There’s No Better Place to Be a Sociopath

All About Eve, 1950. Photo: mptvimages.com

The invitation may be 71 years old, but it’s still irresistible. Come here, it says. Come here, to the city where everyone is making art and laughing uproariously and suffering melodramatically. Come here, where the parties last all night and there’s still somewhere great to go afterward. Come here, where people speak entirely in impeccably constructed aphorisms and comebacks fly through the air like poison darts. Don’t worry if you don’t quite have what it takes to join our club. Just fake it till you make it. How do you think most of us got here?

That last part is the message of Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s brilliant, caustic, and enduringly seductive All About Eve: While talent helps, the sociopaths get ahead faster. This isn’t a movie that valorizes authenticity but rather the ability to simulate authenticity, which makes it one of the truest New York movies ever made. And true to its message, it’s a great movie about theater made by movie people, a great New York movie shot almost entirely in California, and a great gay cult movie that is at least nominally about straight people — though a much-analyzed final scene implies that for Eve, heterosexuality may be just another calculated guise or useful tool.

It’s the story of Eve Harrington (Anne Baxter), who shows up at a Broadway stage door with little more than a pathetic rain hat and a sob story and proceeds to upend the lives of stage diva Margo Channing (Bette Davis, titrating savagery, vulnerability, kindness, and insecurity) and everyone close to her: the playwright she elevates; the director she loves; and even the film’s embodiment of icy self-possession, the powerful, loathsome critic and columnist Addison DeWitt (George Sanders). How does “Little Miss Evil,� as Margo refers to Eve, do it? With every trick available — and, the movie seems to ask, Why not? The New York of All About Eve is a vision of the grit and splendor of mid-century Manhattan served very dry, on the rocks, with a twist. It gets all of the aspirational stuff right. Margo has what appears to be a four-or-five-level townhouse with a different staircase railing for every pronouncement she makes. But it gets the ordinary stuff even righter: the vast, expectant emptiness of a Broadway house during tech rehearsals; the slightly too-small restaurant where theater awards are given elbow to elbow; the dressing room whose cramped drabness is a proud announcement that even leading ladies are working people. It is an entire alluring world that lies right on the other side of a door. You just need to find a way to ease it open or to kick it down.

There are any number of great movies set in the city that proffer an invitation that has been dipped in acid: Come here if you think you can hack it. But for generations of people who felt like misfits elsewhere only to come to New York expecting something to make up for all that not fitting in, well, as DeWitt puts it to Eve, “You’re an improbable person, Eve, and so am I. We have that in common. Also a contempt for humanity, an inability to love and be loved, insatiable ambition — and talent. We deserve each other.�

Few movies have packaged the message as well as All About Eve does with a wink and a challenge. Think you’re fast and smart and daring enough to be one of us? Just try it. We dare you.