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: CLEOPATRA (Joseph L Mankiewicz, 1963)

CLEOPATRA started life in Pinewood with director Rouben Mamoulian and co-stars Peter Finch and Stephen Boyd at a budget of £5 million; Elizabeth Taylor's pneumonia moved filming to the warmer Rome, jettisoning Mamoulian, Finch and Boyd as well.

It resumed with Taylor's choice of director Joseph L Mankiewicz both filming and rewrititng the script at the same time.  20th Century Fox kept throwing money at the production, it's budget totalled $44 million.

This budget meant that despite being the highest grossing film of the year, it only broke even through television sales.

With the publicity surrounding Taylor and Burton's off-screen love affair, oddly enough their on-screen relationship doesn't set the film on fire.

While Taylor gives a pure film-star performance, Burton is mostly pure prosciutto.

Luckily CLEOPATRA has two excellent performances balancing the story's two halves: Rex Harrison's urbane Julius Caesar and Roddy McDowall's slippery Octavian.

Shelf or charity shop?  Pure shelf, it's what Sunday afternoons were made for. Mankiewicz's script strains itself leaning as far away from Camp as it's can so at times it is deliberately verbose, which is fine when you have Rex Harrison's Caesar saying the lines but the Antony and Cleopatra section is a glum affair with Burton declaiming his lines like he is playing to the Old Vic balcony.  But you should just stand back - or better lie on a couch - and just let the stunning Academy Award-winning cinematography, art direction and costumes parade in front of you, marvelling at the visual splendour with hundreds of extras as far as the eye can see, and the thrilling Alex North score. With so much source material being used, Mankiewicz really should have worked Shakespeare's "I am fire and air" speech into the scene of Cleopatra's impending death; it needs to be elevated to greatness but sadly no such luck.  For all it's failings, it is still one of my favourites.

Dvd/150: SUDDENLY, LAST SUMMER (Joseph L Mankiewicz, 1959)

Tennessee Williams' one-act play is expanded by screenwriter Gore Vidal into a fevered Southern Gothic horror classic (Williams recieved a co-writing credit but did no work on it).

Mankiewicz's overwrought film doesn't do the play justice but it's worth it when you have Elizabeth Taylor and Katharine Hepburn going at each other, leaving Montgomery Clift's doctor a mere onlooker.

Hepburn is fantastic as the possessive Mrs Venable, offering to bankroll Clift's hospital providing he lobotomize hysterical niece Taylor, the only witness to her son's death "suddenly last summer..."

Taylor looks magnificent and gives us full 'star' acting, but it's in her quieter moments that she really delivers; her manic scenes show off her vocal limitations too much.

Taylor demanded Clift play the doctor but only three years after his near-fatal car crash, he is a hesitant, stumbling shadow of his former self.

For all it's flaws, unmissable!

Shelf or charity shop?  Katharine Hepburn was so disgusted with Mankiewicz's on-set bullying of shaky Montgomery Clift that when he yelled 'cut' on her very last scene, she asked him if that was definitely her last moment on the film, when Mankiewicz said it was she spat in his face.  One to keep but living in the limbo of my plastic DVD box.  It's worth keeping for the crazed cameo of comedy harridan Rita Webb as a knitting asylum inmate!