*

Joseph L. Mankiewicz's 1950 backstage classic All About Eve [Fox] retains its powers in the new Blu-ray release. This is one of those films that, as they say, needs no introduction; not to my readership, it doesn't. It has been years since I've watched Margo & Eve and the rest; on this viewing I was especially impressed with the performances of George Sanders as the critic Addison DeWitt, especially in the scene in which he unmasks and defeats the seemingly unstoppable Eve Harrington; Thelma Ritter, as Margo's loyal but caustic dresser Birdie; and, surprisingly enough, Marilyn Monroe as Miss Casswell, the Copacabana-trained starlet. The as-yet-unknown Monroe gives a witty and knowing comic performance. One wonders just how much she was noticed at the time; Twentieth Century Fox was impelled to sign her to a long-term contract, but could they have had any idea what they were getting?

Bette Davis and Anne Baxter are there too, of course, as is Celeste Holm. Celeste, in a decidedly supporting role, shared star billing above the title with Davis and Baxter; I suppose this was because she walked in with a 1947 Oscar and a likely shot at the 1949 award, which she didn't ultimately win, for "Come to the Stable." Holm got a third nomination for "All About Eve" — three in four years! For "Eve," she was competing in the supporting category against Ritter; Davis and Baxter battled each other for Best Actress. All four lost, to actresses recreating their roles in two of Broadway's longest-running comedies of the 1940s: Judy Holliday in "Born Yesterday" and Josephine Hull in "Harvey." Sanders won the supporting actor Oscar, though; Mankiewicz won two, as director and author, with the film taking the Best Picture nod as well.

This Sarah Siddons section might be confusing to some viewers; I mean, what are Eve and Margo and everyone doing in Chicago? It turns out that Mankiewicz simply made up the Sarah Siddons Award, naming it after the 18th-century tragedienne. Two years after the film opened, some Chicago society folk decided to adopt the award and have been giving it ever since. (In one of the several Blu-ray bonuses, an official from the Sarah Siddons Society tells how they gave the award in 1973 to Bette Davis herself — who was furious to find that they had brought in Anne Baxter as a surprise speaker!)

Theatre fans who like to scour movies for footage of old-time Broadway will be rewarded with a view — fleeting, but authentic — of the old Klaw Theatre. As in Klaw & Erlanger, the showmen whose grasping syndicate was overtaken by the Shuberts. The Erlanger is now called the St. James. Marc Klaw's house was on the plot just west of the Imperial, where there now sits a parking lot that many of us use as a shortcut between 45th and 46th. "All About Eve" used the Golden as an exterior location. (The interiors were shot not in New York but at the Curran Theatre in San Francisco. They also visit the Shubert in New Haven.) There are two 45th Street sequences — one night, one day — in which we can glimpse the marquees for Lost in the Stars at the Music Box, Miss Liberty (with, curiously enough, "dances by Jerome Robbins" in electric lights) at the Imperial, and the Maurice Evans production of The Devil's Disciple at the Royale. Which dates the location shooting to a six-week window centering on March 1950. The house directly across the street from the Golden — you can make out its then-name, "Columbia Radio Theatre" on the Blu-ray — is the former Klaw.