Movie Quote of the Day (“All About Eve,” on the Theater)

Addison DeWitt (played by George Sanders): [Voice over intro] “Those of you who do not read, attend the theater, listen to unsponsored radio programs, or know anything of the world in which you live, it is perhaps necessary to introduce myself. My name is Addison DeWitt. My native habitat is the theater. In it, I toil not, neither do I spin. I am a critic and commentator. I am essential to the theater.”—All About Eve, written and directed by Joseph Mankiewicz (1950)

All About Eve, released on this date 60 years ago, is not the kind of film that cineastes continually watch for its images. Some naysayers, in fact, complain that, like other films by writer-producer Joe Mankiewicz, it’s far too “talky.”

Just goes to show: You can’t please some people. Here is a film abundant with everything, as recounted by Vanity Fair critic James Wolcott a few years ago on his blog:

“It is art, ambition, vanity, intrigue, philosophy, journalism, sexual politics, and celebrity packed neatly into one overnight kit, the outside world barely noticeable in this brightly lit, drably furnished hermitage known as the Broadway theater.”

You’ll find more famous lines in Mankiewicz’ acid little valentine to thespians and their assorted hangers-on—especially the following spat out by Bette Davis (with her back turned to Sanders, in the image accompanying this post): “Fasten your seat belts—it’s going to be a bumpy night!” (The American Film Institute voted that one the #9 movie quote of all time.)

But for my money, DeWitt’s droll intro gets the Oscar-winning classic off to a perfect start. With an almost perceptibly languid sigh—those who don’t recognize his name, the theater critic suggests, not only don’t watch plays but presumably don’t read or even have any kind of cultural life at all—he at last acknowledges that it is “perhaps necessary” that he tell you who he is.

“I am essential to the theater,” he announces. In the sense that his critical judgment might save or doom a play on opening night, perhaps. But epic self-delusion, masking deep-seated insecurity, hangs all over his pronouncement, the same kind exhibited in “Ozymandias.” Once the eponymous ancient Egyptian ruler of Shelley’s poem delivers his self-assessment (“Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”), the poet reveals that time has left only "a colossal wreck" of the monuments that the monarch thought would preserve his heritage forever.

The same thing applies to Addison DeWitt and the real-life critic who, Mankiewicz’s disclaimer to the contrary, probably inspired George Sanders’ Oscar-winning Best Supporting Actor role. George Jean Nathan is seldom recalled today, aside from serving as co-editor of The Smart Set and The American Mercury with H.L. Mencken, and he is probably read even less.

In his heyday, like Ozymandias, he ruled all he surveyed with his coldly appraising eyes—whether a starlet batting her eyes at a supper club or a new playwright on the stage. He championed Eugene O’Neill and Sean O’Casey when they could use the support. Yet, though those playwrights continue to be read and performed, Nathan is now a mostly forgotten practitioner of a far more ephemeral art: criticism.

Nearly 30 years before Mankiewicz mimicked his waspish tongue, F. Scott Fitzgerald had the same idea, using Nathan as the basis for his critic Maury Nobel in his second novel, The Beautiful and Damned.

DeWitt observes that he does “not spin,” but in fact he traverses the delicate, intricate spiderweb better known as Broadway far better than almost anyone—except for Eve. The other characters might be fools or prima donnas, but DeWitt and Eve are users, and all the more dangerous because they are so intelligent at their game.

DeWitt, in fact, is probably worse than Eve. At least you can understand her motivation: the hunger of being a nobody. But now that DeWitt is at the top of his profession, he’s not above going beyond merely cynical observation. Meeting Eve for the first time, he urges his voluptuous but dim date, Miss Casswell (Marilyn Monroe), to make an old producer at the party happy--i.e., offer him sexual favors. In other words, it’s high-class, in-all-but-name, pimping.

So skilled was Sanders’ reading of the opening lines that studio head Darryl F. Zanuck became convinced that the film title should be changed from “Best Performance” to “All About Eve,” one of DeWitt’s phrases in his opening monologue.

In a marvelous post about Sanders, the unexcelled film blogger Self-Styled Siren quotes from a letter, written 13 years before All About Eve, by the actor to friend Brian Aherne about the theater:

“You talk about the theatre as if it had some cosmic significance. As a matter of fact it is pathetically sublunary; a drab and dusty monument to man's inability to find within himself the resources of his own entertainment. It is usually rather fittingly housed in a dirty old building, whose crumbling walls occasionally resound with perfunctory applause, invariably interpreted by the actor as praise. A sad place, draughty and smelly when empty, hot and sick when full.”

It’s easy to see from this how Sanders took so well to the role of DeWitt: he has the same intelligent, sardonic tone. And yet, while you could hear DeWitt (or Nathan) letting loose such insults at a mere actor, you can’t imagine him using it about the world of theater itself. It would be as if he were acknowledging the emptiness of the world to which he devoted his whole life. For his own sanity, he dares not go there.

Sanders did, and paid for it. Like Richard Burton, his intelligence only left him all the more vulnerable to the self-destructive fear that, after all, acting wasn’t really a worthwhile profession. When he finally got around to penning a suicide note, in 1971, he claimed he took his life out of boredom.