Joseph L. Mankiewicz made the wittiest film in Hollywood history about female ambition. He did not notice that his film’s wit was entirely in service of stopping one woman from having any.
SHUBERT THEATRE
Margo Channing in AGED IN WOOD A New Comedy by Lloyd Richards
Management wishes to welcome you to this evening’s performance. Miss Channing needs no introduction to lovers of the American theatre. Tickets for the remainder of the run are available at the box office. Latecomers will be seated at the discretion of the management. Photography and recording are not permitted.
The role of the young woman at the stage door is not listed in tonight’s programme. She is not, technically, part of the production. But she will be.
| Director | Joseph L. Mankiewicz |
|---|---|
| Year | 1950 |
| Runtime | 138 minutes |
| Cast | Bette Davis, Anne Baxter, George Sanders, Celeste Holm |
| Award | 6 Academy Awards; 14 nominations, a record held for 38 years |
| Streaming | MUBI, Disney+ |
Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s All About Eve (1950) arrives already inside the apparatus of theatrical celebrity. Its narrator is Addison DeWitt (George Sanders), theatre critic, perfectly calibrated instrument of sardonic intelligence, a man who has spent his career deciding which performances deserve to survive and which deserve to be quietly extinguished. He is introducing us to an awards ceremony at which Eve Harrington (Anne Baxter) is about to receive the Sarah Siddons Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Theatre. The people in the room know something about how Eve got here. The film circles back to tell us. What it tells us, across a hundred and thirty-eight minutes of dialogue so precisely constructed it has been quoted continuously for seventy-five years, is the story of a young woman who arrived at a stage door claiming to be the most devoted admirer of Margo Channing (Bette Davis) — star, legend, forty years old and aware of it — and proceeded to dismantle Margo’s career, steal her role, and position herself perfectly to inherit everything. The previous review on this blog called All About Eve the film that gives the sardonic intelligence to the women rather than to a man standing above them, “harder to leave behind” than Sunset Boulevard. That was accurate. What it was not, quite, was complete.
The Sunset Boulevard review argued that what distinguishes All About Eve is that its irony belongs to the women: Margo wields it, Karen Richards deploys it, even the young playwright’s wife understands the architecture of her own situation. This is true. What the earlier review could not say — what requires the film as subject rather than as comparison to see — is that the wit, the intelligence, and the irony are distributed almost entirely among the women defending positions they already hold. Not one drop of it is given to the woman reaching for a position she does not have. Eve Harrington is the most present character in the film, the engine of every scene, and she is constructed from pure surface: pure calculation, pure performance, pure strategic patience. She is never wrong-footed. She is never genuinely vulnerable. She is never caught in a moment of unguarded feeling that the film gives her fully. And the reason is structural rather than dramatic. To give Eve interiority — to ask, with real curiosity, what it is like to be Eve Harrington, to have come from wherever she came from, to want what she wants with the totality she wants it — would require the film to acknowledge that what she wants is not, at its core, monstrous. What Eve wants is recognition. A career. To not be nobody. These are not pathological desires. They are the desires of every ambitious person who ever stood at a stage door. The film makes them monstrous by placing them inside a woman who has no other qualities, no warmth, no cost — a pure instrument of want, stripped of everything that might make the want comprehensible.
The contrast with Margo is the proof. Margo Channing wants exactly the same things Eve wants: to be seen, to be central, to matter in rooms that matter. She is forty and afraid of becoming peripheral, and the film gives her this fear fully — the drinking, the rage, the famous party speech, the late-night panic that arrives as fury at everyone around her. The film loves her for all of it. It gives her Bette Davis, the most expressive instrument of female self-knowledge in American cinema, and it lets her be difficult and frightened and brilliant and excessive and entirely herself. Margo’s ambition is the film’s warmth. Eve’s ambition is the film’s horror. The difference between them is not that one wants more than the other. It is that one already has it. The film can only celebrate female ambition in women who are protecting what they possess. In the woman who is trying to acquire it from nothing, ambition becomes predation. The film never notices that it has made this distinction. It believes it is seeing both women clearly. It is seeing one of them, and performing the outline of the other.
The film gives wit to every woman defending a position. It gives nothing to the only woman reaching for one. It calls this seeing women clearly. It is not.
