Ambition
Both Margo and Eve are incredibly ambitious women. While Margo has had a long and full career and is now enjoying the fruits of her labor—having started on the stage at age 4—Eve has almost no experience as a stage actress and is only just starting. Eve is defined by her almost insatiable ambition. She wants so badly to be an actress and to follow in Margo's footsteps, that she will do almost anything to achieve her goals. While her ambition and star-eyes seem like nothing more than strong admiration for Margo and a dreamy sensibility at first, as Eve begins to get more of a taste of fame and glory, her appetite for power becomes overwhelming. Her helpfulness turns into opportunism, and her admiration for Margo turns into fierce competition. Throughout the film, Eve is exposed as more and more monstrous. She attempts to seduce Bill to further her career, she blackmails Karen, and then attempts to steal Lloyd away from Karen, all for the sake of her own professional advancement. Eve becomes a symbol of unchecked ambition, insatiable need, and an amoral sense of entitlement.
Aging
While Margo Channing is not yet 50, she is certainly getting old for some of the roles she is playing. Her charisma and popularity can carry her through, but there are some—like Addison and Eve—who question her ability to play the 20-year-olds she is still playing onstage. As Eve begins to encroach on Margo's life, Margo begins to feel replaceable, which seems to have to do directly with her age. Margo becomes terrified of being inched out of her own business and her own career by someone whose biggest virtue is her youth. Margo worries that not only will her career be over, but that her husband will leave her for the younger Eve. She says to Bill, "Don't get stuck on some glamour puss.…you're a setup for some gorgeous wide-eyed young babe."
When Eve speaks to Addison for his column in the paper, she insinuates that Margo is too old for the roles she's playing. Everyone thought that Margo was being paranoid about Eve's opportunism, but the column proves that Margo's fears were well-founded, that Eve is in fact trying to use her youth to advance her career.
Star Power
Margo Channing is a star through and through. When we are first introduced to her at the Sarah Siddons award ceremony, Addison describes her as "a great star, a true star. She never was or will be anything less or anything else.” Margo's charisma and magnetism are undeniable (partially due to Bette Davis's electric performance), and one knows that even if Eve is inching her way into the business, it will do little to dim Margo's fire.
Indeed, Margo's star power is so strong that at times it cannot find an appropriate outlet when she is not in a play. When Margo begins acting out as Eve becomes more involved in all of their lives, Karen suggests that “Margo has to realize what’s attractive onstage need not be attractive off.” Here we see that the things that Margo brings to her onstage roles are not always conducive to appropriate behavior in society. Margo is loud, boisterous, temperamental, and deeply feeling, all qualities which have propelled her to stardom as an actress, but which can wreak havoc on her personal life.
Fame & Glory
Fame is perhaps the most important theme in the film. Margo enjoys fame, but it is not her aim as an actress. She shrugs at the admiration she receives from her fans, and prefers the immersive transcendence she feels in adopting a part. Of people who want her autograph, Margo snaps, “Autograph fiends! They’re not people. Those beasts that run around in packs like coyotes.”
Eve, on the other hand, feverishly craves fame. What she admires so much about Margo is Margo's adoring public and power in the industry, and she mimics Margo's final bows backstage while holding Margo's dress with an attentive fervor. Eve represents the fan who covets the life of a star, and will stop at nothing to get it. If Margo represents an artful relationship to her craft, Eve represents the devoted mimic, the proficient mirror image. She wants fame and glory more than anything, and while she may have a big imagination and a pure appreciation for the art form, her central desire is to be famous and beloved. Eve wants applause so bad, and relishes the opportunity to have "hundreds of people" love her every night.
The insatiable appetite for adoration, affirmation, and glory is mirrored back to Eve when the young girl Phoebe arrives in her apartment. Phoebe is yet another version of Eve, a rabid fan who wants proximity to fame so badly that she is willing to sneak into her favorite actress's apartment. The final image of the film is Phoebe holding the Sarah Siddons award, wrapped in Eve's jacket, looking at her own image, multiplied infinitely in Eve's mirror.
The Theater
The theater is a prevalent and straightforward theme in the film. At the very beginning, we are invited into an elite and exclusive world, a world in which only a special few get to participate. The theater represents a place where one can achieve glory and fame, where one's reputation can become almost god-like, and which offers a great many rewards to the individuals who choose to work hard and lend their talents to it. The theater also represents a place of deceit and drama, where egos get smashed, loyalties are abandoned, and dramatic displays abound.
To the characters in the film, the theater is highly preferable to the gaudy and over-the-top world of Hollywood film. Stage actors sweat and work hard for their recognition. Their rewards are all the more glorious and profound because of the amount of work that must go in to making a play. On the other hand, All About Eve suggests that the theater will never hold the rewards of real life. Margo chooses to leave the theater in favor of a life as Bill's wife, and this proves to be a rewarding choice for her. Thus, the theater is a magical and glamorous place, but it is also illusory: a beautiful but ephemeral fantasy.
Belonging
Throughout, all Eve wants is to belong in the theater community. In the beginning of the movie, when we are first being introduced to the characters, and Addison tells us that Eve is receiving the Sarah Siddons award, he tells us, "She has had one wish, one prayer, one dream: to belong to us. Tonight, her dream has come true." The irony is, of course, that Eve has worked so hard to belong that she has alienated many of the powerful people from the circles in which she wanted to belong. Additionally, the person to whom she really belongs by the end of the film is Addison, and she has been blackmailed into this position. When Eve confides at her hotel room in New Haven that Lloyd is going to leave Karen for her, Addison informs her, "You belong to me." He then reveals that he knows about her scandalous past in Wisconsin, and threatens that if Eve does not agree to be with him, he will reveal everything to the public. Thus, when Eve finally finds belonging in the community, she is blackmailed into entering a relationship that she doesn't actually want. "Belonging," therefore, takes on many meanings, some glorious and some dark.
Womanhood
In some ways, the film shows that the traditional notion of womanhood is incompatible with a life in the theater. While Margo Channing is a great actress, she is not an especially attentive girlfriend, and she does not keep the hours of a regular person. Thus, she is shown to be somewhat ill-equipped to be Bill Sampson's wife. On the other hand, Margo characterizes her difficulties with Eve, her intuitions and paranoias that Eve is trying to take her place, as having to do with her gender. After Margo makes a scene on the stage of the theater after learning that Eve is her understudy, Bill tries to reason with her that she has every reason to be happy. She shrugs aside his consolation, saying simply, "It's obvious you're not a woman." Being a woman, according to Margo Channing, is a mysterious, sacrificial and painful cross to bear.
Later, when she is sitting in the car with Karen after it has run out of gas on the way to the train station, Margo discusses the nature of womanhood in more explicit terms. After apologizing for her erratic behavior, Margo says, “It’s funny, a woman’s career. The things you drop on your way up so you can move faster. You forget you’ll need them again when you get back to being a woman.” Here, she acknowledges that she has given up certain features of a normal life—such as marriage and children—for a career onstage. In Margo's eyes, having a career is incompatible with the virtues of traditional femininity. Eventually, Margo arrives at the realization that a woman's life doesn't matter until she finds a man to love her. She says, "...in the last analysis, nothing's any good unless you can look up just before dinner or turn around in bed, and there he is. Without that, you're not a woman. You're something with a French provincial office or a book full of clippings, but you're not a woman. Slow curtain, the end."
