Country: USA
Year: 1950
Duration: 138'
Broadway star Margo Channing hires Eve Harrington, an aspiring actress and devoted admirer, as her secretary. Gradually, Eve insinuates herself into Margo’s professional and personal life, arousing her jealousy and increasingly exasperating her through her deferential and accommodating manner. After securing the role of Margo’s understudy, Eve’s ambitious nature is finally revealed, as she embarks on a meteoric career that will lead her to follow the very path once taken by her idol. Mankiewicz’s masterpiece transforms Mary Orr’s short story The Wisdom of Eve into a sophisticated, multi-perspective narrative and one of Hollywood cinema’s most incisive explorations of theatrical ambition, professional rivalry, and the pursuit of success. The film won six Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Supporting Actor for George Sanders, and Best Screenplay, and features an extraordinary ensemble cast dominated by the confrontation between Bette Davis and Anne Baxter. Marilyn Monroe appears in a small but memorable role as a young aspiring actress.
Biography
film director
Joseph Leo Mankiewicz
(Wilkes-Barre, USA, 1909-New York, USA 1993) was an American director, screenwriter, and movie producer of Polish origin. He won Oscars for best director and best screenplay two consecutive times, with A Letter to Three Wives (1949) and All About Eve (1950), which also won best film. He began working in Hollywood as a screenwriter (like his brother Hermann, who won an Oscar with Orson Welles for the script of Citizen Kane) and debuted as a director in 1946, proving to be an eclectic filmmaker (Gothic tales, Westerns, melodramas, blockbusters) who, with seamless directing and a highly sophisticated writing style, was able to capture the conflicts between the sexes and the complex dynamics of interpersonal relationships.
FILMOGRAFIA
Dragonwyck (Il castello di Dragonwyck, 1946), Somewhere in the Night (Il bandito senza nome, 1946), The Late George Apley (Schiavo del passato, 1947), The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (Il fantasma e la signora Muir, 1947), Escape (Il fuggitivo, 1948), A Letter to Three Wives (Lettera a tre mogli, 1949), House of Strangers (Amaro destino, 1949), No Way Out (Uomo bianco, tu vivrai!, 1950), All About Eve (Eva contro Eva, 1950), People Will Talk (La gente mormora , 1951), 5 Fingers (Operazione Cicero, 1952), Julius Caesar (Giulio Cesare, 1953), The Barefoot Contessa (La contessa scalza, 1954), Guys and Dolls (Bulli e pupe, 1955), The Quiet American (Un americano tranquillo, 1958), Suddenly, Last Summer (Improvvisamente l'estate scorsa, 1959), Cleopatra (id., 1963), Carol for Another Christmas (Canto per un altro Natale, tv, 1964), The Honey Pot (Masquerade, 1967), King: A Filmed Record... Montgomery to Memphis (King: una testimonianza filmata... da Montgomery a Memphis, coregia, Sidney Lumet, doc, 1970), There Was a Crooked Man... (Uomini e cobra, 1970), Sleuth (Gli insospettabili, 1972).
Cast
& Credits
DIRECTOR: Joseph L. Mankiewicz. STORY: from the short story The Wisdom of Eve by Mary Orr. SCREENPLAY: Joseph L. Mankiewicz. CINEMATOGRAPHY: Milton Krasner. EDITING: Barbara McLean. PRODUCTION DESIGN: Lyle Wheeler, George W. Davis, Thomas Little, Walter M. Scott. COSTUME DESIGN: Edith Head, Charles LeMaire. MAKE-UP: Ben Nye. MUSIC: Alfred Newman. CAST: Bette Davis, Anne Baxter, George Sanders, Celeste Holm, Gary Merrill, Hugh Marlowe, Gregory Ratoff, Thelma Ritter, Marilyn Monroe, Barbara Bates, Walter Hampden. PRODUCER: Darryl F. Zanuck for 20th Century Fox. CONTACT:
