by Staggs, Sam
Born in Brooklyn, Hampden began his acting career in England in 1901 with a traveling repertory company. (“I went to England to get the Brooklyn out of my speech,” he said many years later.) After mastering his craft in some seventy roles there, he returned to the United States and made his Broadway debut opposite Alla Nazimova in 1906 in a comedy called Comtesse Coquette. Eventually he rose to prominence in Shakespearean roles; in all, he appeared in twenty-six of Shakespeare’s plays, usually in the lead. He also gave more than 1,000 performances in Cyrano de Bergerac in the 1920s. A little later his dream of a New York playhouse of his own was realized when he opened Hampden’s Theatre with a revival of Hamlet.
Hampden appeared in several silent movies. In 1939, after a twenty-two-year absence from the screen, he returned to Hollywood for The Hunchback of Notre Dame. The following year he appeared in All This, And Heaven Too, in which he delivers this admonition to Bette Davis: “Admit the sinful passion that led to this murder. Denounce this man who betrayed you.”
Their paths had crossed before, as Bette reminded Hampden one day on the set of All About Eve. A very young girl had tried out for the part of a princess in a play that Hampden was casting in New England. When the aspiring actress walked onstage, Hampden took one look and said, “That homely little girl? Good heavens, no!” The homely little girl grew up to be Bette Davis.
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A little later, All About Eve started to acquire a more solid reputation. It was variously described as “triumphantly literary in tone,” “a true and savage indictment of the theatre,” “an elegant comedy of manners,” “théâtre filmé,” suggesting a film whose sequences are acts and whose curtains are fade-outs; and “ersatz art of a very high grade, and one of the most enjoyable movies ever made.”
All of this is true to some extent. But there is more. For a film to endure as a classic, its layers of meaning—we might almost call them its personalities, or selves—must somehow materialize so that later audiences discover more than the original audience found. For example, The Wizard of Oz (1939) didn’t skyrocket until the fifties, when it was shown repeatedly on television and embraced by a new generation. Casablanca, released in 1942, languished with other war movies until 1957, when the Brattle Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts, across from Harvard, revived it forever. Vertigo, a disappointment to many Hitchcock cultists in 1958, seems still in the process of ripening for some insatiable future audience.
Before videocassettes made it possible to scrutinize a film frame by frame and line by line, only the most tenacious cinephile-scholars could explicate movies with the “close readings” available to critics of literary texts. Perhaps that’s why All About Eve, and lots of other movies besides, remained largely unexplored, a rich Brazil of untapped resources.
“We tried to make a picture that would be practically a textbook on the old ways of making pictures.” This statement comes from screenwriter Dudley Nichols, referring to his work with John Ford on Stagecoach. It might also have been said by Mankiewicz regarding All About Eve. That’s because Eve is a textbook film that looks backward to the sophisticated comedies of the thirties, to the flashback structure of Citizen Kane, to a virtual chorus line of backstagers and romanticized accounts of show-biz tragedy and triumph. In the opposite direction, All About Eve predicts an improbable litter of movies strung out over the years, ranging from The Bad and the Beautiful (1952) and Imitation of Life (1959) to Bullets Over Broadway (1994) and Almodóvar’s All About My Mother (1999).
The most textbookish technical device in Eve is the freeze-frame that Mankiewicz uses to stop the action when Eve Harrington reaches for her Sarah Siddons Award. This device goes all the way back to 1895, when Thomas A. Edison’s The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots used a freeze-frame to mark the decapitation. D. W. Griffith elaborated the freeze-frame in 1909 in A Corner in Wheat. To contrast the quick- moving rich with the slower-moving poor, Griffith formulated a tableau vivant where the movement of the poor becomes so slow that it stops altogether. It was Joseph L. Mankiewicz, however, who popularized the freeze-frame. It’s used in Fury (1936), directed by Fritz Lang and produced by Mankiewicz. It’s used again in The Philadelphia Story (1940), directed by George Cukor and produced by Mankiewicz, who claimed that the final freeze-frame of Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn in a startled embrace was his inspiration and not Cukor’s.
So the freeze-frame in All About Eve was not a Mankiewicz first, although he lived to see it become a cliché. Truffaut appropriated it for The 400 Blows (1959), then the Czechs took it up, among them Milos Forman in Black Peter (1964) and Ivan Passer in Intimate Lighting (1965). Since the late sixties, when George Roy Hill froze the final frame of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Hollywood has done it to death.
