Success or Snub? All About Eve (23rd Academy Awards Review Pt. 2)

 To see part 1, click here.

Samson and Delilah Suite~Victor Young - Samson and Delilah

       There is a bitter irony to the fact that All About Eve, a movie whose framing device begins with a cynical commentary about the psychopathic soulless pursuit of a glitzy little statue, ended up being one of the darlings of the Academy Awards ceremony. It was such a darling in fact that it broke Gone With the Wind’s record for number of nominations (though not wins): being nominated for Best Scoring, Best Film Editing, Best Black-And-White Cinematography, Best Black-And-White Set Direction, Celeste Holm and Theresa Ritter for Best Supporting Actress and Anne Baxter and Bette Davis for Best Lead Actress; winning for Best Sound Recording, Best Black-And-White Costume Design, Best Screenplay, Best Supporting Actor (for George Sanders as Addison DeWitt) and Best Picture.

Upon reading that rundown you may notice something odd: neither Bette Davis nor Anne Baxter won the Oscar for Best Leading Actress. The idea that two separate films can win the Oscars for Best Picture and Best Leading Actor/Actress is one of those things that gets into the philosophy of great filmmaking. If the main character’s performance isn’t award-winning, then how is the movie the best? It’s especially interesting here as All About Eve is a very character-focused movie. It lives and dies by Davis and Baxter’s performances. Instead the Award for Best Actress was bestowed upon Judy Holliday in Born Yesterday.

Born Yesterday is a mediocre romantic/screwball comedy that stars Judy Holliday as a dumb bimbo named Billie Dawn whose abusive boyfriend (Broderick Crawford) is a power broker that goes to Washington D.C. Annoyed and humiliated by her lack of class and intelligence, the boyfriend hires a lawyer (William Holden) to educate her and give her manners. And, wouldn’t you know it, D.C. is the perfect place as the representation of American democracy as Billie becomes more intelligent upon learning the importance of American civics.

Born Yesterday feels like a cheap ripoff of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) combined with a very annoying main character that presents one of the most basic, blasé performances to ever win an Academy Award. How did this happen? Well, most critics predicted that the Oscar was most likely going to go to either Davis in All About Eve or Gloria Swanson in the film that serves as this blog’s feature presentation with Baxter bringing up the rear as a potential third option. The problem is that since these things are voted on by committee, apparently the votes were divided between Davis, Swanson and Baxter evenly enough that Judy Holliday managed to sneak in a victory. (Whether or not Davis, Swanson and Baxter then re-enacted the opening to All About Eve during Holliday’s acceptance speech is unconfirmed but probably pretty likely.)

 This once again goes back to highlighting the problem with this process as well as adhering to the philosophy that only one given movie or performance is worthwhile. Especially given all the conspiratorial vote-grabbing and behind-the-scenes deals that the Academy engages in on a regular basis, it’s bizarre that they let this one get through. In case it sounds like I’m getting unnecessarily annoyed by this decision, watch Born Yesterday and then All About Eve knowing that some stuffy-suited Academy members who like to think they’re better than you told you that the former’s lead was better than the latter’s and see what you think.

So, the decision for the Oscar for Best Leading Actress was clearly a snub. Best Supporting Actor, Best Director, Best Screenplay and all the other awards that All About Eve won were successes. Best Leading Actor went to José Ferrer as the titular character in Cyrano de Bergerac

a great performance in an otherwise boring adaptation. But I digress. Let’s get back to the focus of this blog series: examining the Best Picture as well as all the heavy hitters of 1950 in film to see what could challenge All About Eve for the award.

We’ve mentioned previously how screwball comedy was a genre that was doomed by the rise of television. Over the course of the 50s, screwballs would basically suffer a death of a thousand cuts as sitcoms made the idea of spending money to go see low-budget comedies feel completely obsolete. But in 1950, screwballs still received a nice final hurrah. One of the frontrunners was Father of the Bride

a film that satirizes the Hellish expenses that go into paying for a wedding. I also think it shows a good case study as to why screwballs don’t age very well compared to more modern comedies as it is not nearly as funny as the 1991 remake starring Steve Martin. The remake allows for more ridiculous characters and funny situations, as well as the generational clash between the father and the groom, while the original seems to base most of its comedy on just how expensive a wedding is. For its time, though, it’s solid but really nothing special.

