series of fantasies running through Rex Harrison’s mind functions both as imaginary flashbacks and “unreliable” flash-forwards.

In the wrong hands, however, multiple-narrator flashbacks are merely depressing. Two examples: Vincente Minnelli’s
The Bad and the Beautiful
(1952), and Mankiewicz’s own
The Barefoot Contessa
. In the Minnelli film, three drab narrators—Barry Sullivan, Lana Turner, and Dick Powell—unfold a moist melodrama about Hollywood sins: sex and drinking, divorce and treachery. Although it’s more flashily “cinematic” than
Eve, The Bad and the Beautiful
proves you can’t start a fire with damp matches. The dampest one of all is Kirk Douglas, abetted by a soggy script. The result is a shell of a movie, revealed from three vacuous viewpoints.

By 1954, and
The Barefoot Contessa
, Mankiewicz was mired in a smirking smugness that he apparently mistook for Shavian wit. Bogart, Edmond O’Brien, and Rossano Brazzi are the three narrators here. Their characters are not believable; they serve only as mouthpieces for Mankiewicz’s gripes about Hollywood and the ravages of star-making. To his credit, the director soon realized his mistake. In 1960 Mankiewicz said, “I was angry at too many things; I tilted at too many windmills.”

In structure,
Eve
is the offspring of
Citizen Kane
. Its comic style, however, derives from the decade that ended in 1939. In fact, if you wanted to study comedies of the 1930s and couldn’t find any, you could extrapolate a lot just from watching
All About Eve
. Pauline Kael, discussing Herman Mankiewicz vis-à-vis thirties comedies in
The Citizen Kane Book
, characterizes the films of that decade: “They entertained you without trying to change your life. Many weren’t even ‘artistic’ or ‘visual’ movies, which is why they look so good on television now. The writers [with their] toughness and cynicism and verbal skills had an almost aristocratic disdain for putting beliefs into words.”

She might almost have been writing an abstract of
All About Eve
. Except that by 1950 Hollywood comedy had been tempered by the earnestness of war films, shaded by film noir, and chilled by the icy fingers of McCarthyism. And so
Eve
ends on a cautionary note: Look in those mirrors and see a bad girl’s fate. Its “toughness and cynicism” are garnished with Freud, and there’s a wee post-war sermon when Addison lectures Eve: “There was no Eddie—no pilot. You’ve never been married. That was not only a lie, it was an insult to dead heroes and the women who loved them.”

Eve
most resembles thirties movies in its fast-paced talkiness (think of
The Women
), its wisecracks and put-downs (
Stage Door
), even its whiff of the Marx Brothers’ non sequitur (“Remind me to tell you about the time I looked into the heart of an artichoke”). The plot recalls
42nd Street
(1933): broken ankle throws star out of show, understudy goes on, next day understudy is new star.

In a few particulars
All About Eve
contains the seeds of a screwball comedy—one like
The Awful Truth
(1937), starring Cary Grant, Irene Dunne, and Ralph Bellamy. Both films are sex comedies played out in sophisticated milieux. Both have scenes in nightclubs, champagne toasts, and suggestive double entendres. There’s a triangle in
The Awful Truth
, two in
Eve
(viz., Margo, Bill, Eve; and Karen, Lloyd, Eve). In both movies a couple breaks up and gets together again. The plot of
The Awful Truth
is set in motion when a car breaks down. This is echoed in
Eve
when Karen drains the gas tank to make Margo miss her performance so that Eve can go on, events that lead eventually to the film’s resolution.

You could almost argue that John Barrymore, as the hammy, egomaniac producer Oscar Jaffee in
Twentieth Century
(1934), served as a distant prototype for Margo Channing. And what other ideas did Mankiewicz get from this Howard Hawks farce, where Carole Lombard plays a bitchy actress whom Barrymore discovers and casts in a terrible southern play? (Movie historian David Shipman has pointed out that “all dreadful plays in movies are set in the South.”)

Certainly Mankiewicz drew on a comic tradition that depended on deft handling of actors, on the wit and timing of dialogue, and which used a minimum of cinematic trickiness. He learned his lessons well. So well, in fact, that
All About Eve
remains the definitive movie about backstage life, “backstage” being defined as everything in show business that the audience isn’t supposed to see. But those who studied
Eve
as their primer were less adept. Most Mankiewicz followers were copycats.

Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that most Mankiewicz copycats were camp followers. That’s true of imitative directors like Minnelli, and it’s also true of a large segment of the audience.
All About Eve
flourished at the outset because it seemed obvious. It was backstage drama crossed with rollicking comedy, well played by a top-notch cast. And in 1950, all that seemed blatantly heterosexual.

*   *   *

Eve
has endured precisely because of what wasn’t obvious at first. The subtext has beguiled several generations of devotees, largely gay men, who have “read” the film as though it beamed a limelight into the closet of their hearts.

It’s easy to reel off the reasons why
All About Eve
recruited such gay devotion. (I hope that readers will embrace these suggestions with an ironic skepticism, for all such explanations are open to loud debate.) First of all, the icon Bette Davis clones another icon right on-screen: Margo Channing. With her flamboyant body language, jaded sense of humor, and relentless irony, Margo caricatures every female impersonator—or is Margo a drag queen’s impersonation of Bette Davis? Either way, she instantly found her target audience.

Mankiewicz never said it, but many a gay man might: “Margo Channing,
c’est moi
.” Margo lives the life a whole generation of gay men wanted to lead, at least in their dreams: a big-city life of money, prestige, and devotion, punctuated with wisecracks, bitch fights, late nights and breakfast in bed, and always getting in the last bon mot. In other words, gays like glamour. And wit.
All About Eve
is full of quotable lines with plenty of snap.

But more than anything, it’s about women in conflict, and gays cheer for this theme (cf. Scarlett versus Melanie, Baby Jane versus Blanche, Veda and Mildred Pierce, Mommie Dearest and Christina). And
Eve
loads the dice. Here the battle is about age, for Eve Harrington’s youth is her only real advantage. Gays identify with Margo’s dread of aging. It’s a fear that grips gay hearts, though it’s less a defining trait now than it used to be.

Margo is also under siege. A younger woman, perceived as prettier, sexier, more feminine and more talented, tries to usurp her life. How many middle-aged gay men feel that young studs in the bars are grabbing what they themselves used to get? Paul Roen, in
High Camp: A Gay Guide to Camp and Cult Films
, puts it this way: “We are transfixed by Margo’s beautiful face, which seems to be decaying right before our eyes. In its own way,
All About Eve
is as much a horror film as
What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
Here we have a middle-aged woman who, upon perceiving that her world is crumbling, expresses alarm and is promptly told that she’s merely being paranoid.”