Though Mankiewicz didn’t invent the freeze-frame, he used it better than any director since. That’s because he had a precise reason to stop the action as Eve Harrington reaches to accept her award. Having hooked the audience by presenting this young actress at her moment of triumph, and having shown a Greek chorus of sorts—Eve’s sour-faced former friends at the Sarah Siddons banquet—Mankiewicz knows it’s time to start over, this time at the beginning.
A more literal-minded director would have launched the film—where else?—at the start of the story. But an artist has other options. Mankiewicz began at the end, with Eve and her ill-gotten award, then doubled back to reveal the story from three different perspectives. Later directors often used the freeze-frame as nothing more than a chic, lazy conclusion to their films. Few of them had the imagination to vary the freeze-frame as Mankiewicz did, for rather than leaving the image frozen he injected visual rhythm by cutting to a close-up of George Sanders, then back to the static frame of Eve with outstretched arm.
Apart from this one innovative device, however, All About Eve is technically conservative. Bernard Dick, in his book on Mankiewicz, observed succinctly that “the camera moves when it should, and Mankiewicz cuts when he must.” This observation is in line with Mankiewicz’s own credo: “The best direction is where the viewer detects no camera movement and no effect of cinematic technique.” And yet when Mankiewicz structured his film in flashbacks, narrating the story from three points of view—Addison’s, Karen’s, and Margo’s—he used a tricky technique that requires a bravura command of film. Shifting point of view to come at a story from all angles via flashback is the grand method of Orson Welles in Citizen Kane, of Kurosawa in Rashomon. Billy Wilder adapted this structure for Sunset Boulevard (one long flashback from one point of view) and Preston Sturges used a variation of it in Unfaithfully Yours, where a wild series of fantasies running through Rex Harrison’s mind functions both as imaginary flashbacks and “unreliable” flash-forwards.
In the wrong hands, however, multiple-narrator flashbacks are merely depressing. Two examples: Vincente Minnelli’s The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), and Mankiewicz’s own The Barefoot Contessa. In the Minnelli film, three drab narrators—Barry Sullivan, Lana Turner, and Dick Powell—unfold a moist melodrama about Hollywood sins: sex and drinking, divorce and treachery. Although it’s more flashily “cinematic” than Eve, The Bad and the Beautiful proves you can’t start a fire with damp matches. The dampest one of all is Kirk Douglas, abetted by a soggy script. The result is a shell of a movie, revealed from three vacuous viewpoints.
By 1954, and The Barefoot Contessa, Mankiewicz was mired in a smirking smugness that he apparently mistook for Shavian wit. Bogart, Edmond O’Brien, and Rossano Brazzi are the three narrators here. Their characters are not believable; they serve only as mouthpieces for Mankiewicz’s gripes about Hollywood and the ravages of star-making. To his credit, the director soon realized his mistake. In 1960 Mankiewicz said, “I was angry at too many things; I tilted at too many windmills.”
In structure, Eve is the offspring of Citizen Kane. Its comic style, however, derives from the decade that ended in 1939. In fact, if you wanted to study comedies of the 1930s and couldn’t find any, you could extrapolate a
lot just from watching All About Eve. Pauline Kael, discussing Herman Mankiewicz vis-à-vis thirties comedies in The Citizen Kane Book, characterizes the films of that decade: “They entertained you without trying to change your life. Many weren’t even ‘artistic’ or ‘visual’ movies, which is why they look so good on television now. The writers [with their] toughness and cynicism and verbal skills had an almost aristocratic disdain for putting beliefs into words.”
She might almost have been writing an abstract of All About Eve. Except that by 1950 Hollywood comedy had been tempered by the earnestness of war films, shaded by film noir, and chilled by the icy fingers of McCarthyism. And so Eve ends on a cautionary note: Look in those mirrors and see a bad girl’s fate. Its “toughness and cynicism” are garnished with Freud, and there’s a wee post-war sermon when Addison lectures Eve: “There was no Eddie—no pilot. You’ve never been married. That was not only a lie, it was an insult to dead heroes and the women who loved them.”
