Dream Wife (Sidney Sheldon, 1953)

Betta St. John, Cary Grant, and Deborah Kerr in Dream Wife

Cast: Cary Grant, Deborah Kerr, Betta St. John, Walter Pidgeon, Eduard Franz, Buddy Baer. Screenplay: Sidney Sheldon, Herbert Baker, Alfred Lewis Lewitt. Cinematography: Milton R. Krasner. Art direction: Daniel B. Cathcart, Cedric Gibbons. Film editing: George White. Music: Conrad Salinger.

A romantic comedy so inane and inept that it seems to have driven Cary Grant into retirement for a couple of years, until Alfred Hitchcock persuaded him to return in To Catch a Thief (1955). It's certainly a waste of the considerable talents of Grant and Deborah Kerr. Grant plays a businessman who gets tired of his fiancée's (Kerr) devotion to her career with the State Department and calls off the engagement when he falls for a Middle Eastern princess (Betta St. John) who has been raised to serve men. Because the princess comes from an oil-rich country, the State Department enlists Kerr's character in handling the negotiations leading to the princess's marriage to the businessman. The result is a queasy 1950s take on feminism and international relations in which no one behaves like the rational human beings they're supposed to be.

All About Eve (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1950)

Bette Davis and Thelma Ritter in All About Eve

Margo Channing: Bette Davis
Eve Harrington: Anne Baxter
Addison DeWitt: George Sanders
Karen Richards: Celeste Holm
Bill Sampson: Gary Merrill
Lloyd Richards: Hugh Marlowe
Miss Casswell: Marilyn Monroe
Birdie: Thelma Ritter

Director: Joseph L. Mankiewicz
Screenplay: Joseph L. Mankiewicz
Based on a story by Mary Orr
Cinematography: Milton R. Krasner

Talk, talk, talk. Ever since the movies learned to do it, it has been the glory -- and sometimes the bane -- of the medium. We cherish some films because they do it so well: the films of Preston Sturges, Howard Hawks, and Quentin Tarantino, for example, would be nothing without their characters' abundantly gifted gab. Hardly a year goes by without someone compiling a list of the "greatest movie quotes of all time." And invariably the lists include such lines as "Fasten your seat belts, it's going to be a bumpy night" or "You have a point. An idiotic one, but a point." Those are spoken by, respectively, Margo Channing and Addison DeWitt in All About Eve, one of the movies' choicest collections of talk. Joseph L. Mankiewicz won the best screenplay Oscar for the second consecutive year -- he first won the previous year for A Letter to Three Wives, which, like All About Eve, he also directed -- and in both cases he received the directing Oscar as well. Would we admire Mankiewicz's lines as much if they had not been delivered by Bette Davis and George Sanders, along with such essential performers as Celeste Holm, Thelma Ritter, and, in a small but stellar part, Marilyn Monroe? It could be said that Mankiewicz's dialogue tends to upend All About Eve: The glorious wisecracks and one-liners are what we remember about it, far more than its satiric look at the Broadway theater or its portrait of the ambitious Eve Harrington. We also remember the film as the continental divide in Bette Davis's career, the moment in which she ceased to be a leading lady and became the paradigmatic Older Actress, relegated more and more to character roles and campy films like What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (Robert Aldrich, 1962). All About Eve, in which Margo turns 40 -- Davis was 42 -- and ever so reluctantly hands over the reins to Eve -- Baxter was 27 -- is a kind of capitulation, an unfortunate acceptance that a female actor's career has passed its peak, when in fact all that is needed is writers and directors and producers who are willing to find material that demonstrates the ways in which life goes on for women as much as for men.