ALL ABOUT EVE

 

My official DVD of All About Eve (© Joseph L. Mankiewicz/20^th Century Fox – reproduced here on a strictly non-commercial Fair Use basis for educational/review purposes only)

My movie watch on 7 November 2022 was very different from my more typical sci fi/fantasy-themed choices) but is a film that I'd wanted to see for a long while). Namely, the theatre & treachery cinematic classic, All About Eve.

Directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, based upon a 1946 short story by Mary Orr entitled 'The Wisdom of Eve', and released in 1950 by 20^th Century Fox, All About Eve stars Bette Davis as Margo Channing, an ageing but still-lauded Broadway theatre actress who befriends a besotted young fan, Eve Harrington (Anne Baxter). However, saccharine-sweet, Uriah Heepishly humble Eve swiftly insinuates herself into Margo's life in what is eventually revealed to be a determined, cold-blooded attempt to supplant her as a major Broadway – and Hollywood – star.

Eve even attempts to steal first Margo's director fiancé Bill (Gary Merrill), and then, when that fails, playwright husband Lloyd (Hugh Marlowe) of Margo's best friend Karen (Celeste Holm in excellent form), not because Eve loves either of them but because she coldly views them as stepping stones in her indefatigable bid for stardom.

Only two people see through evil Eve's charade – Margo's hard-bitten maid Birdie (Thelma Ritter) and the sardonic but highly intelligent theatre critic Addison DeWitt (played with sinister suavity by George Sanders), and only in his case because he is just as amoral as Eve is! In other words, it takes one to know one!

Marilyn Monroe also appears in a small early role for her, playing a bubbly but hilariously talentless wannabe actress named Claudia Caswell. Her character's sole purpose in this movie is simply to provide some comic relief as a contrast to Eve's shadowy shenanigans, but Marilyn still succeeds effortlessly in commanding the entire screen whenever she appears, even eclipsing her eminent company of long-established stars – no mean feat! Marilyn is every inch a superstar in waiting, and, as we all know, she did not have to wait very long before she did indeed became one.

All About Eve is a fascinating film, its more than 2 hours of running time flitting by in no time at all, as the devious depths of Eve's machinations and subterfuges gradually reveal themselves, but happily DeWitt has no small degree of  experience himself in that deceiving department…

Best of all, and well worth the wait, is a truly wonderful twist right at the end of the movie, which Eve is not even aware of – but the movie's audience is, and no doubt takes great joy (schadenfreude, even) from it, as I did! Indeed, it provides the perfect, entirely apt future comeuppance for Eve – yielding a fitting finale to an absolutely awesome movie.

No wonder All About Eve was nominated for a record-breaking 14 Academy Awards, winning 6 of them, including Best Motion Picture, Best Director (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, who also won Best Screenplay for it), and Best Supporting Actor (a greatly-deserving Sanders). Fantastic!!

Incidentally, although Margo Channing will always be one of Bette Davis's most famous roles, she was far from being first choice for the part. Others who were considered but subsequently dismissed or dismissed it themselves included the likes of Susan Hayward, Marlene Dietrich, Ingrid Bergman, Joan Fontaine, Katharine Hepburn, Gertrude Lawrence, Vivien Leigh, Tallulah Bankhead, Ginger Rogers, Hedy Lamarr, Gloria Swanson, Joan Bennett, Greer Garson, Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford, Paulette Goddard, Loretta Young, Rosalind Russell, and Barbara Stanwyck. Claudette Colbert finally won the part, but when she had to pull out shortly afterwards due to an injury, Davis was drafted in and the character was duly transformed into a more hard-bitten version.

Similarly, Anne Bancroft was ultimately drafted in as Eve after original choice Jeanne Crain became pregnant and withdrew. Others who had been considered for this role included Ann Blyth, Elizabeth Taylor, Olivia de Havilland, June Allyson, and Donna Reed. As for the role of Addison DeWitt, won by George Sanders, other thespian luminaries who had been considered included Vincent Price, José Ferrer, Claude Rains, Adolphe Menjou, Charles Laughton, and Basil Rathbone. And ZsaZsa Gabor, married to Sanders at that time, was considered for the role ultimately given to Marilyn, and was so jealous that Sanders and Marilyn were working closely together on-screen that she kept turning up to the studo to ensure that everything remained completely above board!

