A truly masterpiece, perfect acting and breathtaking plot.

All About Eve is a great classic drama movie that I would recommend to anyone. The movie focuses on theatre and the problems that occur. One of the main themes is age and how it is seen in the theatre and how it is dealt with. Everybody ages and everybody feels the effects of how society treats them differently. In the theatre, the pressure is even greater. This movie does a great job at covering this topic in a way that will pull at the heartstrings of everyone who watches.

Friedan spoke of the "problem that has no name" — the demand of society that women give up the agency they had been demanded to accumulate to lubricate the wheels of the war machine with their factory work. No longer required as servants of warfare, they were supposed to be content with reclassification as unpaid and dependent family worker, because enough of "their men" had returned from abroad. As Smedley Butler so cuttingly detailed, war is a racket. When a racket moves an entire society then the sexes are going to get caught up. Hollywood, the propaganda vehicle in those days, needed to dress up the shabby role of "happy little housewife". And so, one sees slickly corrupted presentations of Friedan's problem. You see, feminists like Friedan also were part of the trap. Instead of being able to fully comprehend that egalitarian gay relationships are not a threat to the foundation of society (e.g. its war profiteering and other machinations), even those who recognized the problems inherent in withdrawing the newly-found agency of women had to decry them in order to put a nice sheen on the "institution" of heterosexual marriage. Why? Because they didn't understand that only a small percentage of people are gay enough to want serious gay relationships in the first place. Think I'm joking? The former PM of Australia stated with a straight face that same-sex marriages, if legal, threatened the extinction of humanity! The "logic" was that same-sex relationships, presumably because they're more egalitarian, were so attractive to most people that they would abandon heterosexual relationships that are about reproduction (for taxes and other resources). There are several failures of logic and examples of ignorance in the Howard claim but the bottom line is that All About Eve uses that very viewpoint as its foundation for dramatic conflict.The fight against the dreaded gayness causes all things to take place in this film. Eve's relentless hollow pursuance of stardom is due to her vapid lesbianism. She has no heart and seeks to put an award there. She and the gay man (critic) who she conspires with are "killers". In fact, she's not even fully human. She has a "feverish little brain" like a rat. She studies people, mechanically, like a serial killer — rather than a natural and warm woman who is interested in true love, what Margot transforms into. Lesbianism is just trickery, as when she and her lover conspired.Margot, the quintessential harpy of Greek myth, is tamed by a younger man. This flip in the gender roles is part of the cleverness of the trickery happening. The common assumption, that younger women belong with older men, is reversed, a seeming improvement for female agency that comes at greater cost — her career. That loss of career, not accidentally, comes with her affirming that older women should leave the business because they're not beautiful enough anymore. Gone is the Margot who doesn't care how young the woman in the part is because of her talent and ferocity. Replacing her is Grandma Channing, who will somehow remain enchanting to the younger man once she has given up all the feminine wiles that made her enchanting – like her fantastic acting and her grande dame exaggeration. Bill sees into her true heart, though — the soft warm fuzzy one that stays in the kitchen to bake muffins.Heterosexism has the word sexism in it for a reason. Almost no one uses the word for reasons, too. In this film, it is the tool for the promotion of sexism. The film's poster said it is about "women and their men". It's about the role of women now that their men are back from the abroad. That role is definitely not to be "strong women" who will be corrupted by lesbianism and the resulting feminist demands. It won't be to leave men floundering, bereft of female companionship, forced into the arms of other men — seeking art rather than child rearing. Make no mistake. The gay male character is purposefully put right next to Marilyn Monroe to make a point. His sophistication is shallow and self-defeating. Leads to a blind alley. By contrast, a virile red-blooded heterosexual man knows just how to treat a lady. The film is so slick that even Ebert was oblivious vis-à-vis that entire narrative is based on repudiating homosexuality (female agency being one of its symptoms) in favor of patriarchal heterosexual marriage. He gabbed about Channing as being a "universal type" and merely focused on mechanical aspects of filmmaking. People have been conditioned in the modes of seeing the world according to heterosexual patriarchal imperative. Also willful blindness? How any thinking viewer can miss obvious bits like Eve and another woman conspiring together and holding each other's bodies while doing it... Of course she was a lesbian! And, of course it's amusing to her for a gay man to claim that she's his property. It's amusing for a gay man to try to possess a woman in a patriarchal way. The perversion of the scene is obvious and intentional. Film cleverly lays out the Friedan problem in pretending that it's only a problem if one is gay. Reaffirms inferiority of feminine brain, when it comes to the Machivellian requirements of running the world; also shows gay man trying, and failing, to live up to duty as a man (woman under his control).Davis is wonderful, despite these themes. She was in love with "Bill" then. The writing is cute with cutting sophistication. I can't escape from all the clichés, stereotyping, and backward beliefs it promotes. Example: Plain folks have common sense to see through nonsense artsy types are tricked by. Although he wrote that Hollywood "needed to drop its vendetta against them", the best Mankiewicz manages to do in this film is not have gays kill themselves (i.e. the Children's Hour). It just shows that all that their "hearts"' desire is folly.

Bette Davis is so effortless and breathes fire in her performance as Margot, an aging actress who finds herself slowly and insidiously being usurped by a young fan, Eve, played by Anne Baxter. I don't think it's in a 'best ever' type of discussion, or worthy of its 14 Academy Award nominations, but its sharp dialog, predatory manipulation, and overall bitchiness make it entertaining, even if it's hard to like the characters. There are some great lines here; in addition to the famous "Fasten your seatbelts, it's going to be a bumpy night", I loved it when Davis exclaimed "I'm not twenty-ish, I'm not thirty-ish. Three months ago I was forty years old. Forty. 4-0. That slipped out. I hadn't quite made up my mind to admit it. Now I suddenly feel as if I've taken all my clothes off." Davis herself was 42, and this line and others ring true. George Sanders (as Addison DeWitt) is also fantastic, at one point saying "You're an improbable person, Eve, and so am I. We have that in common. Also, a contempt for humanity, an inability to love and be loved, insatiable ambition, and talent. We deserve each other."These quotes capture the spirit of the movie, which to me is simply about the difficulties that aging women face, and the cold and calculating world of the theater. There is supposedly a homosexual element, a theory put forth and apparently confirmed by writer and director Joseph L. Mankiewicz, but it's so subtle, perhaps because of the Hays Code, that it didn't even register with me, and I think it's irrelevant. These characters are in the best cases rough around the edges, and in the worse, simply awful people. We see Margot being slowly replaced and want to feel sympathy for her, but it's tough because she's so abrasive. We see the evil side of Eve slowly unveil itself as it becomes apparent she's far from being a starstruck fan or even who she says she is. And at the end we see that she, too, will be replaced. It's all a bit grim: time, a machine that grinds them down, and competition for glory that leads to Machiavellian backstabbing. It's ironic that Davis was such a diva that there was discord amongst the actors, and Baxter pushing her way into a 'Best Actress' nomination instead of 'Best Supporting Actress' would lead to a division of the vote and neither of them winning. I was happy to see Marilyn Monroe in a small part at age 24 and before she was big, just to bring some lightness into the film. This is certainly a good movie, don't get me wrong, but it's not one I'd watch again and again as I would my favorites.