Lunch Break Video: Some great scenes from “All About Eve” which was a highlight of TCM Film Festival

I’ve seen All About Eve many times but until last Saturday, had never seen it on the big screen.

I loved it before but thanks to the TCM Classic Movie Festival, this perfect film came to life for me and others in the audience as it never had before. The dialogue is perfection in this film – so smart, so quick, so funny and biting.

The cast is A-plus all the way – especially the great Bette Davis as Margo Channing.

Host Robert Osborne introduced the film and pointed out that Alec Baldwin was among those in the audience. I knew that because I was standing next to him in the elevator on the way in!

Anyway, Osborne told us that the Bette Davis he know – and he knew her well – was not at all like Margo.

“She was a New England lady who liked to cook and she was a great hostess,” he said. “If she liked you, you couldn’t do any wrong. If she didn’t like you, you couldn’t do anything right!”

I was surprised at his remarks about Miss Davis’s death in 1989 at the age of 81. She had suffered a stroke in the mid-80s, battled breast cancer, and endured the betrayal of her daughter who wrote a nasty book about her. But she had fought to regain her speech and to work again and had one last great role a few years before her death in The Whales of August opposite Lillian Gish.

Still, Osborne said: “I think it was her time to go. There was only pain for her in the end.”