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Motherhood, fertility, and creativity in Mankiewitz's All About Eve.

Article Excerpt
The 1950 screen classic All About Eve, written and directed by Joseph L. Mankiewitz, constructs mother-daughter relationships to analyze fertility, creativity, and the reproduction of art. Set against the backdrop of the theater, Mankiewitz's film explores the mentoring and the creative relationships among women in the world of art, relationships that are often more productive than the ones with the men in their lives. Mankiewitz's film chronicles the artistic rise of the child-like and manipulative Eve Harrington, a twenty-four-year-old aspiring starlet who connives her way into both the life and the career of forty-year-old established actress Margo Channing. In the film, mentoring relationships are cultivated among the leading female characters, women who grapple with identity formation and self-development while struggling to distinguish reality from art. At the end, the mentoring cycle is continued when the even younger Phoebe, a high-school student from Brooklyn, attaches herself to Eve, suggesting the cycle will continue for successive generations of artists. The mentoring relationships in Mankiewitz's film resemble the relationships between mothers and daughters, and fertility and creativity are manifested by the reproduction of art. The relationships between Karen and Eve, Margo and Eve, and Eve and Phoebe imitate and parallel the relationships of mothers and daughters. These women, with the help of their artist husbands and lovers, perpetuate creativity in the world of performing arts.

Existing scholarship focuses on the physical and emotional relationships between characters, and does not yet explore the creative and artistic aspects of fertility. The importance of the film's artistic relationships is never expressed in the original Hollywood marketing, neither is it stressed in subsequent packages made available for home viewing. The original theatrical trailer, available as a special feature on the 20th Century Fox DVD package, maintains the film is "all about women, and their men." Movie-house posters show three couples walking hand-in-hand: Margo and Bill, Karen and Lloyd, and Eve and Addison. In this way, the theatrical trailer and film advertising utilize traditional Hollywood marketing practices to support a heterosexual film structure, a structure that demands positive resolution of the male-female relationships. Mankiewitz resolves these relationships in the background by furnishing the requisite, traditional Hollywood happy ending that perfectly matches the three major movie couples. At the same time, the artistic relationships between the mentoring mothers and their surrogate daughters remain paramount throughout the film.

The film begins at a fictional awards ceremony, introducing the major characters and events before telling the balance of the story in flashback. Eve Harrington is being presented the Sara Siddons Award for distinguished achievement in the theater. The foreground commentary is shifted between the central characters recalling the recent events surrounding Eve's rise to stardom, and the aged actor who presents to Eve her award: "Some of us have been privileged to have known her. We have seen beyond the beauty and artistry that have made her name resound through the nation." He praises Eve for her "loyalty to her art" and notes, "She has had one wish, one prayer, one dream--to belong to us. Tonight her dream has come...

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