Addison DeWitt’s backstage confrontation with Eve — the scene in which he reveals that he knows everything she has concealed, that he has known all along, and that she belongs to him now in the way that a discovery belongs to its discoverer — is the scene the film uses to confirm the horror. Eve, stripped of her performance for the first time, sits and accepts. She has nothing. No counter, no alternative, no interiority she can reach into for something Addison cannot use. She has been pure instrument for the entire film and here she is simply claimed, and the claiming feels like the narrative logic arriving at its destination. Mankiewicz frames this as exposure, as the moment the mask finally comes off. But what is underneath is not a person. What is underneath is the absence of a person, the space where the film never placed one. Eve accepts Addison’s ownership because the film decided she had no inner resource from which to refuse. She is not defeated by Addison. She was never constructed with the architecture of resistance. Margo could have refused. We know this because we know Margo. We do not know Eve. We were never given her.
The final image is Phoebe. A young woman who has worked her way into Eve’s apartment, fallen asleep in a chair, and now stands before the bathroom’s tripled mirror, holding the award, the silk dressing gown trailing on the floor. She multiplies in the glass: one girl, two, then infinite recession. The film’s last image is the horror note: another Eve, and another after her, the cycle without end. Mankiewicz frames this as menace, as the joke that arrives after the film thinks it has concluded. But stay with Phoebe for a moment before accepting the frame. What is she doing? She has found her way into the room of someone she admires. She is holding the thing she wants to one day deserve. She is imagining. This is the same act the film has spent a hundred and thirty-eight minutes treating as monstrous, and in its very last image it frames a young girl’s hunger as the promise of future damage. All About Eve cannot tell the difference between a woman imagining her future and a woman plotting yours. Both look identical in the mirror. The film multiplies them, sets them receding into the glass, and calls what it sees a warning. It does not call it what it also is: a girl alone with an award, wanting something, which is the least frightening thing in the world until you have already decided that women who want are dangerous.
Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Favourite (2018) takes All About Eve‘s exact architecture — a young woman of ambition working her way into the household and the confidence of a powerful older woman, displacing the woman who was there before — and refuses, with quiet precision, to assign the predator role exclusively to the newcomer. Abigail (Emma Stone) wants what Abigail wants, and uses what she has to get it, and the film does not frame her as a horror. Neither does it frame Sarah (Rachel Weisz), who is displaced, as entirely innocent. And Queen Anne herself — the ostensible power around whom both women orbit — is given an interiority so full and so ungovernable that the film’s entire moral architecture refuses to settle. In Lanthimos’s version, all three women are ambitious. All three use what they have. All three are comprehensible from the inside, even when they are terrible. The film holds all of this without deciding which woman the audience should be protecting. Placed directly beside All About Eve, The Favourite illuminates what Mankiewicz chose to do and chose not to do: he gave Margo Channing everything and Eve Harrington nothing, and then concluded that this was a portrait of two kinds of women rather than a portrait of two kinds of the same woman, one of whom the film decided to know and one of whom it decided to fear.
All About Eve is the most intelligent film Hollywood ever made about female ambition, and its intelligence is deployed almost entirely in the service of a woman who already has what ambition is supposed to get you. The wit is real. The performances are real. Bette Davis is real in ways that very few screen performances in any decade achieve. But the film’s brilliance and its blind spot live in the same place: it gave the women the language and then used the language to explain why the wrong woman should not succeed. The programme note said photography was not permitted. It did not say that watching was.
If this stayed with you, watch these next:
The Favourite (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2018): the same architecture — a newcomer of ambition displacing the woman already in position, within the orbit of a powerful older woman — but Lanthimos refuses to assign the predator role exclusively, gives all three women full interiority, and the comparison illuminates precisely what Mankiewicz decided not to give Eve Harrington and why that decision shapes everything.
Sunset Boulevard (Billy Wilder, 1950): our review is on this blog — the film released the same year, set in the same world of performance and replacement, in which the sardonic intelligence belongs to a dead man rather than to the women he observes; placed beside All About Eve, it shows the precise difference between a film that gives women the wit and a film that still uses the wit to police which women deserve to want.
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