Eve most resembles thirties movies in its fast-paced talkiness (think of The Women), its wisecracks and put-downs (Stage Door), even its whiff of the Marx Brothers’ non sequitur (“Remind me to tell you about the time I looked into the heart of an artichoke”). The plot recalls 42nd Street (1933): broken ankle throws star out of show, understudy goes on, next day understudy is new star.
In a few particulars All About Eve contains the seeds of a screwball comedy—one like The Awful Truth (1937), starring Cary Grant, Irene Dunne, and Ralph Bellamy. Both films are sex comedies played out in sophisticated milieux. Both have scenes in nightclubs, champagne toasts, and suggestive double entendres. There’s a triangle in The Awful Truth, two in Eve (viz., Margo, Bill, Eve; and Karen, Lloyd, Eve). In both movies a couple breaks up and gets together again. The plot of The Awful Truth is set in motion when a car breaks down. This is echoed in Eve when Karen drains the gas tank to make Margo miss her performance so that Eve can go on, events that lead eventually to the film’s resolution.
You could almost argue that John Barrymore, as the hammy, egomaniac producer Oscar Jaffee in Twentieth Century (1934), served as a distant prototype for Margo Channing. And what other ideas did Mankiewicz get from this Howard Hawks farce, where Carole Lombard plays a bitchy actress whom Barrymore discovers and casts in a terrible southern play? (Movie historian David Shipman has pointed out that “all dreadful plays in movies are set in the South.”)
Certainly Mankiewicz drew on a comic tradition that depended on deft handling of actors, on the wit and timing of dialogue, and which used a minimum of cinematic trickiness. He learned his lessons well. So well, in fact, that All About Eve remains the definitive movie about backstage life, “backstage” being defined as everything in show business that the audience isn’t supposed to see. But those who studied Eve as their primer were less adept. Most Mankiewicz followers were copycats.
Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that most Mankiewicz copycats were camp followers. That’s true of imitative directors like Minnelli, and it’s also true of a large segment of the audience. All About Eve flourished at the outset because it seemed obvious. It was backstage drama crossed with rollicking comedy, well played by a top-notch cast. And in 1950, all that seemed blatantly heterosexual.
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Eve has endured precisely because of what wasn’t obvious at first. The subtext has beguiled several generations of devotees, largely gay men, who have “read” the film as though it beamed a limelight into the closet of their hearts.
It’s easy to reel off the reasons why All About Eve recruited such gay devotion. (I hope that readers will embrace these suggestions with an ironic skepticism, for all such explanations are open to loud debate.) First of all, the icon Bette Davis clones another icon right on-screen: Margo Channing. With her flamboyant body language, jaded sense of humor, and relentless irony, Margo caricatures every female impersonator—or is Margo a drag queen’s impersonation of Bette Davis? Either way, she instantly found her target audience.
Mankiewicz never said it, but many a gay man might: “Margo Channing, c’est moi.” Margo lives the life a whole generation of gay men wanted to lead, at least in their dreams: a big-city life of money, prestige, and devotion, punctuated with wisecracks, bitch fights, late nights and breakfast in bed, and always getting in the last bon mot. In other words, gays like glamour. And wit. All About Eve is full of quotable lines with plenty of snap.
But more than anything, it’s about women in conflict, and gays cheer for this theme (cf. Scarlett versus Melanie, Baby Jane versus Blanche, Veda and Mildred Pierce, Mommie Dearest and Christina). And Eve loads the dice. Here the battle is about age, for Eve Harrington’s youth is her only real advantage. Gays identify with Margo’s dread of aging. It’s a fear that grips gay hearts, though it’s less a defining trait now than it used to be.
Margo is also under siege. A younger woman, perceived as prettier, sexier, more feminine and more talented, tries to usurp her life. How many middle-aged gay men feel that young studs in the bars are grabbing what they themselves used to get? Paul Roen, in High Camp: A Gay Guide to Camp and Cult Films, puts it this way: “We are transfixed by Margo’s beautiful face, which seems to be decaying right before our eyes. In its own way, All About Eve is as much a horror film as What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? Here we have a middle-aged woman who, upon perceiving that her world is crumbling, expresses alarm and is promptly told that she’s merely being paranoid.”
