ALL ABOUT EVE (1950) improves every time I see it, and seeing it on the big screen last month for a date night with TYG made it even better (I spot lots of details in the set design and decoration, for instance).
Bette Davis plays Margo Channing, stage superstar who takes in Eve (Anne Baxter), a worshipful fan who wants nothing more than to be in her entourage, even if Margo’s buddy (Thelma Ritter) does think Eve is laying it on a little thick (“All that story needs is the bloodhounds snapping at her heels.”). But Eve is indeed more than she seems, a schemer who plans to model herself on Margo, steal a role or two and seduce a talented playwright into creating some new shows for her (though by today’s standards she’s as much a psycho stalker as a careerist). Will tart-tongued critic Addison DeWitt (George Sanders) prove her undoing?
On my first viewing I was strongly influenced by a critique that the movie is sexist: Margo decides she has to be a woman rather than an actress and steps down from the stage to concentrate on her mind. But as the book All About All About Eve says, she’s not quitting, simply letting go of her youth and playing roles her own age, which is a different kettle of fish It’s also a delightful film with great performances (including an early Marilyn Monroe role) and snarky dialog. “What happens in the next reel? Do I get dragged off screaming to the snake pits?”
The opening of THE BAXTER (2005) defines the title as a term for guys like Patrick Dempsey in Sweet Home Alabama or Ralph Bellamy in His Girl Friday, the nice guy who doesn’t get the girl. In this case, Michael Showalter starts out dumped at the altar by shallow Elizabeth Banks before realizing temp worker Michelle Williams has been The One All Along despite having her own romance going with Paul Rudd. Banks and Showalter never feel plausible even as a doomed couple and Showalter feels off, more a wacky sidekick than a lead. I’m not surprised the term hasn’t caught on. “I’m too sensitive — like I was missing a layer of skin.”
Acromegalic Rondo Hatton’s last film cast him as THE BRUTE MAN (1946), taking revenge on the world and the former friends he blames for his Cinema of Isolation disfigurement but also trying to help a blind woman even if it means she’ll see the real him. I don’t remember if Cinema of Isolation included Blind Girl Falls For Deformed Freak as a disability stereotype but I can think of several examples — though the young woman’s insistence Hatton’s heart is good undercuts the cliche. In any case, this is a mediocre movie; Universal made it but showed good judgment in letting the bottom-of-the-barrel PRC release it. “You aren’t scared of me?”
THE HARBINGER (2022) asks What If Nightmare on Elm Street Happened During Covid: a woman leaves her “pod” to help out a friend terrified by increasingly monstrous nightmares but discovers upon arrival that the nightmares are sucking her in too. Can the two women even find the boundary between reality and dream any more?
Most of the twist, including the climax, won’t surprise anyone who’s familiar with Freddy Krueger. Even so, the movie works, and it’s a fascinating look at a period that now seems as strange as the age of AIDS, like wiping down everything with disinfectant before making skin contact. “The initial responses to our post were — well, the internet.”
Despite some rave reviews, ENYS MEN (2022) bored me to tears. A wildlife researcher spends her time on an isolated British island; after about half the movie she starts having strange visions she’s not alone there, but even after that not much happens. Nor is it clear whether we’re dealing with flashbacks, hallucinations, spirits or some mix of them all. Michael Redgrave’s Thunder Rock (another movie about someone on an isolated island, talking to people who aren’t there) would make a good double bill. “I told you not to go up there.”
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