Review of All About Eve (1950) by Albert D — 05 Jun 2010

All About Eve is All About Perfection, it really is a flawless, time less piece of classic cinema. I know many feel that the theater references are now dated, and maybe that's true, the theater is not what it is portrayed in the movie, however, the film's theme remains time less.

Sadly, the word classic has to be attributed, and I say sadly cause even though by regular standards calling a movie would be a grand thing, with All About Eve it is rather melancholic, cause every time that I see it, it reminds me that Hollywood does not make movies like this anymore.

All About Eve is a massive combination of production, directing, and above all, WRITING AND ACTING. No person should be allowed to do films without seeing certain movies, and All About Eve is certainly amongst them. It's almost hard to keep up with the continuous flow of writing perfection, phrase after phrase of exuberant brilliance, every single line clicks, and believe it or not, that is a hard thing to do in writing for movies or plays. The story has everything, comedy, drama, tension, surprise, you name it, watching the film for the first time is bliss, and it's a bliss that never fades out after each re watching.

The acting is perfect, absolutely perfect. It works both as an ensemble and as single performances, every single actor did a outstanding job. However it is obvious that the two main gals from Hollywood's golden age steal the show, watching Bette Davis and Anne Baxter is to see performing at it's best. Davis made many, many movies when she was young, but I think the pick of the litter of her performances is Margo Channing, same goes for Anne Baxter far as I'm concerned. George Sanders does steal the show from the 3 main male characters. And it's fun to see a young Marilyn Monroe start to glitter in an almost cameo role which was no cameo at all back then, but nowadays feels like it.

I won't get into any details of the story or characters, I think pretty much all has been said and said again, and it's also quite stupid to be arrogant and post personal interpretations of the story and the themes it deals with.

All that I what to say is that All About Eve is a perfect movie, and it's a shame we won't see any movies of it's like again. I'm not talking about remakes(which would be a tremendous sin), but films today just don't hold the brilliance that All About Eve has, it is really one of those films that sets very high standards for motion picture excellence, it ranks high up with the other films that do this such as Gone With the Wind, Citizen Kane, Casablanca, Seven Samurai, Lawrence of Arabia, The Godfather, Raging Bull and Schindler's List just to name a few.

Everyone should see this movie, and any person that dares to write and make a movie without having seen it, it's really not all together credible.