DVD/150: ALL ABOUT EVE (Joseph L Mankiewicz, 1950)

Hollywood likes to show how the theatre is full of treachery - unlike the innocent film world - the Queen of these remains Joseph L Mankiewicz' magnificent ALL ABOUT EVE.

Nominated for fourteen Academy Awards, it won six but overlooked Bette Davis' magnificent ageing star Margo Channing.

At the Sarah Siddons Theatre Awards, the Best Actress is won by Eve Harrington for her debut.  In the audience, she is watched disdainfully by five people who know all about Eve: actress Margo Channing, her director lover Bill Sampson, playwright Lloyd Richards and wife Karen, and waspish critic Addison DeWitt.

They each remember how they met Eve... Karen found her waiting outside the stage door of Margo's latest hit and brings her backstage.  Eve tells them she is a war widow who has seen every performance.

Margo offers Eve a PA job but slowly realizes that she has her own agenda... becoming a star.

Shelf or charity shop?  Taking a bow on the shelf... I can watch ALL ABOUT EVE over and over.  It's a film where every componant fits together seamlessly with career-best performances from all concerned.  Mankiewicz' direction and screenplay provides the frame and the motor which drives the excellent performances.  It's interesting to reflect that Davis and Gloria Swanson in SUNSET BOULEVARD were both up for the Best Actress Academy Award for playing actresses who were ageing - their characters were 40 and 50 respectively.  My favourite performances come from Thelma Ritter's Birdie, Margo's spikey dresser - viewing the mink-strewn bed at a party, she says "It looks like a dead animal act", notably Birdie is the only one not taken in by Eve.  Marilyn Monroe is delicious as Miss Casswell, Addison DeWitt's 'protege'  from the 'Copacabana School of Dramatic Art' in a performance that hinted at performances to come.  Anne Baxter is marvellous as the duplicitous Eve, her hushed voice and demure appearance slipping occasionally to reveal the conniving wannabe star.  George Sanders deservedly won the Best Supporting Actor Academy Award as the silky Addison DeWitt who eventually pulls the rug under Eve's machinations while Bette Davis simply IS Margo: proud, bitchy, unsure, drunk, realistic, and above all else, a star.  So fasten your seat belts... it's gonna be a bumpy night.

Dvd/150: THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY (Arthur Lewin, 1945)

The most famous of the eighteen films based on Oscar Wilde's 1890 supernatural novel made a big impression on me when I first saw it years ago.

However  although the film has some great components, ultimately it is smothered by MGM's 'taste'.

The film also suffers from Hurd Hatfield as Dorian; he certainly looks the part but his glacial, uninvolving performance never suggests anything underneath, good or bad.

The film however looks wonderful with marvellous art direction, atmospheric lighting and Academy Award-winning cinematography by Harry Stradling.

It also gained 20 year-old Angela Lansbury an Academy Award nomination and a Golden Globe Award, in only her third screen role.  She is luminous as tragic Sybil Vane, loved and discarded by Dorian.

George Sanders' silky Sir Henry excels while Lowell Gilmore as Basil, Richard Fraser as James Vane and Morton Lowry as a dissolute artist make up for Hatfield's anonymity.

Shelf or charity shop?  I can see myself watching this again but it lives in the limbo of my plastic DVD box...

DVD/150: REBECCA (Alfred Hitchcock, 1940)

Hitchcock ended his British career with the misjudged JAMAICA INN based on a novel by Daphne du Maurier and his Hollywood career began with another, REBECCA, and it remains one of his greatest - his only film to win the Best Picture Oscar.

Despite producer David O. Selznick's interference, Hitchcock's film is a triumph of sustained mystery.

A timid orphan, a paid companion to an overbearing American, is befriended in Monte Carlo by the suave widower Maxim de Winter who proposes to her; although he is occasionally remote, she accepts.

At his mansion Manderley, she finds everywhere the oppressive presence of Maxim's first wife Rebecca who drowned a year before.  Her nemesis is the disdainful, obsessed housekeeper Mrs Danvers who keeps Rebecca's bedroom as a shrine to her beloved mistress.

Vivien Leigh lobbied for the lead role but was considered too forceful a presence, leaving Joan Fontaine to triumph in it.

Shelf or charity shop?  An absolute keeper, for Hitchcock's masterly storytelling as well as Franz Waxman's swooning score, and the performances of Fontaine, Laurence Olivier, the wonderful Judith Anderson as Mrs Danvers, sexy George Sanders as Rebecca's cousin and lover, and delightful support from Gladys Cooper, Nigel Bruce and Florence Bates.