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:

Every Girl Should Be Married (1948)

Four plus stars...will definitely watch again



If I were Anabel (Betsy Drake) and ran into Madison Brown (Cary Grant) at the lunch counter and then in the department store where I worked buying baby booties and being charmingly nice to young children, I'm sure that I, too, would see no other course than to stalk him until we were married. The movie was wonderfully hilarious.

One of the most wonderful things about the movie is that Dr. Brown knows what Anabel is up to the entire time. When she stalks him for two weeks to learn all of his habits, interests, and favorite foods, he lets her know he was aware the whole time. During Anabel's first attempt to get Dr. Brown, which goes a little wrong because she does not know yet that he is a "baby doctor," she makes an appointment with him and tells him all about her "insomnia...it might be emotional." Dr. Brown tells her "I’d recommend a little less romantic imagination and more sleep." Annabel has her work cut out for her. She has to find craftier and craftier ways to get Dr. Brown's attention. "I know it’s dreadful," she tells her friend "but it’s the kind of thing men force us to do."