Because she’s getting older and because she’s in jeopardy, Margo is the archetype of the Long-suffering Woman. Many gay men, like her, are in a sense terribly battered. They’ve been mistreated and rejected since childhood, by the world and often by their families. But Margo fits another archetype as well. Even before pop psych, she was rightly labeled a survivor. Who wouldn’t admire her perseverence? In less reverent terms, she’s a bitch with a heart of gold—gays have known many such. And Margo is an actress; that says it all. (What is it about a movie star on a staircase that makes gay men swoon?)
Gay men respond to other women in the cast: to Thelma Ritter’s Birdie, a leather-lunged den mother who’s the earthy voice of common sense; to Celeste Holm as the true friend who nevertheless commits a terribly disloyal act; to the daffy knowing innocence of Marilyn’s Twinkie, Miss Caswell; and to Eve Harrington, played as a stalking predator who’s closer to Lillith than to the original Eve. (The heterosexual Mankiewicz responded much the same to these females. “Male behavior is so elementary,” he said, “that All About Adam could be done as a short.”)
Savvy gays of course react to the camp aspect of George Sanders as Addison DeWitt, who seems so queeny yet is portrayed as lusting for females when the opposite must surely be the case. Mankiewicz confessed that Addison was “based essentially on me and what I think a theatre critic should be like—and on George Jean Nathan.” With pronouncements like this, Mankiewicz comes across as a heterosexual trapped in a gay sensibility.
And so does All About Eve. When did so many Hollywood straights ever create such a gay entertainment? It is perfectly ripe. To misquote Shakespeare, ripeness is all (about Eve). Certainly Eve holds no monopoly here; most movies about show business are overblown, but not many have such a patina of real sophistication. That’s because Mankiewicz was the Oscar Wilde of 20th Century-Fox.
Put another way, Eve transcends the usual vulgarity of Hollywood movies about actresses. Just contrast Eve’s chic milieu with the queasy goings-on at Norma Desmond’s. The audience laughs with the characters in Eve, but it often laughs at those sad creatures in Sunset Boulevard. This observation is not a complaint; the unyielding bad taste of “actress movies” is exhilarating. Think of Joan Crawford in Torch Song (1953), Bette herself in The Star (1953), Judy Garland in A Star Is Born (1954), Lana Turner in Imitation of Life (1959), Geraldine Page in Sweet Bird of Youth (1962), Carroll Baker in Harlow (1965), Jean Hale in The Oscar (1966), Kim Novak in The Legend of Lylah Clare (1968), and many more.
Mankiewicz at his best wrote and directed wi
th an operatic touch, and nowhere more than in All About Eve. Did some gays, even early on, perhaps view the movie in terms of opera, with the characters relating to one another as quartets, trios, duets? (The flashbacks evoke Tales of Hoffman, an older woman vying with a younger one recalls Norma, and Addison and Eve play their scene in the hotel room with the sexual frenzy of Scarpia and Tosca.)
Mankiewicz cleverly paced the speeches so that they come off musically. For example Eve, in Margo’s dressing room, delivers a long recitative that starts out, “I guess it started back home. Wisconsin, that is…” Bill’s lecture to Eve about the theatre—“Listen, Junior, and learn”—is a cavatina that’s not sung but declaimed, though Bill flings out his arms as though he’s about to sing it. Karen and Margo have a lovely duet in the stalled car, and the off-screen arrival and departure of movie stars at Margo’s party recall the gypsies who show up in Act III of La Traviata. There’s no Mad Scene, of course, but this is comic opera. Besides, how could Mankiewicz top Gloria Swanson’s insane aria at the end of Sunset Boulevard?
It’s instructive to speculate on the gay infatuation with All About Eve. But if you watch the movie with die-hard fans you’ll find their admiration less schematic. More than politics, psychology, or camp, it’s the vitality of the movie that keeps them hooked. After a showing of All About Eve, there’s always something new to talk about. Here, for instance, is a typical audience gathered around a video monitor where the end credits have just scrolled by …
Glenn: “I don’t have anything to say about the significance of All About Eve, but when Margo is seeing Bill off at the airport and they walk past that sign, No Smoking Beyond This Point, I thought, This has to be the only time in the movie when she’s not allowed to light up.”
Sam: “Does she smoke as much in this one as in her other movies?”
Brian: “Cigarette consumption probably rose dramatically with each one of her films. No one smokes quite like Bette Davis.”
