Experiencing Eve with Celeste Holm

It's been almost 24 hours since the experience below, and I still can't believe this happened.

After standing in line for Tribeca Film Festival tickets for four hours Saturday, I wasn't sure I wanted anything to do with cinema for the rest of the day. It was in the mid-70s and sunny, a Yankees/Red Sox game was on, I was wearing a cute new jacket - why would I want to spend my evening in a theater watching a movie I already own? Well ...

Hundreds of people, including the Village Voice’s Michael Musto, lined up Saturday night on a side street in the gritty Journal Square section of Jersey City, N.J. , to watch a movie. It wasn’t just any movie, though: It was All about Eve, one of the greatest films ever (and my No. 7 all-time favorite). As if that weren’t enough, the print was from the Fox archive and screened at one of the remaining movie palaces in the country, the 3,000-seat Loews Jersey, which opened in 1929. What’s more, we had preshow entertainment, live pipe-organ music. AND Celeste Holm, the only living Eve cast member (she turns 91 at the end of April), presented the flick to us and did a Q&A afterward.

The cost for all this grandeur? $6. Seriously. Popcorn and soda were $1 each.

Had I died and gone to cinema heaven?

In introducing Eve, film professor and author Foster Hirsch stressed that it was a “talking” picture. Indeed, Joseph Mankiewicz’s Academy Award-winning screenplay - one of six Oscars Eve won, including Best Picture - includes some of the most memorable lines around. Everyone knows “Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy night,” a statement Bette Davis delivers with such bite before a life-altering party. That party featured a sparkling Marilyn Monroe as a starlet, and her performance garnered her a seven-year contract at 20th Century Fox. However, Hirsch told us that none of the original Eve reviews even mentioned the woman Holm described as a “fuzzy young duckling.”

In addition to the “seatbelts” comment, Eve’s screenplay contains notable quotables aplenty. Some are poignant: “Funny business, a woman's career. The things you drop on the way up the ladder so you can move faster. You forget you'll need them again when you get back to being a woman,” Davis’ stage diva Margo Channing muses as she reflects upon her storied career and stormy relationship with director Bill Sampson (Gary Merrill, later Davis’ husband). More often, the words are tart, as one might expect from an ode to theatrical life. “What a story! Everything but the bloodhounds snappin' at her rear end,” Birdie (Thelma Ritter) sneers upon hearing Eve’s (Anne Baxter) sob story of Wisconsin and a deceased war-hero husband. She’s the only one not initially taken in by Eve Harrington, the seemingly naïve newcomer to New York who manipulates her way into the lives of Margo, Bill, scriptwriter Lloyd Richards (Hugh Marlowe) and his wife, Karen (Holm).

Many of the best quips come from … well, why don’t we let him introduce himself? “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 theatre.” Addison finds Eve intriguing, but he doesn’t drink her Kool-Aid. “You're an improbable person, Eve, but so am I. We have that in common,” Addison archly observes in a riveting confrontation. “Also a contempt for humanity, an inability to love or be loved, insatiable ambition - and talent. We deserve each other.” Addison’s portrayer, George Sanders, won the Supporting Actor Oscar for his performance.

It’s no surprise, then, that when Hirsch asked Holm whether she recognized the brilliance of Eve’s screenplay, she replied, “Well, yes. I can read.” For all the homages and remakes, the wordplay of All about Eve still stings almost 60 years later. Brilliance.