Summary
The film opens on a shot of an award statuette, as a narrator tells us about the “Sarah Siddons Award,” which is being presented at a ceremony honoring achievements in the theater. As the camera zooms out, we see a man speaking to a large banquet hall, and the narrator tells us the man is an “extremely old actor.” “Being an actor,” the narrator says, “he will go on speaking for some time.” The narrator then tells us that we are looking at the annual banquet and presentation of the Sarah Siddons Award, “the highest honor our theater has.” A group of old men sit in the audience waiting for the award to be presented. At this particular point in the ceremony, the minor awards—those for writing and directing—have already been presented, and now they wait for the most distinguished award to be presented. The narrator then says, “…No brighter light has ever dazzled the eye than Eve Harrington. Eve…but more of Eve later. All about Eve, in fact.” The narrator then introduces himself as Addison DeWitt, and we see him sitting at a table at the awards ceremony. He tells us that he is a theater critic and commentator. “I am essential to the theater,” he says, before introducing Karen Richards, the wife of a playwright, Lloyd Richards, who met her when he was lecturing in drama at Karen’s alma mater, Radcliffe.
Addison then discusses the different kinds of theater producers: “One has a great many wealthy friends who will risk a tax-deductible loss. This type is interested in art. The other is one to whom each production means potential ruin or fortune. This type is out to make a buck.” We then see “the producer of the play which has won for Eve Harrington the Sarah Siddons Award,” named Max Fabian. Near him sits Margo Channing, “a star of the theater,” a star ever since she entered the stage in A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the age of 4 completely naked. She smokes a cigarette as Addison tells us, “Margo is a great star, a true star. She never was or will be anything less or anything else.” The chairman of the Sarah Siddons Society then gets around to announcing the final award of the night. A verbose man, the chairman goes on and on, before finally announcing that the recipient of the award is quite young. As he speaks of her hands, we see a pair of young woman’s hands resting on a table. “Young in years, but whose heart is as old as the theater,” the chairman says, extolling Eve Harrington’s fame and many creative virtues. “She has had one prayer, one wish, one dream: to belong to us,” he says. Eve Harrington stands to accept the award as the room erupts into clapping and standing for her and flashbulbs go off.
As Eve approaches the stage and takes the award, Margo Channing looks skeptical and the shot freezes for a moment. Addison narrates, “Eve. Eve, the golden girl. The cover girl. The girl next door. The girl on the moon. Time has been good to Eve…You all know all about Eve. What can there be to know that you don’t know?” Addison asks, smirking at the awards ceremony knowingly. Suddenly, Karen Richards takes over narrator duties, as the camera settles on her face. She narrates, “It’s June now. That was early October…” as the scene shifts to last October. We see Karen’s taxi pulling up in front of a theater advertising Margo Channing in a new play. Karen asks the taxi to wait for her, as she gets out of the taxi and goes through the alley to the stage door. She is stopped by Eve, who stands in a doorway. Karen tells Eve that she thought she wouldn’t be there. “Why should you think I wouldn’t be?” asks Eve. It becomes clear that Eve comes to the theater every night just to see Margo Channing leave and enter the theater.
Eve asks Karen about Margo Channing, since she is her best friend. “You and your husband are always with her. And Mr. Sampson. What’s he like?” Eve says to Karen. Bill Sampson is a director whom Eve greatly admires. It then comes out that Eve has seen every performance of the play that Margo Channing is acting in. Karen can hardly believe that Eve is spending that much money to see the play, and, taking pity on Eve, decides to take her to meet Margo, to which Eve agrees reluctantly, feeling self conscious about the way she looks. They go in the stage door, and Eve walks over to look at the stage as an usher vacuums the seating area. “You can breathe it, can’t you…Like some magic perfume,” Karen says, seeing Eve’s admiration for the theater. She then leads her to Margo Channing’s dressing room. Entering Margo’s dressing room, Karen goes and kisses her husband Lloyd, as Margo speaks theatrically about an interview she did with a woman from the South. Margo then turns to Lloyd and tells him, “Write me one [a play] about a nice, normal woman who just shoots her husband.” Eve watches from the door as Karen defends Lloyd’s current play, in which Margo is starring, called Aged in Wood. “I can’t see that Lloyd’s plays have hurt you any,” Karen says to Margo, who tells her to relax and not take her criticisms so seriously.