Remarkably, all four lead actresses (Davis, Baxter, Holm, and Ritter) were nominated for an Academy Award for their respective roles, but none won one, whereas Sanders did for his role, but it was his only Oscar win. Also of note: Davis and Gary Merrill, who played her on-screen fiancé Bill, married in real life, shortly after the movie was completed, and adopted a baby girl, whom they christened Margot!

In 1970, a stage musical version of All About Eve appeared on Broadway, entitled Applause. A Tony Award-winning production, it originally starred Lauren Bacall as Margo Channing, but when she later left the show, she was replaced in this role by none other than – Anne Bancroft!

If you'd like to witness at first hand the rollicking rollercoaster of a classic that is All About Eve, be sure to click here to view an official trailer for it on YouTube – and also, in the immortal words of Margo: "Fasten your seatbelts, it's going to be a bumpy night!"

To view a complete chronological listing of all of my Shuker In MovieLand blog's other film reviews and articles (each one instantly accessible via a direct clickable link), please click HERE, and please click HERE to view a complete fully-clickable alphabetical listing of them.

 

FADE TO BLACK

 

Full cover for the official UK DVD of Fade To Black (© Vernon Zimmerman/Compass International/American Cinema Releasing – reproduced here on a strictly non-commercial Fair Use basis for educational/review purposes only)

Tonight's movie watch was a very unusual, highly memorable film, yet whose very existence I only learned about a few days earlier – but whose premise intrigued me so much that I duly purchased the DVD, which arrived this morning. A dark movie about movies, not to mention mayhem and madness, it is entitled Fade To Black.

Directed and also written by Vernon Zimmerman, Fade To Black was released in 1980 by Compass International and American Cinema Releasing, and focuses upon a film buff who takes films just a little too seriously…

Eric Binford (played by Dennis Christopher) is a geeky, shy, not unlikeable, but lowly, underachieving young worker at a film distributor's warehouse in Los Angeles. Workmates pick on him, his aggressive boss Marty Berger (Norman Burton) is forever berating him, so too is his wheelchair-bound Aunt Stella (Eve Brent Ashe) with whom he has lived all his life since his mother's death, and he has neither any friends nor any discernible future beyond his downbeat job.

However, all of these grievances are compensated for by Eric's passionate, life-long love of the movies, finding solace and escapism by screening and watching all of his favourite stars and characters in his movie memorabilia-packed bedroom every evening after work. Moreover, he has acquired through the years an encyclopaedic knowledge of the big screen. Conversely, Eric's aunt has neither patience nor interest in any of this, considering it to be an unhealthy obsession, and telling him irascibly that it's time he started living in the real world.

One day, Eric chances upon a young model and budding actress named Marilyn (Linda Kerridge) who bears a striking resemblance to his all-time favourite movie star, the one and only Marilyn Monroe. So eventually he plucks up enough courage to ask her out on a date to their local cinema to watch a movie together. To his astonishment, she accepts, finding him rather cute, and at the appointed time he duly arrives at the cinema and waits for her outside, slickly dressed in his smartest attire. Tragically, however, Marilyn has forgotten all about poor Eric and has gone out with someone else instead. Eventually, she does remember their planned date and, feeling guilty, hails a cab and drives to the cinema, but it is too late – dejected at being rejected, Eric has gone home. And for days afterwards, he locks himself in his bedroom watching movies and chain-smoking, feeling too abject even to eat, let alone go to work.

Finally, ill-tempered Stella has had enough, wheels herself into Eric's bedroom, and savagely smashes his film projector. It just so happens that the movie that Eric had been watching was Kiss of Death (1947), in which a wheelchair-bound harridan is pushed down the stairs to her death – and the shock of seeing Stella smash his beloved projector, added to the trauma that he had already been suffering from having been (as he wrongly thought) stood up by Marilyn, proves too much. In a fit of psychotic rage, Eric duly re-enacts in real life the movie scene that he has just watched on screen, resulting in Stella lying dead in her wheelchair at the bottom of the stairs inside their house.

