Genre: Dramas
Starring: Bette Davis, Anne Baxter, George Sanders, Celeste Holm, Gary Merrill
Joseph L Mankiewicz's wonderfully literate 1950 classic drama of the theatrical life, All About Eve, is back in the cinema, to be savoured for its language, performances, psychological insights and proof that all the world's a stage.
The peerless tale of two rival drama queens, playing as the central attraction in the BFI Southbank's Joseph L Mankiewicz season, and rightly so.
Top Critic Here is a real Christmas treat: a restored version of Joseph L Mankiewicz's jet-black 1950 comedy about Margo Channing, elegant leading lady of the theatre, superbly played by Bette Davis.
Top Critic Top Critic One of Hollywood's finest backstage dramas. If nothing else Davis should have been rewarded for services to the tobacco industry.
Top Critic Apart from the monochrome photography, all that dates the film is the chain-smoking and the fact that these are theatre folk rather than movie stars (frequent in-jokes about the low art of Hollywood pepper the script).
For old-school Hollywood movie-making at its most polished, literate and sophisticated there is really nothing to match it.
Top Critic Top Critic [Features] more quotable dialogue in one movie than most screenwriters manage in a lifetime.
Top Critic Forget Foreman vs. Ali, this is Baxter vs. Davis in one of Hollywood's greatest showdowns.
Top Critic The Zanuck production investiture is plush in every department.
Top Critic There is so much to admire in All About Eve, even for those too young to be drenched in nostalgia for the spectacle of Bette Davis unleashing her sharp tongue.
Still retains its stagy power to provoke theater lovers by its elaborate wit and campy bad taste.
The hoped-for tone of Restoration comedy never quite materializes, perhaps because Mankiewicz's cynicism is only skin-deep, but the film's tinny brilliance still pleases.
Amazing performances top the list of positive qualities in Joseph L Mankiewicz' All About Eve.
Her display as Margo Channing shows Davis at the top of her game, not only for the acid-tongued egotism and bristling paranoia about the effects of the passing years, but for the moving realisation of the emotional toll exacted by her glittering career.
Top Critic In one of the wittiest films to be made by Hollywood about the Broadway theater, Bette Davis shines as declining diva Margo Channing, but, alas, she was deprived from getting an Oscar by various political factors.
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