Karen stands, becoming more impatient with Margo, telling her that she has nothing to complain about—people come to see her “in the wind and the rain.” Margo fires back, “Autograph fiends! They’re not people. Those beasts that run around in packs like coyotes.” Karen then tells Margo that she’s brought a fan backstage to meet her, which startles Margo. When Margo tells her assistant to send Eve away, Karen begs her to let Eve come meet her; “You’re her whole life!” she pleads. Karen lets Eve in and introduces her to Margo and Lloyd. Margo then introduces her assistant, Birdie Coonan, a sarcastic woman who knows Margo very well and can tell that she’s being phony. When Birdie goes into the other room, Margo invites Eve to sit down, and they talk about the fact that Eve has seen every performance. When Lloyd asks if she likes the play, Eve says, “I’d like anything Miss Channing played in.” She then tells them that she is excited about Lloyd’s next play, Footsteps on the Ceiling, which she read about in the paper. When Lloyd asks why she’s come to see every performance, she tells him that she has nowhere else to go, that she has no family or friends.
As Eve begins to tell them about her situation, Birdie enters the room, interrupting her. Eve tells them that it all started during Margo’s last play—Remembrance—which she saw in San Francisco. She describes the night she saw the play as the most important night of her life, and the beginning of her obsession with Margo. She followed the show East when it transferred. Karen then asks Eve to tell them her life story. She tells them she was raised in Wisconsin, an only child, who loved acting and make-believe. “It got so I couldn’t tell the real from the unreal.” She goes on to tell them that her father was a poor farmer, and that she had to drop out of school, move to Milwaukee, and become a secretary at a brewery, where it was “hard to make believe you’re anything else.” She met a man named Eddie, with whom she did a play at a small theater company, but then Eddie joined the army, was stationed in the South Pacific, and she went back to working at the brewery. Eddie later told her that he had a leave coming up in San Francisco, but when she went there, she found out that Eddie had been killed overseas. Hearing this, Margo Channing, Karen and Lloyd look saddened by the girl’s tale. She continues her story, telling them that after the news, she stayed in San Francisco, where she first saw Margo Channing in Remembrance.
As she finishes her story, Margo is weeping, and Birdie makes a comment about how tragic Eve’s life has been. Wiping her eyes, Margo scolds Birdie for her comment, which causes Birdie to apologize to Eve, who insists that she didn’t hurt her feelings. Suddenly a man storms into the room and dramatically tells Margo that she’s taking too long; “Is it sabotage? Does my career mean nothing to you?” he asks her. They are catching a flight soon, and the man reminds Margo that he starts shooting a movie in a week. When he references a man named “Zanuck,” Margo makes a joke that the two men are lovers. Karen introduces the man, Bill Sampson (the director of the play), to Eve, but he doesn’t seem to take much notice of her. Eve stands and excuses herself, but Margo invites her to stay and promises that they’ll go somewhere and talk once Bill is on his plane. With that, Karen and Lloyd say their goodbyes. Before leaving, Karen tells Eve that she’d like to get to know her and become friends. Eve then tells Karen, as she and Lloyd leave, “I’ll never forget this night as long as I live. And I’ll never forget you for making it possible.” The Richards’ smile and leave.
Eve sits in the chair as Bill smokes nearby. “So you’re going to Hollywood?” she asks him, then asks him why. He is confused by her questioning, and mocks her admiration of the theater. Sitting up, he says, “What book of rules says the theater exists only within some ugly buildings crowded into one square mile of New York City?…Do you wanna know what the theater is? A flea circus. Also opera!…Wherever there’s magic and make-believe and an audience, there’s theater.” He goes on a long monologue about how the theater is everywhere and for everyone, but Eve is mystified. “I just asked a simple question,” she says, before warning him about the seductive dangers of Hollywood, how “so few ever come back.” She then tells him that she reads the work of two critics, one of them Addison DeWitt, every day. Just then, Margo enters looking for an earring, instructing Birdie to check the wigs for it. Bill says his goodbyes to Birdie, kissing her on the cheek. “Kill the people,” she tells him as he goes. Margo tells Birdie that she’ll see her at home.
At the airport, Eve offers to give Margo and Bill some time alone by taking care of the luggage and meeting them at the gate with Bill’s ticket. They accept her generous offer and Bill gives her the ticket. Walking away, Bill marvels at the stranger, Eve: “that lack of pretense, that strange directness and understanding.” Bill and Margo then mock Eve’s earnest admiration of the theater. “All the religions of the world rolled into one, and we’re gods and goddesses,” Margo laughs. Margo then tells Bill that she feels protective of Margo, as he pulls her towards him for a romantic goodbye. “Don’t get stuck on some glamor puss,” Margo warns him. Smirking he says, “I’ll try.” After postulating about the fact that Bill is going to leave her for a younger woman, Margo says plainly, “Am I going to lose you?” Before he can really answer, they are interrupted by Eve who hands Bill his ticket. Eve watches as Margo and Bill kiss goodbye passionately. Bill calls back to Eve and Margo before he gets on the plane, and tells Eve to look after Margo in his absence. “Don’t worry,” Eve says, and she and Margo leave the airport, arm in arm.
