All About Eve Film Review

Fasten your seatbelts, it's going to be a bumpy night, advises the incomparable Bette Davis in Joseph L. Mankiewicz's wickedly poisonous satire of 1950s Broadway, still dripping venom from every frame. Davis is at her swaggering, histrionic best with a towering performance as fading star Margo Channing, equal parts acid-tongued chutzpah and brittle-edged pathos.

The years are beginning to take their toll on this theatrical grand dame and her glittering career is losing its lustre; a fact not helped by the silky platitudes and eyelash-fluttering of starry-eyed ingnue Eve (Baxter), slowly ingratiating herself into Margo's life onstage and off. The dialogue is pure pyrotechnics; they really don't write 'em like this anymore. Sure, all those hardboiled ripostes may seem a touch elaborate at times - any semblance of a plot submerged in a shower of barbed bon mots - but you're having too much fun to care.

I mean, it's Bette Davis - martini-swinging, eye-popping, playing to the back of the theatre with every ounce of self-mocking bravura she can muster, while Marilyn Monroe shimmies past in a luminous cameo and George Sanders purrs each acerbic apercu with the languid urbanity that only he could get away with. The newly restored print is practically flawless, and with Davis' centennial just around the corner, there couldn't be a better time to revisit what is quite simply one of the most enjoyable films ever made. [Laura Smith]