Joseph L. Mankiewicz skewered Broadway in "All About Eve", one of the best screenplays ever to grace the silver screen. It features some of the most biting humour you’ll find anywhere in cinema. The script, is witty and perceptive. And who can deliver this sort of material better than Bette Davis? She’s at the top of her game. The witty dialogue and biting performances in Mankiewicz's picture hit home. The presence of "All About Eve" is sad reminder of how movies have regressed in the past 50 years.

The movie's plot is slight, almost nonexistent, a framework for conveying the script's scintillating dialogue. It is told in flashback from an awards ceremony wherein various participants tell us in confidence about the guest of honor, a young Broadway actress named Eve Harrington, and her rise to theatrical stardom. The history they convey concerns Eve's shrewd and cunning manipulation of people and events to suit her own needs as she climbs ruthlessly but effortlessly to the top of her profession. It's a story so familiar we see it repeated, ironically, at the end of the film.

The real star of the show is Bette Davis as Margo Channing. Margo is the toast of Broadway, a tempestuous, ego-driven talent. She is a brilliant, temperamental star who's always been a little insecure and who is also pushing 40, a fact of life that brings a little more desperation and poignancy to her outbursts. In show business, especially for women, forty is positively ancient and the age at which most actresses begin to lose their ability to play pretty young things. This is one of those unfortunate and hypocritical truths about movies as well as the stage: that men are able to continue well into their advancing years playing dashing heroes, romancing beautiful younger ladies, while women have a shelf life far shorter than their male counterparts. Maybe it's because show business has always been dominated by males.

Davis's Margo is the quintessential demanding, egotistical, popularity-obsessed big-time star. She devotes her life to the theater, not even having time for marriage, but she now faces middle age and a declining number of leading roles. Supremely self confident on the outside and a bundle of insecurities on the inside, Miss Davis was tailor-made for the part. She had been a reigning queen of Hollywood for the previous 15 years, and having turned forty, she was looking at a slump in her own career. The movie put her back on top of the business, although she failed to win the Academy Award she so deserved.

Eve Baxter is the secondary character, despite the movie's ironic title. Eve in the beginning is a seemingly sweet, naive young woman who starts at the bottom of the show business ladder as a mousey, devoted, starstruck fan; she volunteers to do anything for her idol, Margo. As the film proceeds, Eve’s ambition gradually becomes evident as a devious understudy scheming to take over a part, and in the end, a life.

Among the supporting cast members, it is probably George Sanders as the cynical, acid-tongued theater critic Addison DeWitt who stands out most. DeWitt is the consummate snob, opening the narration with barbed sarcasms, a man with a bigger ego than any of the actors, a man who believes he is the most important person in the theatrical world, and perhaps rightly so because he has the power to make or break any actor, director, writer, or show on Broadway.

As wonderful as the performances are, though, it's the film's dialogue that carries the day. But it's also the film's dialogue that most sets the movie apart as a work of art, an entertainment, rather than a slice of life. Face it, no one talks the way the people do in this film; no one is so clever, so witty, so smart and sprightly all of the time. Oh, well; maybe they've become part and parcel of the characters they play onstage. Take some of these lines, for instance, all spoken at the same cocktail party at Margo's:

Margo: "It's that Miss Casswell. I don't see why she hasn't given Addison heartburn." To which Bill Sampson replies, "No heart to burn."

Margo (regally, with a drink in her hand): "It is my last wish to be buried sitting up."

Richards to Margo: "You've got a new guest, a movie star from Hollywood." To which Margo responds: "Shucks, and I sent my autograph book to the cleaners."

Margo: "Bill's thirty-two. He looks thirty-two. He looked it five years ago; he'll look it twenty years from now. I hate men."

Karen: "Margo compensates for underplaying on stage by overplaying reality."

Birdie (looking at all the furs in the bedroom): "The bed looks like a dead animal act."

The need for stardom and the ends people will go to in order to achieve it are perfectly captured in "All About Eve." Backstabbing was never more fun.

Many critics have noted that the only aspect of All About Eve that prevents it from being mentioned in the same breath as Citizen Kane and Sunset Boulevard is the pedestrian nature of its visuals. The director's strengths lie in his writing and his rapport with actors.

Is it the best picture of all time, as some critics have suggested? I think that's a stretch. But in saying that "All About Eve" is "The wittiest, the most devastating, the most adult and literate motion picture ever made that had anything to do with the New York Stage," critic Leo Mishkin is closer to the mark. There probably hasn't been another film so drolly critical of Broadway stardom in the history of filmmaking.

All About Eve is intelligent and fascinating. With a towering, self-mocking performance by Ms. Davis and almost equally memorable performances by the rest of the ensemble, "All About Eve" stands as a testament to screen writing of high wit and bitter sarcasm. While its attitudes toward women are dated, the satire, wit and perceptiveness remain as fresh today as they were in 1950.as entertaining today, and as relevant, as ever before.

"All About Eve" was nominated for a record fourteen Academy Awards (tying "Titanic"), winning six, including: Best Picture, Best Director (Mankiewicz), Best Screenplay (Mankiewicz), and Best Supporting Actor (George Sanders).