#41 All About Eve

All About Eve (1950)

directed & written by Joseph L. Mankiewicz

"Fasten your seat belt. It's going to be a bumpy night"

So says All About Eve is a tour de force about an aging stage actress, Margo Channing (Bette Davis), and a fan, Eve Harrington (Anne Baxter), who insinuates herself into Channing's life. On the surface, it's a backstage tale of actresses, playwrights, and critics. It's also about how we sabotage ourselves - Margo is a talented actress, but she's convinced she's aging out of the great roles and it helps make her susceptible to the blandishments of Eve. It's also one of the bitchiest movies ever, filled with sharp-tongued retorts, witticisms, and sarcastic quips.

Bette Davis is someone who could be great and could be terrible. She turned into a pitiful caricature eventually, reduced to starring in campy trash (and I say this as someone who loves Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? and Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte). In this she's great, balancing between a self-assured star and an insecure mess.

Anne Baxter is good, too. I'm really only aware of her from The Ten Commandments and her spot on Columbo. Her deft turn from sycophant to master manipulator is excellent.

At the pinnacle of his most suavely evil, George Sanders (one of my favorite actors) as the critic Addison DeWitt is perfection. His interaction with Marilyn Monroe (in one of her earlier performances) as a ditzy actress is hilarious. His demolition of Exe is practically Satanic.

Among the rest of the cast standouts are Thelma Ritter, who's always good, and Celeste Holm.

I'm not the biggest Bette Davis fan, but she's so good here and gets to deliver some plummy lines. The script and dialogue in this movie are so good they really make me despair at the crappiness of so much of what Hollywood spews out these days.

verdict: a keeper

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#25 Foreign Correspondent

Foreign Correspondent (1940)

directed by 

Alfred Hitchcock

Written by

James Hilton (dialogue)

Robert Benchley (dialogue)

Screenplay by

Charles Bennett and Joan Harrison

  

If I have a favorite director, it's Hitchcock. His movies, across the decades, are original, brilliantly put together, smart & clever, filled with amazing performances, and all, even the least ones, worth watching. I remember hearing two store clerks rave about Kubrick but dismiss Hitchcock as a mere master of gimmickry. I had to get out of that store fast. There's simply no comparison. Too many of Kubrick's movies are cold, soulless That's why I own thirteen Hitchcock (actually, more. I have a boxed set somewhere of all his early films) movies and only two Kubrick.

Foreign Correspondent, I think, often gets overlooked, coming as it does right after his first American movie, Rebecca, and that's a shame. Mechanically, it's a smashing thriller, replete with memorable set pieces, most notably the umbrella scene and the windmill. The plane crash over the ocean is pretty harrowing, too (It was designed by the brilliant William Cameron Menzies).

Joel McCrea is great fun as the American crime reporter dispatched to Europe in August 1939 to cover the looming war. He becomes entangled in a plot involving a Dutch diplomat (Albert Basserman), Nazi spies (Herbert Marshall, Eduardo Cianelli, and Edmund Gwenn), a beautiful girl (Laraine Day), and a charming (and scene-stealing) British reporter (George Sanders). Marshall and Sanders are just damn cool, uttering every one of their lines with a dryness and wryness that is just perfection.

I can't remember when I first saw this. It might have been as long ago as elementary school. Whatever, it's a movie I've always loved, for the action, for the laughs (of which there are plenty), and for it's potent recreation of a feeling of impending catastrophe as Germany edges the world toward chaos.

The movie, written by Charles Bennett and Joan Harrison, with dialogue by James Hilton and Robert Benchley (who makes a fun appearance as a bored US reporter in London). Hitchcock went to London after the movie was completed just as the Battle of Britain was about to begin and quickly had a scene written and filmed reflecting the imminent bombing of London. Release a year and half before Pearl Harbor, the movie is a magnificent call to arms for America, practically demanding we come to grips with the Nazis.

verdict: a keeper of the first rank

George Sanders, Laraine Day, and Joel McCrea