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Discussion Questions for Women in Film Gathering, June 7, 2011:

Focal Film: All About Eve (1950; Dir. Joseph L. Mankiewicz)

Consider the female roles in All About Eve: * Margo Channing (played by ) * Eve Harrington () * Karen Richards () * Birdie Coonan () * Miss Casswell ()

1. With which roles are you most able to Identify? Why?

2. Which female characters change discernibly over the course of the narrative? In what ways?

3. How do the roles fit into each actress’ film career, to the best of your knowledge?

4. Some writers have indicated that Margo’s transition from intensely talented diva to domestic wife mirrors American society’s impetus toward a “re‐feminization” of women following World War II. Do you agree or disagree?

5. What do you think has made All About Eve a classic, an “essential” film on so many critics’ lists? (BTW, it won six , including Best Picture.)

6. Almost the entirety of All About Eve plays out in an extended flashback. Does this help or hinder in your understanding of the narrative?

7. All About Eve has been identified by writer Molly Haskell as one of a select group of important films that explore the implications of women aging (with, e.g., Sunset Boulevard and ). Haskell says that the films represent the anxieties of their male directors, who themselves were entering middle age. How do you feel about this viewpoint?

8. How might All About Eve have been different if a female director had been at the helm?

9. The writer/director of All About Eve, Joseph Mankiewicz, was known as one of two key “women’s directors” of the Hollywood Studio Era. The other was openly gay director . In commenting on their successes as directors of the performances of actresses, Mankiewicz is quoted as saying, “George befriended his female stars. I [blank]ed them.” What does this indicate about classic Hollywood, and this film in particular?

10. The film features Academy Award‐winning costume design by , herself one of the most successful and powerful off‐camera professional women in the Hollywood Studio Era. How do the costume designs punctuate the story and the performances?

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11. Writer Molly Haskell says that with the Margo Channing character, we get “not the burning zeal of the actress but the burnt‐out candle.” Do you agree or disagree?

12. All About Eve contains one of the most quoted lines in cinema history: “Fasten your seat belts, it’s going to be a bumpy night.” (#9 on the ’s list of top movie quotes) What do you think this line means?

13. All About Eve is the only film in Oscar history to receive four female acting nominations (although none were winners—Bette Davis and Anne Baxter for Best Actress, and Celeste Holm and Thelma Ritter for Best Supporting Actress). Yet the female cast was far from a cozy ensemble—Davis and Holm famously feuded throughout the film shoot. What stands out for you in terms of the four performances and their interactions?

14. Film scholar Laura Mulvey, in her groundbreaking 1975 psychoanalytical essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” contends that the male‐dominated, patriarchal structure of classical Hollywood cinema created a typical film structure in which men are the active spectators both on‐ and off‐screen, and women are the more passive objects of what she calls “the gaze.” How might this apply to All About Eve? Is there a principal visual focus on the females by the camera? And, are the male characters’ attentions focused on the female characters?

15. How does the role of Margo Channing compare with other hallmark roles played by Bette Davis? Is this role a bridge for her between her romantic lead period and her later characters roles?