Another frontrunner was a much funnier comedy, Harvey,

the film that pioneered the “dimwitted moron whose folksy wisdom actually makes everyone’s life better” trope. In this case, James Stewart plays Elwood P. Dowd, a schizophrenic socialite whose best friend is a giant imaginary rabbit named Harvey and the pair befriend almost everyone he meets. This film is a lot more fluid in marrying its moral to its comedy than Born Yesterday or Father of the Bride as it has a lot of fun in making the people surrounding Dowd grow increasingly frustrated by him. Josephine Hull is especially good as his sister who basically exists as the film’s punching bag (one great gag involves her trying to have him committed and he is so charming and she is so exasperated talking about Harvey that the doctors end up committing her instead) and won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress. This is one of Stewart’s great comedic performances and one of my personal choices for one of the funniest screwballs ever made.

Moving onto some quick-hitters from some more genre films, there was Broken Arrow

(which is a curious case of dual naming in film history as this has absolutely nothing in common with the 1996 action movie of the same name). This is one of the great Westerns starring James Stewart as a settler who tries to broker peace between American settlers and Native Apaches. Broken Arrow is also notable as one of the very first films to portray Native Americans in a positive light and really show the difficulty of burying the hatchet between two eternally clashing cultures. It’s a great story and the Apache chief, Cochise (Jeff Chandler), is a great character and the film is surprisingly historically accurate for a movie of its era (relatively speaking of course).

The first Technicolor safari film came in the form of King Solomon’s Mines.

The safari film is one of those genres that almost completely died out with the Golden Age of Hollywood due to the ipso facto racial superiority implied by it. Basically it involves three British characters (Deborah Kerr, Stewart Granger and Richard Carlson) journeying through British Kenya in the late 1800s on the search for lost gold. This film is progressive in the sense that it’s the first of these types of films that gave the native African characters their own agency and character (a major subplot features the leads helping a lost prince (Siriaque) reclaim his kingdom). As a movie it’s fine though it’s not really worth going back to.

The highest-grossing film of that year was Cecil B. DeMille’s Samson and Delilah.

Telling the Biblical love story of Samson (Victor Mature), the superhumanly strong Hebrew, and Delilah (Hedy Lamarr), the seductive Philistine, and the constant battle between the two cultures instigated by the evil Lord Saran (George Sanders). This was a big splash when it came out and started the trend of Biblical epics becoming the biggest moneymakers of the 1950s. The scale is, of course, amazing, particularly the climax, but I don’t think it’s one of DeMille’s stronger movies, mainly because I think Victor Mature’s performance is pretty weak and he was hired more for his physique than his acting capabilities. (Groucho Marx hilariously critiqued the film stating: “No movie can hold my interest where the leading man’s tits are bigger than the leading lady’s.”)

Moving onto some bigger hitters. After the war years and a few animator strikes that threatened the financial stability of his studio, forcing him to make a series of package films, Walt Disney once more decided to stake his reputation and his studio’s fiscal livelihood by returning to feature-length fairy tales. The start of the studio’s silver age officially began with Cinderella.

This film returns to Disney’s roots with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), telling the tale of a young woman named Cinderella (Ilene Woods) who lives under the tyrannical thumb of her evil stepmother (Eleanor Audley) and stepsisters (Lucille Bliss and Rhoda Williams). But when she hears of a ball being held to find a wife for the kingdom’s Prince Charming (William Edward Phipps, Mike Douglas singing), she endeavors to do whatever it takes to make it to the ball.

From there, most of the plot is typical and re-establishes many of the isms that we associate with Disney: the singing animal sidekicks, the catchy songs, the Fairy Godmother (Verna Felton) who is part of the Walt Disney Company’s cultural lexicon and, of course, the gorgeous animation. (Fun fact: Disney considered the scene where Cinderella’s rags are transformed into a dress his favorite piece of animation the studio ever produced.) The film would probably have been the year’s highest grosser if it didn’t come out the same year as Samson and Delilah but it did help launch a second wind of Disney’s products going through the 50s and 60s up until Walt Disney’s death in 1966.

