All About Eve (1950)

My dad tells me that my grandmother really liked Bette Davis. But despite being able to sing along with parts of "Bette Davis Eyes," I realized I had never seen one of her movies. It was time to fix that!

Bette Davis plays Margo Channing, a well-known and respected actress who is starting to wonder if she still feels comfortable playing twenty-somethings as a forty year old.  When her friend Karen (Celeste Holm) brings Eve (Anne Baxter), a young fan with an amazingly sad story,  into her dressing room to meet her after a performance, Margo decides to take Eve on as a new friend.  (Margo, Karen, Karen's playwright husband, and Margo's director boyfriend apparently did not find it creepy that Eve had followed them across the country and had seen every single performance of the play, standing in an alley between performances.)  As Eve inserts herself into more and more of Margo's life, meddling with her relationships and using her theater connections, Margo begins to be suspicious of her motives.  Margo's friends, however, continue to adore Eve, and Margo becomes more and more isolated from everyone she trusts, as Eve becomes more and more creepy.



(If you look closely, there's a very young and very minor character Marilyn Monroe in the background of this photo.)

I guess I'm giving this movie four stars.  Bette Davis is amazing.  Many good lines, and a lot of drama.  I worried about her character a lot during the movie, because I kept waiting for disturbing and upsetting things to happen to her... I loved how Margo ended up back with and finally engaged to her director boyfriend after all the craziness she put him through. She finally let him love her, and I'm so glad he was still there. I don't think I could have taken the movie if it had been all downhill! Good things for Eve as well...

                                                             Bette Davis and my lovely grandmother

The song:

Gentleman's Agreement (1947)

Confession: I rented the movie for this:

It turns out, though, that this is a really interesting movie, highly deserving of four stars.

Gregory Peck plays a newspaper reporter named Philip Green who moves to New York with his mother and his son in order to take a new job. When his new boss asks him to take on a series of articles about anti-semitism, Green spends days debating whether or not he should take the assignment and wondering how on earth he can approach the subject in a new way that will have an impact on people. He is inspired to keep trying to find an angle by Kathy Lacy (niece of the editor of the paper with whom he is instantly smitten) and by his mom. Ultimately, Green decides to take advantage of his newness to the city and his Jewish-sounding last name and to start telling everyone that he is Jewish so that he can write about anti-semitism first-hand.

Green's first taste of anti-semitism comes very quickly after he adopts his new identity. When he tells Kathy that he is going to tell everyone he's Jewish, her face sinks, and she says something along the lines of, "But you're not really, are you?" She spends a lot of the movie wanting to tell people that Green is just pretending, so that no one really gets the wrong idea.

Green encounters everything from discrimination at work to being denied a hotel room. The movie really targeted the more subtle forms of bigotry as well, though. There was a lot about the role of the bystander in helping anti-semitism along. Green wants Kathy to help a Jewish friend of his (played by John Garfield) get a home in Darien, CT, where Kathy's sister lives, but Kathy refuses, not wanting to upset the community. It's just the way things are, she keeps telling Green. We know there's nothing wrong with being Jewish, but your friend would not be treated well there. At one point, Green's son gets called names for being Jewish. When Kathy tries to comfort him by telling him, "But it isn't true, you're no more Jewish than I am," Green becomes furious with her. He tries to explain to her that the name calling is what is wrong and what she should be fighting against. He tells her that by comforting his son in the way that she did, she confirms that there is something bad about being Jewish.

My friend Yvonne and I, while happy with Kathy's eventual realization that she needed to take an active role against bigotry, wished that Green would end up with the smart and passionate fashion editor at the paper, played by Celeste Holm. Celeste Holm, by the way, won an oscar for her role in this movie:


A sad note is that in later years, many of the people involved with this film were eventually called before the House Un-American Activities Committee.

A more frivolous note is that I accidentally ended up with this movie on Purim. I found watching a movie about anti-semitism to be the most fitting way I've found so far to celebrate Purim (in addition to eating hamantashen). My opinions on the book of Esther belong in a different blog.