All About Eve

Young admirer Eve Harrington is welcomed into the circle of Broadway star Margo Channing. As Eve becomes Margo's assistant and understudy, her apparent humility gives way to calculated efforts to acquire Margo's roles, relationships, and status.

Mankiewicz fashions the drama from entrances, glances, dressing-room hierarchies, and acid dialogue, while Bette Davis and Anne Baxter make performance itself ambiguous: sincerity, ambition, insecurity, and theatrical technique continually borrow one another's masks.