Like Disney’s original outputs in the 30s and early 40s, there was never acknowledgement from the Academy due to the institution’s snobbery towards animated films and the fact that an award for animated films wouldn’t exist until the 21st Century. Though unlike Snow White or Pinocchio (1940), I don’t know if one would call Cinderella the year’s best film. The movie is only about 70 minutes long and about half of that is complete filler. Still, when it’s good, it’s pretty damn good and both the Fairy Godmother and the evil stepmother are great characters.

Disney had another major film released that year in the form of their first completely live-action film, Treasure Island.

Telling the story of young Jim Hawkins’ (Bobby Driscoll) quest for the titular island and his encounter with a band of cutthroat pirates led by Long John Silver (Robert Newton). This is often considered the most definitive version of the story with Driscoll’s Jim Hawkins being a surprisingly not-that-annoying portrayal of the character (trust me, this is an accomplishment). Similar to Cinderella, while this is a good movie and didn’t receive any Oscar nods, I don’t think it could be called the best of the year. It’s more significant in what it meant for the company as its success allowed Walt Disney Productions to diversify their output into making live-action films as well as animated films.

(Fun fact to put in perspective how big Treasure Island was when it came out: this is the movie where the stereotypical “pirate voice” comes from. When you think about it, pirates speaking in the pirate voice makes no sense since piracy existed over the course of several hundred years all over the world and so would have had a limitless variety of different slangs and accents. Robert Newton’s Long John Silver was such an iconic character that his arr matey’s and shiver me timbers’es would forever be associated with how the general public thinks that pirates talk. In fact, probably 90% of all tropes about pirates (the squawking parrots, the buried treasure, the maps leading to the buried treasure etc.) can all probably be traced back to this film or the book it was based on.)

Besides the Biblical epic and the return of animated films, another genre that would see a lot of traction in the 1950s were the first heist movies, the start of which began with The Asphalt Jungle.

Set in an unnamed steel town, The Asphalt Jungle centers around a group of criminals who join forces to rob a jewelry store. The heist movie, or at least the first wave of it during the 1950s, was a genre that more or less split off from the film noir. Whereas film noirs normally involved murder-mysteries, the heist films were specifically focused on a heist. It usually weaves a complex and sordid tale as it shows the different members join the gang to get to know each other with a lot of build-up to the heist itself which then often serves as the highlight and/or climax of the movie.

1950s heist movies are an interesting time capsule when compared to later installments of the genre. Mainly because of the Hays Code and different social mores, the criminals in these films are usually more specifically terrible characters who don’t get away with their crimes (the last act after the heist showing how it all comes crashing down on their heads). Compare this to later heist films which stars characters who are usually a bit more likable and maybe even heroic (e.g. Ocean’s Eleven (1961), its remake and sequels (2001-2007), A Fish Called Wanda (1988)) and they do stand out. The Asphalt Jungle basically invented almost all of these tropes and made such a big splash that it influenced numerous crime thrillers for the next decade. The heist films would be especially popular in Europe and be one of the prime influences for the French New Wave near the end of the 50s.

This all isn’t to say that the only good thing about The Asphalt Jungle is its influence as it still holds up an excellent example of the heist genre. The film is a bit preachier than usual in regards to how unlikable the criminal characters are as a prominent B-plot features the local Police Commissioner (John McIntire) trying to hunt the criminals down and constantly telling everyone he meets about how evil criminals are. This does get in the way but the heist is a lot of fun and the movie has a great, nasty gang of criminals who are constantly out to screw each other over. There are two standout performances in the movie that are worth noting.

First is the gang leader, Doc Erwin Riedenschneider (Sam Jaffe). In most other, later films, the gang leader is a charismatic Danny Ocean-type. In this film, Riedenschneider is a more nebbish, nerdy professional who is quietly confident in his safecracking abilities; he just needs some guys to do the more heavy lifting. The other is Marilyn Monroe as the abused girlfriend of one of the gangsters (Louis Calhern). We mentioned her briefly in the All About Eve review but Marilyn Monroe was cinema’s first true bombshell who was more or less the Queen of American pop culture in the 1950s. The Asphalt Jungle acted as her breakout role as she was the character audience members and critics most remembered from the movie and led to her getting more roles where she acted as the lead.

