Between Anora, Everything Everywhere All At Once, CODA, and Nomadland, the 2020s have so far been dominated by female-led Best Picture Oscar wins. Only Oppenheimer stands out as a prototypical prestige film filled with men, and even that was balanced out by a release indelibly linked to the Barbie movie. Looking at that record, it’s easy to assume that progress has been a straight line and that as our society has gotten more broadly feminist, our films have evolved in that direction too. But history isn’t so neat. In fact, the first and so far only film to earn four female acting nominations at the Oscars came out 75 years ago—1950’s All About Eve.
To be fair, that’s partially because studios got savvier about not splitting their own votes with too many nominations in the same category. But it still puts All About Eve in rarified air. The only films in Oscar history to score a quartet of acting nominations for its men are On The Waterfront, The Godfather, and The Godfather Part II. And while, at first glance, writer-director Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s biting satire of the glamorous theater world seems a million miles from the macho iconography of Marlon Brando’s two defining roles, the comparison between them all is actually pretty apt.
Like those Brando classics, All About Eve is filled with morally gray characters who defy the easy labels of heroes and villains—ones whose actions are colored by the cutthroat environments in which they exist. But where The Godfather and On The Waterfront take place in the hypermasculine worlds of mob bosses and dock workers, All About Eve takes place in the hyperfeminine realm of theatrical leading ladies.
The trick of All About Eve is that it realizes that even though its stakes aren’t literally life-or-death, they feel that way for the players involved. Margo Channing (Bette Davis) is a beloved Broadway diva who’s worried that her days of playing leading ladies may soon be behind her now that she’s turned 40. Birdie Coonan (Thelma Ritter) is the sassy assistant who keeps her grounded. Karen Richards (Celeste Holm) is the wry playwright’s wife who thinks she’s the only normal person in this realm of big theatrical personalities. And the titular Eve Harrington (Anne Baxter) is an unassuming young fan who worms her way into their world.
The film opens with Eve becoming the youngest person to win a prestigious acting award, then jumps back in time to explore how she got there. Eve evolves from a shy devotee with a standing room ticket to every performance of Margo’s new show to an acclaimed actress in her own right; a saga with as many twists and turns as that of any mob boss’ ascent.
While All About Eve‘s female-centric world might feel like a novelty from a modern perspective, it didn’t at the time. It was part of the broader trend of “women’s pictures” that were fashionable from the silent era through the late 1950s. In 1939, The Women became the first film with an entirely female cast—including over 130 speaking roles for women and the gimmick that no men ever appear onscreen. Elsewhere, melodramas, romances, and film noirs like Gone With The Wind, It Happened One Night, and Rebecca counterbalanced male-centric Westerns and gangster flicks. The main difference is that they received more critical acclaim than the “chick flicks” of today.
There are a few different reasons women’s pictures flourished when they did. There was an economic pull to make films that appealed to female audiences—particularly during World War II, when women were the ones seeing movies on the homefront. There’s also the fact that the restrictive Hays Code forced filmmakers to get more creative about how they depicted strong, sparky female characters at a time when they couldn’t outright sexualize them. And, somewhat ironically, the reality that women had less power in real life made it “okay” to see them empowered onscreen. It was fun to watch Katharine Hepburn overpower Cary Grant in Bringing Up Baby, so long as everyone understood that it was just a Hollywood fantasy.
Even by those standards, however, All About Eve is still a particularly female-centric women’s picture. There are men in its story, including Karen’s playwright husband Lloyd (Hugh Marlowe), Margo’s lover/director Bill (Gary Merrill), and the catty theater critic Addison DeWitt (George Sanders, the film’s record-matching fifth acting nomination). But there’s barely a scene where they talk to each other about anything other than the women in their lives. (If there’s some sort of Reverse Bechdel Test, this film flunks it.)
In All About Eve, women are the center of the universe and men merely circle their orbit, tossing out savvy observations, like that Margo “compensates for underplaying on the stage by overplaying reality.” Even better, the film doesn’t demand that its female leads remain likable or sympathetic. They’re prickly, proud, ambitious, and ruthless—savvier than the men in their lives yet just as capable of making mistakes. (That’s not even getting into the coded queerness in the mix too.)
