Hall of mirrors: the ending of All About Eve

The first ten or 12 times you watch Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s dirty martini of a showbiz satire All About Eve, the final coda lands like a cocktail stick skewering a Gibson’s pickled onion. A young female fan calling herself Phoebe has infiltrated the hotel room of Gertrude Slescynski, aka Eve Harrington (Anne Baxter), on the night of Eve’s presumptive triumph, when she has just received the theatre world’s highest acting honour. First alarmed, then mollified, Eve doesn’t seem to notice that the girl looks a lot like she did only a few months earlier when she herself was an eager ingénue looking for a way to break into the glamorous world of the theatre. Nor does she notice that the young woman’s sob story, about the humble background she’s longing to transcend, is similar in tone, if not in exact particulars, to the whopper Eve herself spun at the start of the film to ingratiate herself with veteran star Margo Channing (Bette Davis) – the woman she would then undermine, blackmail and manipulate to achieve her own dream of stardom.

Phoebe makes herself useful around the suite while Eve bathes, and just as Eve did with Margo’s stage costume, she slips on Eve’s sparkly cloak – literally assuming her mantle – and, clutching the award, turns this way and that in the angled mirror, which suddenly, impossibly, reflects her back at herself infinitely. So the cycle resets: for every Margo, an Eve; for every Eve, a Phoebe. Listen carefully, and under the swelling strings of Alfred Newman’s sarcastically romantic score, you can practically hear karma’s throaty cackle.

But as your repeat viewings of this infinitely rewatchable movie climb into the teens, a funny thing may happen to your relationship to this ending. Paradoxically, as the march of time shunts us inevitably out of Eve’s age bracket and into Margo’s, it’s possible to feel the stirrings of a strange sort of pity for the conniving little sociopath. Is All About Eve, in the end, too hard on Eve? Mankiewicz shows no mercy in the fate to which his screenplay consigns her. However grievous and unrepented her transgressions, her sentence is even crueller: to “belong” to Addison DeWitt (George Sanders), the only character more deviant and malevolent than she – and a critic. It’s an agonisingly specific penalty, but with that troublesome hall-of-mirrors coup de grâce, Mankiewicz does her even dirtier. “There never was – there never will be – another like you,” says Addison, but the final shot takes even that away from Eve. There are hundreds, thousands, like her, waiting in the wings with sharpened elbows and sharpened teeth, and like she did for Margo, they will come for her.

So, is Eve uniquely wicked, or common as muck? Is she a supremely talented actress with a well-founded, if psychotically unscrupulous, drive to be celebrated for her thespian “fire and music”? Or is she a grubby little opportunist who only settled on a theatrical career after being driven out of town by the wife of the brewery manager with whom she was having an affair? Mankiewicz’s screenplay is so dextrous, so full of barbed quips and arsenic-laced zingers, that it’s possible not to notice its darkly sexist manipulation of Eve’s reputation to be whatever he needs it to be in the moment to make her maximally indecent, maximally ‘unwomanly’ and therefore maximally deserving of punishment without end – one that can only be dispensed by men. That final shot tips the director’s hand. With it, All About Eve stops being about these two anomalous, extraordinary, ambitious females, and starts being about female ambition more generally, as a trait, as a phenomenon, as a scourge.

All About Eve is a glorious, masterful movie full of superlative performers delivering crackling dialogue so brilliantly that even lines that make no ostensible sense leave acid burns on the upholstery (why is the inexplicable “Remind me to tell you about the time I looked into the heart of an artichoke” so scabrously funny in this context? No good reason except for the way Davis hocks out its vowels like a particularly imperious llama). But part of the film’s mastery is in how it conceals its agenda as deviously as Eve’s “feverish little brain” conceals her true intentions. What All About Eve, with insolent, insinuating silkiness, forces us to celebrate is not the essentially decent Margo Channing’s hard-fought triumph, nor even the essentially sinful Eve Harrington’s much deserved comeuppance. Instead, it’s a kind of tragedy for both women, and for women in general, that the terms of both Margo’s happiness and Eve’s misery, are defined not by these two superb, towering female antagonists, but by the men around them – Margo’s partner Bill, Addison, Mankiewicz himself.

The biggest winner in this women’s picture is not a woman at all. It’s the world of men who have never known what to do with ambitious, talented females, and who now have two fewer of them to worry about. Eve is trapped forever under Addison’s manicured thumb, and Margo – voluntarily, happily but no less completely – has been domesticated into her last role as (all due respect to Bill) Some Guy’s wife. So next time you watch All About Eve – and there must always be a next time – spare a thought for the eponymous antiheroine. Vicious and amoral and as deserving of treatment in kind as she is, don’t forget that her actual downfall comes not from the women whose lives she’d happily have ruined, but from Addison; she can slither away from all consequences, except when she dares to dent the ego of a spiteful man. To pity her a little, therefore, is also to pity Margo Channing, and Phoebe Whatshername and ourselves and those young reflected women, whose crime was to dream of self-determination, to deliver shampoo-bottle acceptance speeches to their bathroom mirrors, to wrench open the door to independence and success only for it to be casually shut again, by some man, sneering, “You’re too short for that gesture.”