In terms of pioneering a new type of film, The Asphalt Jungle stands out as one of the best movies of the year. However, I don’t think it quite reaches the highs of All About Eve so let’s continue our search. As long as we’re in this area, let’s do a quick pivot back to the film noirs. 1950 might very well have been the best year for noirs during the height of the genre as several truly great noir films came out this year.

To quickly hit off some quick-hitters, there was Gun Crazy

a fun crime thriller that portrays its crazed main characters as straight-up addicts to violence, adding a layer of depth to them that you didn’t see in most criminals in movies from this era.

Night and the City

a very excellent noir that is almost like The Asphalt Jungle in the fact that the fun comes from all the characters being terrible and constantly scheming against each other.

In the wake of Home of the Brave (1949), there was No Way Out

a race-based noir where the villain tries to ruin his attending doctor’s life just because he’s black. While it’s significant in being a race-based movie and one of the first movies starring Sidney Poitier, the movie very much falls into the “good, not great” category as the plot drags like crazy and its racial morals can feel a bit clumsy. Still points for progressiveness though.

In A Lonely Place

is a movie that feels very ahead of its time with its miserable, self-destructive main character and subversive framing device.

But looming high above all of these as probably the most famous of all the film noirs is The Third Man.

The Third Man~Anton Karas - The Third Man

Often considered one of the best, if not the best, film noirs of the classic age of the genre, The Third Man is set in post-war Vienna as Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten) comes into town to try to reconnect with his old friend, Harry Lime. Unfortunately, he finds out that Harry is in fact dead after having been run over by a car. Through meeting with a series of colorful characters, particularly Harry’s old flame, Anna Schmidt (Alida Valli), Holly finds out that there’s a bit more going on and that Harry’s death may not have been a complete accident.

Film noir was a genre defined by its shadowy cinematography and gothic imagery but even by those standards, The Third Man stands out by having longer shadows and more gothic imagery than most. When I say that The Third Man takes place in post-war Vienna, that means it was shot less than 5 years after the fall of the Third Reich. Much of the city is still in ruins and the foot chases take place over gigantic heaps of rubble which adds to the dismal atmosphere. The Third Man is also notable for its prominent use of Dutch angles (a camera angle where the camera is tilted off-center to give the scene a weird/uneasy feeling). While Dutch angles weren’t anything really new, being primarily pioneered 15 years before this in Bride of Frankenstein (1935), the fact that almost every single shot in The Third Man is tilted in some way adds to the unease.

The final ingredient in this concoction is the music that sounds almost completely inappropriate given the film’s dark subject matter. The Third Man theme was one of the most famous pieces of music at the time, making a killing on vinyl records long before the idea of movie soundtracks being released alongside the film became commonplace. The zither composed by Anton Karas both adds to the eastern European setting but also completes the mood of the film. Instead of being dark and dismal, The Third Man seems to come off as glib and cheeky, a character trait emphasized by the titular Third Man (Orson Welles) himself (who is a great villain and the film’s accompanying leitmotif makes his intro one of the best scenes in noir).

All this combines to emphasize The Third Man’s allegory of American interference and pomposity. The film was shot in England in 1949 but didn’t make its way Stateside until 1950 and it wouldn’t surprise me if the film’s implied anti-Americanism helped that delay (in fact, considering how this is the height of McCarthyism, I’m surprised it came out to a big release at all). Most of the Austrians are portrayed as honest people just trying to get by and survive. All the Americans who visit genuinely seem to make things worse, whether with the villains’ malicious planning or with Holly’s bumbling condescension that means well but still comes off as elitist. Considering how Europe was now under the shadow of a newly–powerful America that was officially the most powerful country in the world (on account of it being the only one at the time to have atomic weapons), the timeliness of this allegory fits like a glove.

The movie itself is of course very excellent with great characters, cinematography and two great chase sequences. It’s a great murder-mystery with some twists that are still surprising today so do yourself a favor and go watch it.

The Third Man was given paltry acknowledgment by the Academy, though it did earn the Oscar for Best Black-and-White Cinematography, which, considering how this is one of the coolest-looking movies ever made, seems well-deserved. Of course, it wasn’t nominated for the Oscar for Best Picture. It probably might have had they kept it at ten though then that begs the next question as to how the Academy didn’t consider this in their top 5 but apparently Father of the Bride and King Solomon’s Mines were?

