Word: mankiewicz
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Scripted and directed by Joseph L. (A Letter to Three Wives) Mankiewicz, All About Eve is probably Hollywood's closest original approach to the bite, sheen and wisdom of high comedy. It crackles with smart, smarting dialogue. Sometimes at too earnest length, but mostly with wit and always with insight, it jabs at the quirks and follies of show business and its "concentrated gatherings of neurotics, egomaniacs, emotional misfits and precocious children." It matches some penetrating characterizations with top-drawer acting. With all these merits, plus a full-blooded story, the picture is absorbing enough to ride over...
...alert the audience to distrust Eve, the early sequences make her wholly sympathetic. She seems "a lamb loose in our big stone jungle," humble, gracious, utterly devoted to the tempestuous big star (Bette Davis) who adopts her as a secretary-handmaiden. Subtly at first, then with fine crescendo effect, Mankiewicz reveals her as an ambitious fanatic who stops at nothing-deceit, betrayal, assignation, blackmail-to knife...
Racial tensions have now been pictured on the screen frequently enough to have lost some of their novelty. Writer-Director Joseph L. Mankiewicz and co-Scripter Lesser Samuels make up for that with sensational incidents (e.g., a woman spits in the Negro doctor's face) and dialogue strewn with virtually every known epithet for Negroes. They draw the line at showing much of the race riot-in which the Negroes ambush and demolish the mob that plans to attack them-but the detailed scenes leading up to it are charged with venom...
Oscars for screenplay and direction went to one man, 20th Century-Fox's Joseph L. Mankiewicz, for his A Letter to Three Wives (TIME...