All About Eve at 75

Few 75-year-olds have aged as gracefully as All About Eve. With biting wit undiminished by time and a performance for the ages by Bette Davis, I could watch this classic on repeat for all eternity.

So how does a film made in 1950 deliver more snap, crackle and pop than most of today’s flicks?

It starts with a killer script. Joseph L. Mankiewicz had just won two Oscars for writing and directing A Letter to Three Wives when he began shooting Eve, which scored a record-setting 14 Oscar nominations, and won six, including Best Picture, Screenplay and Director. (By the way, that 14-nod pileup that would not recur until Titanic in 1997 and La La Land in 2016.)

After Claudette Colbert – the studio’s pick to play Margo Channing – broke her back at the last minute, Joe scrambled to find a replacement. Enter Miss Davis, who seemed born to play the role. In fact, the day her mother gave birth, Bette wrote, “A clap of thunder and a streak of lightning almost hit the house and it destroyed a tree. As a child, I fancied that the Finger of God was directing the attention of the world at me.”

Years later, a critic would joke, “Bette Davis would probably be burned as a witch if she had lived two or three hundred years ago.” Let’s just say her reputation around Hollywood was formidable. But by 1950, Bette had skid from huge hits like Now, Voyager to cheesy flops like Beyond the Forest. Her third marriage was toast. Worst of all, she was 42, the usual expiration date for leading ladies.

Incredibly, it was at that low point that the hottest filmmaker in Hollywood sent Bette the finest script she’d ever read. With that lucky break, Bette claimed, Joe Mankiewicz “resurrected me from the dead.” Bette’s co-star Gary Merrill agreed, saying, “Never in the history of motion pictures has an actress been so perfectly cast.”

Yet Merrill did more than admire Bette’s talent. They tied the knot just three months after meeting on the set of All About Eve. The couple moved to Maine, where they adopted two children, Michael and Margot (named after Bette’s character in All About Eve) and raised them with Bette’s three-year-old daughter B.D. Sadly, the couple split in 1960 after 10 years together.

Joe Mankiewicz packed Eve with great actors (including Marilyn Monroe in an early role), and five of them (including Bette) earned Oscar nominations:

* Anne Baxter co-stars as conniving fan Eve Harrington. Bette and Anne may have played rivals, but in real life they were friends.

* Thelma Ritter crushes it as Margo’s maid Birdie, a part written for her by Joe Mankiewicz. Ritter sums up Birdie’s superpower: “She always says the thing people never can think of saying until it’s too late.”

* Celeste Holm portrays Margo’s best friend Karen – but off-screen? She and Bette couldn’t stand each other. (Oil, have you met my pal, Water?)

* George Sanders won the movie’s only acting Oscar as acid-tongued theater critic Addison DeWitt, who has some of the bitchiest lines in the production.

Of course, Bette delivers the most memorable line of them all (say it with me, now): “Fasten your seat belts. It’s going to be a bumpy night.”

Fortunately, Eve gave Bette’s sputtering career the “bump” she needed for a legendary comeback. Despite losing her Oscar bid to Judy Holliday (Born Yesterday), Bette continued working for three decades. And when she died in 1989, the man behind Bette’s resurrection wrote the epitaph on her family tomb: “She did it the hard way.”