Potent Quotables - Margo Channing in All About Eve
Tuesday, December 10, 2013 at 11:00PM Anne Marie here, looking forward to the end of the holidays when we can all toast the new year with a martini in hand. Many iconic movie lines seem to have come from characters who were three sheets to the wind, so I'd like to celebrate a few of them. I'll start with one of my favorite divas: Margo Channing, Star of Screen and Scotch. Her poison of the night is martinis very dry; buckets of them in fact. During her party - after "fasten your seat belts" but before the bumpiest part of the night - Margo corners Max to deliver this gem:
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."
Though swimming in her self-pity at the bottom of a martini glass, Margot Channing is still a star.
Stars - even drunk ones - get the best lines, and the true insight and witty delivery speak to both Bette Davis's fantastic acting and Mankiewicz's devilish dialogue.
What's your favorite tipsy movie quote?
Slur it out in the comments, won't you?
Reader Comments (12)
"Don't speak." (Bullets over Broadway)
"CK Dexter Haven you have unsuspected depth!"
It's not so much the line as the delivery.
Michael took my movie but not my character, which is basically everything Kate/Tracy says in that drunk scene.
"Is it not a handsome day that begins, professor?"
This movie is an amusement park for actressexauls.
"Hmmm, tell me something, those two girls at the party last night. Did you, by any chance, happen to fuck them"
Can you guess the movie?
Technically not drunk but certainly acting like it
"Don't take me home until i am drunk... until i am very drunk indeed!"
Holly Golightly was the first movie character I felt in love with.
Also: "Do you think she is handsomely paid.."
Ava Gardner on meeting Bette Davis:
"Maybe I just didn`t have the temperament for stardom. I`ll never forget seeing Bette Davis at the Hilton in Madrid. I went up to her and said, "Miss Davis, I`m Ava Gardner and I`m a great fan of yours." And do you know, she behaved exactly as I wanted her to behave. "Of course you are, my dear," she said. "Of course you are." And she swept on. Now that`s a star."
"Sean Connery is Monique's boyfriend! He may be three hundred years old, but he's still a stud!"
Drunk actresses in movies get the best lines. No one else in Hollywood wants to admit the truth about ageism.
All About Even has been added to Netflix instant. So I plan to watch it at least a dozen more times.
I love that (and every other) Margo Channing quote.
A few of my other favorites:
"Hello Dexter. Hello George. Hello Mike." ~Katharine Hepburn, The Philadelphia Story, more for delivery than for the line itself
"That's fucking amazing." ~Meryl Streep, Adaptation, again for delivery. Granted, she's tipsy on a fictitious orchid-extract drug, not alcohol, but I still think it counts.
"And I say to the cabbie, 'Take me to the middle of the George Washington Bridge.' And the cabbie turns around and he says, 'Don't do it, buddy! You're a young man! You've got got your whole life ahead of you!'" ~William Holden, Network
God, every line she utters is glorious.
I personally love "Remind me to tell you about the time I looked into the heart of an artichoke" and "I don't have your unyielding good taste".
@Tyler -- that quote is glorious
KAREN: I hope it gives (Addison DeWitt) heartburn.
BILL: No heart to burn.
MARGO: Everybody has a heart. Except some people.
ha!
"Bloody damn butchering Nazi pig! "
-Burke Dennings in The Exorcist
Also (cheating a little bit) but Kym's entire toast at Rachel's rehearsal dinner in Rachel Getting Married, if we want to expand the category to include lines from recovering alcoholics/substance abusers. That entire speech was perfection from Anne Hathaway. I wish she'd do something else that stripped down and naturalistic.