I admit to holding the unpopular opinion that All About Eve is an overpraised movie. I find the famously bitchy dialogue to be entertaining, but far too unrealistic to have any true resonance for me. I much prefer Sunset Boulevard from the same year, for the theme of “actress who’s feeling her age.”
But really, about Addison DeWitt. He’s tagged as a villian, which is how most critics and columnists were portrayed in movies of that type back then. He’s described as being feared for his viciousness, but when Margo reads his “piece of filth” as Bill calls it, the column sounds, if anything, restrained. All the column says is that young Eve turned in a brilliant performance in Margo’s part, and maybe forty year old women shouldn’t play ingénues. That’s vicious? Birdie, Thelma Ritter’s character, says meaner things than that.
Later, Addison stops Eve from poaching Lloyd, Karen’s husband for no insidious motive that I can see. It doesn’t look like Addison is in love with Eve other than saying they are alike.
So why would Addison care if Eve runs off with Lloyd or not?
He has invested his time and effort in furthering her career*, and so he feels a proprietary interest, he feels he “owns” her to some degree, and he prevents her liaison with Lloyd as an exercise of pure power.
As to whether he is evil or not, it’s true that newspaper columnists were often shown in a bad light (as distinct from reporters or journalists or editors, who might be good or bad depending on the story), but I think he is more complex than that. My sense is that he truly loves the theater and wants what is best for it. So he may also feel that Eve monopolizing Lloyd’s talent might constrain him from writing his very best stuff.
*Which leads me to wonder why he is allowing her to gallivant off to Hollywood, quite possibly never to return.
As a complete aside, especially in the title role, I think Anne Baxter turned in the worst performance of the entire cast. Hammy and ineffective. Just my opinion, of course.
I believe we’re meant to infer that Addison sees Eve as being his creation and his property, and that’s why he stops the Eve/Lloyd connection.
He’s a not-particularly-nice person who acts as an enabler and accomplice to the unscrupulous Eve. “Bad guy”?..well, the entire story is more nuanced than that; they’re all flawed, though some are more sympathetic and some are less sympathetic.
I’d say the way he manhandles her in the motel room indicates he is *not *a nice guy but as **Sherrerd **mentioned, there is much nuance and not so much black and white.
And I agree with Roderick Femmregarding Anne Baxter’s performance. I adore this film but when it comes to her, I find myself hate watching it.
Also also, there’s another thread going about our older celebrity crushes and George Sanders was at the top of my list since I was a little girl.
I’ve always particularly loved the coincidental(?) 80s callback to this movie, the fact that Anne Baxter took over Bette Davis’s role as the owner/manager in the series “Hotel”. Baxter was supposed to be a temporary replacement while Davis was ill, but they kept her on and relegated Davis’s character (Baxter’s character’s sister-in-law) to a mentioned but unseen status.
I think he’s truly infatuated with Eve, but he’s so practiced that he keeps it under control except for that one telltale moment when she laughs at him and he loses it. He really wants her, probably because her pure evilness is a turn-on for him.
That hotel room scene between Addison and Eve is right up there in the top ten movie scenes of all time.
My wife and I just watched this a couple of days ago!
When Bill calls Addison’s column “filth,” he doesn’t mean it’s smutty, he means it’s a personal betrayal of Margot, who, with the other three, considered him a friend at some level.
Furthermore, I don’t think Addison stops Eve from running off with Lloyd, because I don’t think Lloyd was ever going to leave Karen. I think Eve’s claim that Lloyd is going to marry her is a fantasy. If anything, she may have been saying this to make Addison jealous.
Yes, Lloyd ran to Eve after her roommate made that phony phone call, but I think that turned out the same way as her attempt to throw herself at Bill. There’s no sense before or after this scene that there was any serious rift between Lloyd and Karen. So Addison doesn’t get any good-guy points for preventing Eve from breaking up their marriage. It wasn’t going to happen.
As others have said, Addison has a feeling of ownership because of all that he believes he has done for Eve, and because he is a would-be Svengali who thinks that by forcefully insisting that she “belongs” to him, she’ll surrender. And essentially, she does. Which is the main reason I think she was making up the story about running off with Lloyd. I mean, if you could choose between Lloyd and Addison, would you take Addison?
I bolded your final question because apparently WOOKINPANUB would take Addison. See post # 4.
In most of his pictures, George Sanders played villains with a deep sexy voice. I first encountered it when he voiced Shere Khan in Disney’s Jungle Book.
I find it a little strange that DeWitt would consider Eve his creation merely because he wrote a glowing review of her performance. He has had little interaction with her before that scene with all the exposition. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have had to do all that exposition in the first place. Eve just assumes he bought her story along with all the others, so it’s not like they were in together on this all along. It would’ve made more sense for Addison to feel possessive about the character that Marilyn Monroe played, but she disappears after the party scene.
I know Bill didn’t mean Addison’s “piece of filth” column was smutty. All Addison did was suggest that Margo was too old to play the part she was playing. Not nice, but really, Margo had to know that already. She was bemoaning it all the way through the film. I guess it just irritates me the way everybody was coddling Margo when she’s such a bitch to everyone.
That’s why I like Sunset Boulevard better. Norma Desmond is a homicidal loon for the same reason that Margo is a bitch. Both women are bitter that they have gotten too old for their profession. I guess homicidal loons don’t irritate me as much as bitches do.
Ha! Two Many Cats beat me to it; I would take Addison over Lloyd ;). Lloyd is a putz.
Actually, I find all of the main cast pretty unappealing, both physically and personality wise. Hell, Margo would be utterly unbearable IRL but watching Bette Davis is such a treat that it makes Celeste Holm with her dopey hairdo manageable.
When I first watched All About Eve many years ago, I wondered if the waspish Addison with his evil, soignee voice was supposed to be an evil homosexual type. (maybe I was thinking of The Picture of Dorian Gray). Later, I wondered if he was just plain evil. Now I’m seeing him as an evil perv type, I can see him and the awful Eve in a sado-masochistic relationship.
Different sorts of columnists completely, with different sorts of goals. Hunsecker wants power over people, especially famous people, so he can make them do what he wants. DeWitt only wants to rule Broadway as a sort of Petronius/Svengali type, the one whose artistic judgment holds general sway over the most important theatrical enterprises.
At one point in the hotel scene with Eve, he says something about her “killer instinct,” and implies that he has it too. He doesn’t, really, but since he doesn’t respect himself he tries to substitute the respect of other, more important people.