Sinful Sunday: The Enduring Pleasures of Queer Evil in "All About Eve'
Even after nearly 75 years, Eve Harrington and Addison DeWitt remind us of the subversive power of classic Hollywood queerness.
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Welcome to “Sinful Sundays,” where I explore and analyze some of the most notorious queer villains of film and TV (and sometimes literature, depending on my mood). These are the characters that entrance and entertain and revolt us, sometimes all three at the same time. As these queer villains show, very often it’s sweetly good to be bitterly bad.
In the pantheon of my favorite movies, All About Eve outranks almost everything else. From the moment I saw it in graduate school I was hooked. I mean, this is a movie that has not one, not two, not three, but four blisteringly talented female performances (Bette Davis, Anne Baxter, Celeste Holm, and Thelma Ritter), all of whom spend much of the film trading barbs with each other. As if that wasn’t enough cattiness, George Sanders also makes a very memorable appearance as the caustic theater critic Addison DeWitt, whose verbal barbs are as well-timed and devastating as anything the four women can dish up. There’s a reason that it’s commonly referred to as the bitchiest film ever made and, given the simple amount of talent involved, it’s also unsurprising that it has long had a very strong following among queer folk.
But, as it probably goes without saying, a lot of the film’s queer appeal comes from its nefarious queer villains. Anne Baxter’s scheming ingenue Eve Harrington and the “venomous fishwife” Addison DeWitt. These are the types of queer characters that are sadly thin on the ground these days. Devious and destructive, manipulative and utterly without compassion or pity, these are the types of villains that we love to hate (or is it hate to love?). And, just as importantly, we might even find ourselves admiring them despite, or perhaps because of, their unsavory qualities.
From the moment we meet Eve we’re meant to see her as someone capable of putting on an act, since she is receiving the prestigious Sarah Siddons Award while various characters, including Addison, offer up their thoughts on who she is and what she’s done to get where she is in the present. It’s only once we go to the past, however, that we get a real sense of what a chameleon she is, how easily she can get others to believe her story about being nothing more than a devoted fan of Bette Davis’ theater doyenne Margo Channing with a perfectly-tuned sob story. Even in these early moments of the film, however, one still gets the sense that there’s far more to this young woman than she lets on, not least because Thelma Ritter’s Birdie–Margo’s devoted assistant–doesn’t seem all that impressed by her. Little by little, however, she shows all the signs of being a marvelously effective queer parasite, first worming her way into Margo’s life (and pushing Birdie out), and then taking over more and more aspects of her life: her husband, her friends, and eventually her place at the apex of the theater world.
Much of Eve’s queerness stems from the ambiguity of her desires. At first blush, it seems as if she yearns for Margo herself, the very embodiment of the overdevoted fan who has difficulty ascertaining (let alone maintaining) a healthy level of distance between herself and the object of her adoration. As the film goes on, however, her yearnings become ever more complex, as she goes after first Margo’s career, then her husband, then a different man (Lloyd, the husband of Celeste Holm’s Karen), until she’s left with only her success and Addison for comfort. Of course, this being 1950, All About Eve never comes right out and tells us that Eve is queer, but there are more than enough hints to make it clear, including the woman who is her “roommate” but is almost certainly a little more than that. Not only does the other woman willingly participate in her ruse to get Lloyd to her to their apartment; the two go upstairs in one another’s arms. Birds of a feather, as they say, flock together.
In the film’s narrative logic, Eve becomes even queerer when her story arc is juxtaposed to Margo’s. Whereas the latter ultimately gives up her career to find the wedded happiness she always desired but could never admit to, Eve does the opposite. Though she emerges triumphant in the end, she’s given up almost everything to do so, even her own autonomy (assuming, of course, that she is really as in thrall to Addison as she pretends to be). For many in the 1950s, the homosexual was a tragic and pitiable figure precisely because pop psychology of the time held that they were incapable of forging any kind of healthy bonds with others. The film goes out of its way that this is true for both Eve and Addison.
And speaking of Addison…talk about bitchy. George Sanders was one of those actors who never met a villain role he couldn’t sink his teeth into, and this one is no exception. From the moment we meet him in the very beginning of the film he offers his biting and wry commentary on the foibles and absurdities of the theater world and those who inhabit it. Like Waldo Lydecker of Laura (who I’ve also written about here), he relishes the power he wields, and he knows that he can make or break careers. In every exchange he has, whether it’s with starlet Claudia Casswell (Marilyn Monroe) or with Margo or Eve, Addison shows his absolute contempt for the world in which he lives, and perhaps even himself. It doesn’t get any queerer than that, does it?
Arguably the most revealing and deeply queer conversation is the one that takes place when Eve goes to New Haven to premiere a new play. It’s at this point that he reveals that he knows Eve’s sob story–as well as most other aspects of her biography–is a lie and a sham, and he uses this to dominate her and subordinate her desires to his own. At the same time, he also makes it clear that, despite their power imbalance, they are the only two who truly understand one another. “You’re an improbable person, Eve, and so am I. We have that in common, he says, “Also a contempt for humanity, an inability to be loved, insatiable ambition and talent. We deserve each other”. Of all of the lines in this very queer film, this is arguably the queerest, and it’s the moment in which both Eve and Addison become fused together, their villainous queer destinies forever intertwined.
Thankfully for all of us, Eve doesn’t mean the grisly fate so often accorded to queer villains in classic Hollywood. I mean, it doesn’t all go her own way, of course. It’s clear that she’s not particularly happy with what she’s managed to gain, but she’s still at the top of the theater world, having finally achieved the industry’s highest award. There’s also a deliciously queer irony in the fact that Eve has, herself, now become the object of affection of someone very much like her, a young woman more than willing and capable of changing her demeanor and behavior to get what she wants. And, if Addison’s response is anything to go by, she has a bright and promising future in front of her.
Even now, so many decades after the film hit theaters, Eve Harrington is a reminder of the thrill and pleasure of queer villainy. As Robert J. Corber reminds us in his book Cold War Femme: Lesbianism, National Identity, and Cold War Cinema, she resists all efforts to fully classify or contain her. She will forever remain a reminder of the power of queer figures in classic Hollywood cinema to trouble our ideas of gender, sexuality, and the stability of the self. Sometimes, it really is awfully good to be bad.