All About Eve
All About Evei benefits from superb narrationii and excellent oration (Walter Hampden, whom you haven't heard of because, in the words of Sanders, "to those who do not read, attend the theatre, listen to unsponsored radio programs or know anything of the world in which you live it is perhaps necessary to introduce Walter Hampden". I won't.)
Baxter isn't really very good at all. She's doing Slim's low voice, which doesn't work too well on her, and sports the squarish, vulgar, all American face you'd fully expect gracing the shoulders of some gun moll or other. She'd have been a great whore down on her luck (as she's yet too young for matron down on her luck), but she makes a horrible consumptive youth with a hyperactive imagination and overdeveloped volitive glands. Those are an entirely different type, skinnier, sharplier, edgier around the corners of their eyes and mouth (and I know all this quite from direct experience, having in my time turned a few of the later into the former, to the great benefit of all involved).
Thelma Ritter is downright gorgeous. Before I'm complete as a black cat patting steel gloved tyrant of everything + roses I will have to get a Birdie of my own. It's just not possible to do without. Anyone wanna be my Birdie ? (And it's not just Birdie, either. Even the bimbos have good lines in this movie. Not that it's hard to have good lines around a man de wit, but still. Rare quality.)
Ps. It's just a silly, innocent misunderstanding. Men have been hanged for less. You must see it.
A, pps. Monroe is also in it. Possibly her best role.
———- 1950, by Joseph Mankiewicz, with Bette Davis, George Sanders, Anne Baxter. [↩]
To those of you who do not read, attend the Theater, listen to unsponsored radio programs or know anything of the world in which we live, it is perhaps necessary to introduce myself. My name is Addison deWitt. My native habitat is the Theater -- in it I toil not, neither do I spin. I am a critic and commentator. I am essential to the Theater -- as ants are to a picnic, as the boll weevil to a cotton field...
Sanders, ofc. [↩]