Moving onto our feature presentation (pun intended) is another movie that is debatably a noir and you can fight until the day comes home, Billy Wilder’s biggest “screw you” yet to the Hollywood system, Sunset Blvd.

Sunset Boulevard Suite~Franz Waxman - Sunset Blvd.

This movie and All About Eve are sometimes seen as brother-and-sister films in that they both came out the same year, both dealt with the subject matter of aging starlets, both provide an at-the-time unusually harsh and frank point of view towards show business and both were frontrunners at the Academy Awards which seemed to completely miss the irony. But while All About Eve is a plodding drama, Sunset Blvd. is a harsh thriller crossed with a dark comedy and elements of horror.

The film revolves around a down-on-his-luck screenwriter named Joe Gillis (William Holden) who, while fleeing from a couple of repossession agents, stumbles upon the home of aging actress Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson). Upon learning that Gillis is a screenwriter, Desmond happily takes him under her wing, offering him room and board in exchange for him helping to relight her career. The rest of the film is then a pretty well-paced drama as we find out alongside Gillis that Desmond used to be one of the biggest stars in Hollywood during the Roaring 20s and has never seemed to forget or get over this fact.

From that set-up alone, you can see why this movie and All About Eve are considered brother-and-sister films. Both films are commentaries about the unfairness of how actresses’ careers ultimately fade as they get older and detail subjects who have difficulties coming to grips with this fact. But while Margo Channing is able to eventually grow past this, Norma Desmond is a much more Gothic and miserable figure who seems eternally stuck in the past. The film acts as a commentary on more than show business but specifically about Hollywood and, even more specifically, the people who get crushed and left behind: from the starving artists who just try to make ends meet to the actors who hit it too big too early and have been chasing that high ever since. (While Norma Desmond was, at least partly, based off of Mary Pickford, the timelessness of her performance seems to encompass countless examples of washed-up actors who can never move on from their glory days throughout the generations of Hollywood.)

Sunset Blvd. seems to exist as one of the most iconic films of the turn of the decade and most other works that ape or spoof films from this era usually borrow tropes from Sunset Blvd. (probably not even being fully aware that Sunset Blvd. itself was meant to mock many of these aspects of Hollywood society): the German butler (Erich von Stroheim), the aging starlet who constantly acts like she’s on the stage, the blending of reality and movies, “I’m ready for my close-up, Mr. DeMille” etc.  Billy Wilder was one of the most auteur-esque directors of the Golden Age of Hollywood and he demonstrated a real knack of getting his thumb to the pulse of whatever topic he went after. Whether it was the rampant alcoholism in The Lost Weekend (1945) or the tabloid journalism of Ace in the Hole (1951), he seemed to really be able to engage these topics in a way that was pretty taboo for their time. It’s also a very smart casting choice that Swanson and von Stroheim are both actors from the silent era whose careers fumbled after the transition to sound. This adds a certain extra sadness to their performances that someone who didn’t experience it would not have been able to convey.

Sunset Blvd. seems to encompass most of the negative tropes we tend to associate with Hollywood. I already mentioned how aging starlets are left behind but they also show the rampant classism in the industry. Compare how hard it is for Gillis just to find food while Norma Desmond is so wealthy that she can still live in such an ostentatious house even decades after her last role. Or how some people (such as Norma Desmond) are stuck in the past and unable to move on while other people (represented in the film by Cecil B. DeMille playing himself) are able to adjust to the changing world around them. (And what makes this commentary clever is that it can mean different things to different people. One interpretation is that since DeMille is a man who’s a director and Desmond is an actress, he is more able to adjust his livelihood. The other is that he’s a guy who got lucky and doesn’t particularly want to be bothered and she is eternally stuck in the past and it’s more the system’s problem than any individual's. Both interpretations can be valid.)

        There’s even some implied commentary on the casting couch. Obviously not outright stated due to the Hays Code but it becomes clear before too long that Gillis is going to be expected to do other favors for Desmond if he wants a career and she’s not very subtle about what she has in mind if you know what to pay attention to.

