All About Eve

Nabbing Academy Awards for Best Picture, Director, and Adapted Screenplay, Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s classic is the age-old tale of a diva of the theater whose spotlight is usurped by an ambitious ingénue—“just another tongue-tied gushing fan.” A scalding Bette Davis spars with a coy Anne Baxter, but both transcendent performers (along with Gloria Swanson from Sunset Boulevard) would lose the Oscar to Judy Holliday for Born Yesterday. Mankiewicz’s script is a textbook “how to” of screenwriting — one memorably wicked line after another. With its acidic turns of phrase and venomous banter, All About Eve is a reference point for generations of queer cinephiles.