On Friday night, I finished reading the best book I’ve read in a while (although, lately, I haven’t been doing much reading), Ben Elton’s Blast from the Past. It was alternately funny and sweet and terrifying, as it dealt with the ways people get intertwined with each other, often despite their intentions or even, in the case of the protagonist’s obsessed stalker, violently against their wishes. To go from that world to the one meticulously constructed in Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s All About Eve was both apt and unintentional, because, I’d done no research on the movie beforehand, but had acquired it because it had been on someone’s list (and I wish I could say whose, but I caught it on CNN and wasn’t paying the most attention at the time) as one of the best film scripts ever; Casablanca, much to no one’s surprise, was first.

The movie opens on an award ceremony, being narrated by the misanthropic theater critic, Addison DeWitt, played with cold charm by George Sanders, where the highest honor of the night is being presented to Eve. Then the narration shifts to the wife of the playwright, who discovered the girl outside the theater one night, and from there, the narration shifts between this woman, the theater critic, and Bette Davis’s character, a diva actress by the name of Margo Channing, as it goes through the invasion of Eve on her way to conquer Broadway.

Initially Ann Baxter, as Eve, is all beauty, innocence, humility, and yet manages to be disquietingly so. When brought into the presence of a group of friends, the playwright Lloyd Richards, his wife Karen, Margo, and her boyfriend and director Bill, she gives a vivid sad story about a life suddenly set adrift, and Margot takes pity on her, and hires her as a sort of assistant. There is something wrong about the girl, though, and at first it is only Margot’s dresser who picks up on it. But as Eve becomes more part of Margo’s life, Margo, too, begins to see her as a threat, because her youth is acting on one of Margot’s insecurities. As a lead actress, she makes her living portraying women the age of Eve, and she has just turned forty. Meanwhile, Eve is making almost obvious plays for Margot’s boyfriend, who is, even without Eve’s interference a source of insecurity for the great lady, because he is also appreciably younger than she. All this comes to a head at the boyfriend’s birthday party, and Channing comes close to losing her boyfriend, but more importantly to her, attempts to make another deal to get rid of Eve.

However, at the same time, Eve makes a better deal for herself, as she will continue to do, and as the film goes on, it becomes clearer that it is not entirely Margo’s paranoia and histrionics that causes her to distrust and perhaps loath the younger woman. And as her career moves on from assistant to understudy to lead actress herself, Eve lets more and more of her amoral ambition show, while at the same time trying to keep as much of her outward appearance of humble naivety.

It is a fascinating film, but an unsettling one, as it seems to go out of its way to suggest that the advent of Eve herself is not an isolated event, but part of an increasingly frequent phenomenon; self-invented people grasping at any expedient, no matter the consequences to other people, to get what they think they want, fame or fortune. And I guess, I don’t know that I can say that that’s too far out of line. But it does come across as rather pessimistic, even if it ensures Eve will get as good as she gave in the end. But actually, by that point it’s hard not to feel a little sorry for the woman; the old warning about being careful what you wish for because your wishes may be granted seems to apply here.

It is a movie about women, and the viciousness that women have in them, that men either are unaware of or turn a blind eye to (the only man who sees Eve for what she is is the cynical critic). If the clever script and the genius of Bette Davis as she runs through every emotion imaginable aren’t enough to tempt you to watch this film, there are also the ancillary charms of Thelma Ritter’s portrayal of a former vaudevillian turned dresser and a brief and endearing performance by Marilyn Monroe, playing the usual dim blonde would-be actress, who is trying to break into the business the more usual way.