Anne Baxter and Bette Davis put on quite a show in ALL ABOUT EVE (yes, that’s Marilyn Monroe in the center)
ALL ABOUT EVE (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1950)
MoMA Film
Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
January 11-13, 1:00
Tickets: $12, in person only, may be applied to museum admission within thirty days, same-day screenings free with museum admission, available at Film and Media Desk beginning at 9:30 am
212-708-9400
www.moma.org
Nominated for fourteen Academy Awards and winner of six, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Screenplay, All About Eve is one of Hollywood’s all-time greatest movies, a searing depiction of naked ambition set on the Great White Way. Based on Mary Orr’s 1946 short story “The Wisdom of Eve,” writer-director Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s flawless drama stars Anne Baxter as Eve Harrington, who is not exactly the mousey wallflower she at first appears to be. She quickly worms her way into an inner circle of Broadway vets populated by superstar Margo Channing (Bette Davis), her younger lover, Bill Sampson (Gary Merrill), playwright and director Lloyd Richards (Hugh Marlowe), and Richards’s wife, Karen (Celeste Holm), who takes Eve under her wing. Joining in on all the fun is powerful theater critic Addison DeWitt (Oscar winner George Sanders), who marvels at all the manipulation and backstage drama, much of which he wickedly orchestrates himself. “There never was, and there never will be, another like you,” DeWitt tells Eve in one of the film’s most poignant moments. All About Eve is filled with classic quotes, including the iconic “Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy night,” boldly proclaimed by Davis. In a movie about acting and the theater, Mankiewicz never shows anyone onstage; instead, he focuses on the characters and the intrigue with a sly flair that is deliciously entertaining. All About Eve is screening January 11-13 at 1:00 as part of MoMA’s ongoing “An Auteurist History of Film” series, which continues January 18-20 with “Rossellini and God,” featuring Roberto Rossellini’s Francesco, Giullare di Dio (The Little Flowers of St. Francis) and Il Miracolo (The Miracle) and January 25-27 with Luis Buñuel’s Los olvidados (The Young and the Damned).