While much of the film’s wit comes from Mankiewicz’s pitch-perfect screenplay, the original story stemmed from a woman who knew the world of showbiz first-hand. The script is based on a 1946 short story by stage actress Mary Orr, who was inspired by an anecdote from colleague Elisabeth Bergner with a bit of Tallulah Bankhead thrown in—all women who understood the fear of being “replaced” by a younger, hotter model. All About Eve premiered a few months after Sunset Boulevard, another dark fable about what happens when a star ages out of ingénue roles. And though All About Eve suggests the theatrical world is slightly kinder to its leading ladies than Hollywood (“Week after week, to thousands of people, you’re as young as you want,” a playwright tells Margo), there’s still a limit for aging women.
That’s something Davis also personally understood. While all of the film’s lead performers are great (like Marilyn Monroe in a small but memorable early role), it’s Davis who burns brightest. After her heyday in the 1930s and early ’40s, her career was in decline as she aged towards 40 in real life. In fact, she wasn’t even cast in All About Eve until a few days before filming began, when original star Claudette Colbert injured her back and had to step away from the project. At a time when Davis’ stardom could have faded away, All About Eve gave her perhaps her signature role—a bullish actress happy to make it everyone else’s problem when she doesn’t get her way. “Fasten your seatbelts,” she warns her friends before a party. “It’s going to be a bumpy night.”
What’s compelling about the first half of All About Eve is that it’s hard to tell whether Margo is destroying her own life and career in a fit of insecure paranoia or whether she’s actually the only one sharp enough to spot the inevitable. Is Margo gaslighting everyone around her or is she the one being gaslit? Like so many of classic Hollywood’s iconic female stars, Davis excels at projecting a steely, sardonic exterior that hides a soft, vulnerable emotional core. “Funny business, a woman’s career,” Margo admits in a rare moment of self-reflection. “The things you drop on your way up the ladder, so you can move faster. You forget you’ll need them again when you go back to being a woman.”
For her part, Baxter projects a luminous elegance, even as Eve’s love of the theater is so painfully earnest it’s almost embarrassing. She’s like a stray puppy people can’t help but take home; an adorable side project they never quite take seriously, to their own detriment. If there’s one thing All About Eve warns, it’s to never underestimate the ambitions of a young theater kid. (In a bit of life imitating art, Baxter is reportedly the one who insisted she be submitted for Best Actress rather than Supporting.)
But perhaps the film’s most unique role belongs to Holm, the everywoman stuck between so many larger-than-life personalities. While cinematic diva rivalries like Black Swan, Death Becomes Her, and Single White Female use a man as the fulcrum point between their women, All About Eve simply adds even more female perspectives to the mix. Ritter’s no-nonsense Birdie is skeptical of Eve from the beginning, but Holm’s Karen is her early champion and supporter, even if she’s also deeply loyal to Margo. That adds layers of complexity to the backstage chaos that eventually unfolds. There’s warm female friendship between Margo and her bestie (“Karen, during all the years of our long friendship, I have never let you go to the ladies’ room alone,” she quips), but notes of self-interest and judgment too.
In fact, with so many great roles for its women, All About Eve‘s cast wound up vulturing votes from one another, ironically leaving Sanders as the only actor from the film who actually walked away with a statue. Still, All About Eve scored a record 14 Oscar nominations (a feat only since matched by Titanic and La La Land) and took home the prize for Director, Screenplay, and Picture among its six wins—more than securing its place in awards history.
Still, the film’s greatest legacy is as a yardstick for both how far we’ve come as a culture, and how far we haven’t. Its take on aging actresses and awards season competition still feels shockingly relevant. As so many pop divas have warned us over the years, sometimes getting everything you want is the most terrifying prison of all. And an eerie epilogue suggests that for women in particular, the fear of being replaced by a newer, younger, hungrier model never really goes away. The Oscars may currently be kinder to female-led stories than they were in the decades after women’s pictures fell out of fashion, but that fact is sadly still very much true. In a world where 29 is deemed improbably young for a Best Actor Oscar winner, while women regularly nab Best Actress statues in their early 20s; a world where 25-year-old Mikey Madison beat out 62-year-old presumed frontrunner Demi Moore and her film about aging in Hollywood; a world where every Hollywood leading lady over 40 now strives to look eternally 35, All About Eve is just as incisive as it was 75 years ago.