Analysis
The beginning of the film sets the audience in a high-brow high society world, filled with pretensions and snobbery. The narrator speaks with a stuffy British accent and narrates the structures governing the Sarah Siddons awards with a subtle condescension and a knowing bite. He introduces himself thusly: “To those of you who do not read, attend the theater, listen to unsponsored radio programs or know anything of the world in which you live—it is perhaps necessary to introduce myself. My name is Addison DeWitt. My native habitat is the theater. In it, I toil not, neither do I spin. I am a critic and commentator. I am essential to the theater.” With this line, we can see that the film will be, in part, a satire: revealing the pretentious, self-impressed, and stuffy aspect of the world in which it takes place. Addison DeWitt clearly thinks very highly of himself, and looks down his nose at anyone who does not know who he is. By beginning the film on such a pretentious and starchy tone, director Joseph L. Mankiewicz orients his viewer in a very rarefied and easily-mocked world. As a narrator, Addison DeWitt is both entrenched in this world and looking at it from the outside, easily seeing its absurdities, but still investing in it all the while. We are, from the start, prepared for a satirical outlook on the more highbrow corners of society, and invited in by a most conspiratorial narrator, who refers dismissively to the “extremely old actor,” who "speaks for a long time, but says hardly anything”; clearly, he has a critical word for nearly everyone.
The conspiracy that the viewer feels with the narrator and with the narrative more generally is unique. After having been invited into an exclusive world, and with the most knowing, cynical perspective being played in voiceover, as though whispered to us in between sips of champagne at a party, the viewer becomes a confidant of sorts. Joseph L. Mankiewicz ensures this also by taking filmic liberties, such as when he freezes the frame as Eve accepts her award. “Eve. Eve, the golden girl. The cover girl,” the narrator says, as we see a frozen image of Eve accepting the Sarah Siddons Award. This stylistic choice shows the viewer that the film will take liberties with narrative, and that we are not fully immersed in the narrative world. This is not an objective narrative arc, but a highly specific one, one in which we must look at the events through a certain rhetorical lens. In this way, we are not meant to look at Eve Harrington or the world of the theater in a straightforward way, but through the twisted, clannish, and competitive lens of its very particular logic.
Eve Harrington’s journey is framed by great longing, and by her almost idolatrous admiration for the theater, fame, glamor, and acting. In the flashback, Margo is situated at the center of the theater bubble. She is the star of a new Lloyd Richards play, people want her autograph, she’s been interviewed for a magazine, and she still has a lot to complain about. She is the spitting image of diva-style glamor and high standards, never satisfied, puffing on a cigarette while she takes off her makeup and entertains friends in her dressing room. Margo Channing is a show business veteran who knows exactly how to stay on her pedestal. Contrastingly, Eve Harrington is a striver, wishing so desperately to be accepted into the inner circle, seeing every performance of Margo’s play, waiting at the stage door no matter the weather. The central tension in the film is between Margo Channing’s complete ease with herself, her lack of desperation or striving, and Eve’s desire to break in, her acute desperation and interest in a world that she looks on from the outside.
Aside from their different relationships to fame and belonging, Margo and Eve are distinguished from one another by their respective relationships to reality. Margo is portrayed as an earthy, practical, and tough broad, hardened by her years of working in the theater, of setting boundaries, and speaking her mind. She has no illusions about the theater, and affectionately rolls her eyes when recounting Eve’s wide-eyed adulation to Bill. Eve is quite the opposite, a dreamy girl who admits that she has always had a hard time distinguishing “the real from the unreal.” She is earnest, absorbent, and adoring of fantasy and the theater. If Margo’s earthiness borders on cynicism, Eve’s innocence borders on naïveté. The viewer sees that Margo never gets carried away with illusions or fantasies, even though she is connected to a profession built around fiction. While she is jaded by her time in the spotlight, Eve is completely porous, and her longing mixed with her taste for the fantastical are what help her to catapult towards prestige.
While Margo seems like an intrepid and invulnerable soldier, we also see her in a relatively more vulnerable light in this first part of the film. Tough as nails in her dressing room, she becomes a fretful puddle at the airport when she says goodbye to her lover Bill. Worried that she will be dethroned by a younger woman, she glibly tells Bill all the reasons that he’s the perfect companion for a “young babe,” before asking him explicitly if he is going to leave her. This is the plight of an aging woman, but particularly an aging actress, who is worried about her relevance, anxious about her shelf life. Bill can give her no explicit reassurance, beyond telling her, “as of this moment, you’re six years old.” They are then interrupted by Eve, a bonafide “young babe,” who looks on longingly, hoping to be helpful, and pining after Margo Channing’s life. Margo feels protective of Eve, particularly after hearing her sad story, but there is also a strange tension rising between them, a competitive edge that Margo had not expected. This tension is bolstered by the fact that we the viewer know that Eve will shortly be a huge stage star, winning the Sarah Siddons award, heightening the dramatic tension of the film.
