Introduction by Rosemary Mankiewicz on October 1

Special Student Price: $12

What can you say about a film so legendary? Let’s start with this: All About Eve gets fresher with each passing year. Mankiewicz crafted three magnificent and archetypal characters with Bette Davis’s Margo Channing, Anne Baxter’s Eve Harrington, and George Sanders’s Addison DeWitt—that’s three more than many of his fellow creators managed in a decade. Darryl F. Zanuck had wanted Marlene Dietrich to play Margo, the aging star who is gradually edged out of the limelight by the wanton Eve under Addison’s jaded and watchful eye (the film was based on Mary Orr’s story “The Wisdom of Eve,” inspired by an episode in the life of Elisabeth Bergner). Mankiewicz refused and offered the role to Gertrude Lawrence; when her demands proved unreasonable, he signed Claudette Colbert, who slipped and wrenched her back, at which point Bette Davis was suddenly available—luckily for her, for Mankiewicz, and for us all.