Bette Davis and Gary Merrill in the Best Picture winner, All About Eve.
Photograph: British Film Institute
Chosen by Beeban Kidron, director of Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason and To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar.
Every single line in this scene is quotable. It’s the most beautifully written thing, from an era of cinema very closely knitted to the theatre, when the words were supposed to evoke things rather than just be things for people to say while the pictures were going on. That’s something that’s very often lost years later.
Margo, played by Bette Davis, is a great Broadway actress at the pinnacle of her power: brilliant, sophisticated, bitchy. Her assistant Eve, played by Anne Baxter, is simpering, beautiful and very, very ambitious. Eve is trying to replace Margo, trying to get her next part on Broadway and take her lover, Bill. This is the scene where Margo finally loses her rag, having waited upstairs for Bill to throw him a party before discovering that he’s been downstairs with Eve for 20 minutes.
The scene sums up the central themes of the film, to do with Margo’s insecurity about age and about the way that Eve is eating into her life. This is referred to in the dialogue all the time: Margo finds Eve and Bill talking and immediately asks if she can join in – “Or isn’t it a story for grown-ups?” Bette Davis, despite being so powerful, gives a phenomenal performance of insecurity. That is very, very rarely drawn in the cinema.
The question of ageing and of being replaced by the younger, more beautiful woman is something we can still understand today.
