All About Eve started out so promising. The opening narration (given by the velvety pipes of Shere Khan, George Sanders) is a hilarious piece of witty exaggeration. Unfortunately, nothing else in the movie is anywhere near as funny. It's another film-about-show-business, which we haven't seen since The Great Ziegfeld (#9). The basic plot is that a young woman, Eve (Anne Baxter), insinuates herself into the inner circle of a temperamental stage actress (Bette Davis) she admires. At first everyone likes and trusts her, but slowly like dominoes falling they all suddenly have separate revelations that she's actually a conniving snake out to supplant the actress and take everything from her because...reasons. It doesn't seem to be personal. It's basically ambition. Some of the early characters realizing this was confusing because they were acting on practically no evidence, they would just take a sudden hard turn into disliking the newcomer. Eventually we the audience are clued in for real as to Eve's true colors, but it takes awhile and in the meantime it makes everyone who dislikes Eve look delusional. Bette Davis is renowned for this performance as a persnickety actress terrified of aging, and while the performance is excellent the character is a whiny, insecure, unlikable bitch in 4/5ths of her scenes.
Then at the end things take a hard turn for the sinister and I actually exclaimed aloud "what the shit am I watching?" We're supposed to think it's Eve getting her comeuppance for all of her lies and manipulation by finding the tables turned and I imagine that's exactly what audiences in 1950 thought. To my 21st-century post-several waves of feminism eye, it raises my hackles because it looks very likely she's about to be turned into a virtual slave to George Sanders' character, sexual and otherwise, when he blatantly says she 'belongs to him' and if she doesn't obey his every whim he'll air all her lies. Since he's a respected theater critic he has the forum and audience in which to do so. There's blackmail, and then there's Blackmail. Yes, Eve had been shamelessly and callously manipulating people for her own ends but no one deserves to be blackmailed this hard. It would have been enough for her to be called on her lies, maybe have her and George Sanders prepare to manipulate and blackmail each other endlessly, and then have the final scene where another young woman appears to be preparing to do to her what she did to Bette Davis' character. That would have satisfied my need for poetic justice without bringing the creepy coercion factor quite so high.
(As a sidenote, this movie also marks an early supporting role for Marilyn Monroe, easily recognizable by that mole.)
Watched: May 20, 2018
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