Like this screenshot for instance.

As mentioned, this was All About Eve’s strongest competition at the Academy Awards and was beloved by much of the Hollywood press and Gloria Swanson was Bette Davis' strongest competitor for the Best Actress award. In comparing the two films, All About Eve is a much more subdued and subtle movie which does lend itself better to age. While Sunset Blvd. was very excellent and haunting for its time, it can come off as over-the-top which has prevented it from aging with the greatest of graces. Though I don’t think that’s the reason that Academy members decided to vote against it for Best Picture.

Many of the old crowd (that the movie is satirizing) did not like the movie and didn’t make much of a secret about it. While All About Eve is more satirical towards the young actress without morals, Sunset Blvd. is downright scathing towards the entire culture of Los Angeles and how the vapid pursuit of fame is ultimately meaningless. Considering how this institution revolves around that same belief being meaningful, it’s pretty surprising how well-regarded Sunset Blvd. was at the time.

This, in turn, leads to one of my favorite episodes in Hollywood history. Louis B. Mayer especially hated the movie and after a preview screening went on a rant on the red carpet about how terrible he thought Sunset Blvd. (and, by extension, Wilder) was. This rant climaxed in Mayer shouting that Wilder should be run out of town, calling Wilder anti-Semitic slurs and telling him he should’ve been left behind in Germany. Wilder, who had fled from Nazi Germany in 1942 and had family members that were killed during the Holocaust, walked up to one of the most powerful men in Hollywood on the red carpet in front of more than a dozen reporters and replied: “My name is Mr. Wilder. Go fuck yourself.”

Louis Mayer resigned from MGM later that year.

While Sunset Blvd. and The Third Man (as well as The Asphalt Jungle, In A Lonely Place and Harvey) are all excellent movies, I do think All About Eve is still the movie that could be called movie of the year. It’s witty, smart, has some fun things to say about Hollywood and features a great performance by Bette Davis. While we could dwell a bit more on the acting choices, I don’t want to repeat myself too much between each blog post. These are all excellent films. There’s no reason to choose one or the other and you should watch all of them.

Calling All About Eve the Best Picture of 1950 was a…

SUCCESS!

Personal Favorite Movies of 1950:

• All About Eve (dir. Joseph L. Mankiewicz)
• Broken Arrow (dir. Delmer Daves)
• Cinderella (dir. Hamilton Luske, Wilfred Jackson & Clyde Geronimi)
• Gun Crazy (dir. Joseph H. Lewis)
• Harvey (dir. Henry Koster)
• Night and the City (dir. Jules Dassin)
• Sunset Blvd. (dir. Billy Wilder)
• The Asphalt Jungle (dir. John Huston)
• The Third Man (dir. Carol Reed)
• Treasure Island (dir. Byron Haskin)

Favorite Heroes:

• Captain Tom Jeffords (James Stewart) (Broken Arrow)
• Cyrano de Bergerac (José Ferrer) (Cyrano de Bergerac)
• Dave Allister and Clyde Boston (Nedrick Young and Trevor Bardette) (Gun Crazy)
• Delilah (Hedy Lamarr) (Samson and Delilah)
• Dr. Luther Brooks (Sidney Poitier) (No Way Out)
• Elwood P. Dowd (James Stewart) (Harvey)
• Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten) (The Third Man)
• Joe Gillis (William Holden) (Sunset Blvd.)
• Laurel Gray (Gloria Grahame) (In a Lonely Place)
• Margo Channing (Bette Davis) (All About Eve)

Favorite Villains:

• Bart Tare and Annie Starr (John Dall and Peggy Cummins) (Gun Crazy)
• Dix Handley (Sterling Hayden) (The Asphalt Jungle)
• Dixon Steele (Humphrey Bogart) (In a Lonely Place)
• Doc Erwin Riedenschneider (Sam Jaffe) (The Asphalt Jungle)
• Eve Harrington (Anne Baxter) (All About Eve)
• Harry Fabian (Richard Widmark) (Night and the City)
• Lady Tremaine (Eleanor Audley) (Cinderella)
• Long John Silver (Robert Newton) (Treasure Island)
• Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) (Sunset Blvd.)
• The Third Man (Orson Welles) (The Third Man)