Weekend Update (Sunday Edition): All About
Last weekend, it was books. This weekend, it was movies. But you don’t want to hear about my storage sagas. While Kathleen was packing for Coral Gables last night, we watched Laura, simply because, of the 220 DVDs that were taken down from shelves, removed from plastic boxes, and slipped into album sleeves, Otto Preminger’s 1944 classic was the one to hit a snag in my consciousness.
In the middle of Laura, Kathleen made the most astonishing remark. “I always confuse this with All About Eve.” She proceeded to offer a plausible explanation. You have to admit: it could have been called All About Laura. In any case, we had to watch Joseph Mankiewicz’s 1951 classic next — not that either one of us was awake for the ending.
Kathleen’s slight confusion must have thrown my antennae into overfeel, because one of Eve’s best-known scenes struck me in an entirely novel way. (Novel for me, I hasten to add.) It was the scene in which Margot Channing shows up very late for a reading with Miss Casswell, Addison DeWitt’s protégée. Having encountered Addison in the lobby, she enters the theatre perfectly well aware that Eve has stood in for her, giving a reading of the part of Cora that was full of “fire and music.” Her lover, Bill, and her playwright, Lloyd, behave as though it’s unreasonable (ie feminine) of her to be upset about her younger understudy’s encroachment.
What was new last night was that I saw the men’s response as a pretense, as a boys’ own club maneuver to wink away the bad faith of having let Eve read. They must have known that Margot would be furious when she found out, and they probably ought to have seen to it that there was nothing for Margot to find out. Instead, they indulged the pleasure of indulging a pretty young lady, and now they demonize their victim, framing her as an “hysterical woman.” When Bill “realizes” that Margot must have been wound up by Addison, the reptilian critic is saddled with the moral blame, but at the cost of Margot’s reputation for self-control.
Even more interesting was the aftertaste of grasping that, in order for the foregoing to be true, the two men must understand a thing or two about women, instead of being the clueless dudes that they pretend to be throughout the initial phase of Margot’s meltdown.
As for Laura, if I didn’t see anything altogether new, I was battered once again by the film’s modern raciness. Despite its thoroughgoing theatricality, Laura is every inch an adult feature — freakishly so, for the times.