All About Eve (1950)
100 %
Reviews Counted: 49 Fresh: 49 Rotten:0 Average Rating: 9/10
Consensus:
Perfectly cast and solidly scripted, this dark Hollywood satire contains a brilliantly self-deprecating performance from Bette Davis. Smart, cynical, terrifically entertaining, and one of the greatest films ever released about the movie industry, All About Eve has retained its edge, and remains a sharp, beautifully-written gem.
Runtime: 2 hrs 19 mins
Synopsis: Given that she throws tantrums, gets intoxicated, and pushes people away when she needs them the most, it's a wonder New York theater star Margo Channing has any true friends. But when Eve Harrington, Margo's young and innocent-seeming protégée, schemes to gain both the affection of Margo's... [More]
Genre: Dramas
Starring: Bette Davis, Anne Baxter, George Sanders, Celeste Holm, Gary Merrill
Director: Joseph L. Mankiewicz
Screenwriter: Joseph L. Mankiewicz
Producer: Darryl F. Zanuck
Composer: Alfred Newman
Screenwriter: Joseph L. Mankiewicz
Producer: Darryl F. Zanuck
Composer: Alfred Newman
Buy It On DVD
Reviews
Joseph L Mankiewicz's wonderfully literate 1950 classic drama of the theatrical life, All About Eve, is back in the cinema, to be savoured for its language, performances, psychological insights and proof that all the world's a stage.
Comment
01/30/08
Top Critic
The peerless tale of two rival drama queens, playing as the central attraction in the BFI Southbank's Joseph L Mankiewicz season, and rightly so.
11/30/07
Here is a real Christmas treat: a restored version of Joseph L Mankiewicz's jet-black 1950 comedy about Margo Channing, elegant leading lady of the theatre, superbly played by Bette Davis.
11/30/07
One of Hollywood's finest backstage dramas. If nothing else Davis should have been rewarded for services to the tobacco industry.
11/30/07
Apart from the monochrome photography, all that dates the film is the chain-smoking and the fact that these are theatre folk rather than movie stars (frequent in-jokes about the low art of Hollywood pepper the script).
11/29/07
For old-school Hollywood movie-making at its most polished, literate and sophisticated there is really nothing to match it.
11/29/07
There is so much to admire in All About Eve, even for those too young to be drenched in nostalgia for the spectacle of Bette Davis unleashing her sharp tongue.
11/20/07
[Features] more quotable dialogue in one movie than most screenwriters manage in a lifetime.
08/16/07
Still retains its stagy power to provoke theater lovers by its elaborate wit and campy bad taste.
07/12/07
The hoped-for tone of Restoration comedy never quite materializes, perhaps because Mankiewicz's cynicism is only skin-deep, but the film's tinny brilliance still pleases.
12/12/06
Top Critic
Amazing performances top the list of positive qualities in Joseph L Mankiewicz' All About Eve.
10/31/06
Forget Foreman vs. Ali, this is Baxter vs. Davis in one of Hollywood's greatest showdowns.
03/04/06
Her display as Margo Channing shows Davis at the top of her game, not only for the acid-tongued egotism and bristling paranoia about the effects of the passing years, but for the moving realisation of the emotional toll exacted by her glittering career.
02/09/06
In one of the wittiest films to be made by Hollywood about the Broadway theater, Bette Davis shines as declining diva Margo Channing, but, alas, she was deprived from getting an Oscar by various political factors.
11/29/05
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