The film begins at a banquet and ceremony, where Eve Harrington is to receive the Sarah Siddons Award for Distinguished Achievement. The result is, in Pauline Kael’s words, ‘one of the most enjoyable movies ever made’. Mankiewicz critiques theatrical two-facedness and artifice at the same as he exhibits and exults in these qualities. It’s certain that she has ceased to be the force of theatre that she looked to be at the start of the story. It’s implied that Margo may now have grown up enough to find happiness with another human being. She decides that she’d rather settle down than continue to fight for the starring role that she and Eve have been contesting. Eve Harrington’s killer instinct takes her rapidly to the top of the theatrical tree but while she grabs Margo Channing’s acting crown, Eve doesn’t succeed in stealing her man. They are ‘displaced persons’, who can’t live or love like ‘real’ people. They are uniquely insecure, insatiable for applause and admiration like no one else. His theatre people are a mythical (and, even in 1950, clichéd) race apart. Mankiewicz’s definition of theatre in All About Eve is neither expansive nor nuanced.
Mankiewicz then ignores his own advice as utterly as Eve ignores Bill’s. It may not be your Theater, but it’s Theater of somebody, somewhere.’Īt this point in his brilliant script, Joseph L Mankiewicz, the writer-director of All About Eve, might be telling himself, rather than Eve, to get real about the Theatuh. You don’t understand them all, you don’t like them all, why should you? The Theater’s for everybody – you included, but not exclusively – so don’t approve or disapprove. Donald Duck, Ibsen, and The Lone Ranger, Sarah Bernhardt, Poodles Hanneford, Lunt and Fontanne, Betty Grable, Rex and Wild, and Eleanora Duse. Wherever there’s magic and make-believe and an audience – there’s Theater. Also rodeos, carnivals, ballets, Indian tribal dances, Punch and Judy, a one-man band – all Theater. Want to know what the Theater is? A flea circus. ‘The Theatuh, the Theatuh – what book of rules says the Theater exists only within some ugly buildings crowded into one square mile of New York City? Or London, Paris or Vienna? Listen, junior.
Eve asks him, ‘Why, if you’re the best and most successful young director in the Theater?’ Bill retorts:
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Bill is about to go to Hollywood to discuss a movie project. He and Margo Channing are also an item offstage: Eve aims to take over from Margo in that department too. At a still early stage of her campaign to usurp legendary stage actress Margo Channing, the pathologically ambitious Eve Harrington is in conversation with hot-shot New York theatre director Bill Sampson.
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