However, Eric deftly passes it off as a tragic accident and duly inherits not only Stella's house but also her ashes, in whose urn he takes malign delight in discarding his cigarettes – a disturbing indication of the increasingly dark, macabre pathways along which his rapidly-unraveling, movie-addled mind will be travelling as this film progresses. And sure enough, having successfully disposed of his aunt, Eric duly does the same for his other tormentors, including a hooker who had insulted him, bullying co-worker Richie (an early role for Mickey Rourke), his boss Berger, and film producer Gary Bially (Morgan Paull) who has brazenly stolen an idea for a movie that Eric had previously proposed to him.

However, such is his movie-infused madness that instead of committing straightforward murders, Eric goes to great pains to recreate key killing scenes from his favourite films. He even faithfully dresses up as the silver screen assassins in question, which include Hopalong Cassidy, Dracula, The Mummy, and gangster Cody Jarrett (from the 1949 James Cagney movie White Heat), but this ultimately leads to Eric's undoing.

For whereas his true identity is concealed beneath his grotesque early disguises, when dressed as Jarrett while shooting Bially dead in a hail of bullets Eric is readily recognized – and the chase is now well and truly on between him and a posse of police. Even so, they are pursuing him somewhat belatedly, because criminal psychologist Dr Jerry Moriarty (Tim Thomerson) had already raised Eric as a suspect after profiling him regarding the earlier murders, but his suspicions had been brusquely dismissed by Captain M.L. Gallagher (James Luisi), the hot-headed, arrogant police officer leading the investigation into those murders.

What happens next I'll leave you to discover for yourselves if you watch this very engrossing movie. Let's just say the 1957 Laurence Olivier/Marilyn Monroe movie The Prince and the Showgirl (which just so happens to be one of my own favourite films) plays a major part, as does White Heat once again ("Made it, Ma! Top of the world!").

Dennis Christopher plays Eric with exactly the correct proportions of nerdy pathos and sinister psychosis, mixing and blending these potent portions of his splitting sanity to great effect – to the extent that even though he ultimately transforms into a veritable movie monster himself, you cannot help but root for him, especially during this movie's early sections, when he does his best to fit in and be accepted by those around him, only to be consistently mocked and misused by them instead.

Now, a trio of queries. Firstly: one of the investigating cops, Officer Ann Oshenbull (Gwynne Gilford, who was pregnant with future actor Chris Pine during this movie's production!), discovers to her surprise that Eric's late aunt Stella was not his aunt at all. In fact, she was his mother, but in order to prevent losing her career as a dancer (which she was before the accident that confined her to a wheelchair when Eric was only 4 years old), Stella had publicly claimed that he was the child of her deceased sister. Yet this shocking discovery was never revealed to Eric in the movie – so why was it included in the first place? After all, by not influencing the plot or any characters in any way, it served no useful purpose, it was wholly superfluous.

Secondly: despite Dr Moriarty appearing in the movie as a major character throughout it, his scientific expertise was never drawn upon. On the contrary, it was repeatedly ridiculed and dismissed by Captain Gallagher. So, once again, why was Moriarty included at all?

Thirdly: bearing in mind that Eric was far from generously paid at his job, where on earth did he get all the money from to pay for the immense collection of highly impressive movie memorabilia that filled his bedroom and beyond at home? Even when acting out his favourite movie murders in reality, he took pains to duplicate with precision the attire worn by the actors playing those roles on screen, and the extravagant costumes and props that he used when recreating The Prince and the Showgirl would have cost a fortune! Clearly, therefore, in order to take this movie even remotely seriously (which of course we shouldn't ever try to), we need to indulge in some serious suspending of disbelief!

Such contentions aside, however, I personally found Fade To Black to be very compelling viewing, boasting a plot so unapologetically implausible that it is all the better for being so – a unique example of imaginative, surreal escapism both for its viewers and for its lead character, who inhabits his own movie within the movie that the rest of us are watching.

If you would like to visit the weird world that his all-consuming obsession with the silver screen has created inside Eric's shuttered, shattered mind, be sure to click here to view an official Fade To Black trailer on YouTube.

To view a complete chronological listing of all of my Shuker In MovieLand blog's other film reviews and articles (each one instantly accessible via a direct clickable link), please click HERE, and please click HERE to view a complete fully-clickable alphabetical listing of them.

 

Publicity poster for Fade To Black (© Vernon Zimmerman/Compass International/American Cinema Releasing – reproduced here on a strictly non-commercial Fair Use basis for educational/review purposes only)