Gay Best Friend: Addison DeWitt (George Sanders) in "All About Eve" (1950)

A series by Christopher James looking at the 'Gay Best Friend' trope
SERIES FINALE (for now)

She's the bitch who always has the tea... Addison DeWitt.All good things must come to an end (or extended hiatus). Over the past year, we’ve covered 42 examples of the gay best friend spanning from 1955 to 2021. Don’t worry, I’ll be starting a new column very shortly, so you haven’t seen the last of me. However, we are going out in fabulously bitchy style with our final entry. Not only is this our oldest entry, but it’s also the only Gay Best Friend that earned the actor in question an Oscar statue. Needless to say, George Sanders’ Best Supporting Actor win for the gossip columnist Addison DeWitt in All About Eve is one of the best wins in the category.

The central premise of All About Eve is a tale as old as time. Aging Broadway star Margot Channing (Bette Davis) meets an adoring fan one night named Eve Harrington (Anne Baxter). Margot bonds with Eve over her favorite topic… herself. She eventually giving her employment in the theater. Soon, the much younger Eve starts to get greedy, taking some of Margot’s spotlight as the new, younger face of the theater...

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Smackdown '46: Duel in the Sun with the King of Siam

Welcome back to the Supporting Actress Smackdown. Each month we pick an Oscar vintage to explore through the lens of actressing at the edges. This episode goes back to the 19th Academy Awards honoring 1946. It isn't a particularly beloved Oscar vintage though the Best Picture winner, The Best Years of Our Lives, is sublime. Apart from the winner and the Christmas film It's a Wonderful Life, the Academy all but ignored the most enduring pictures of that post-war year (Notorious, Gilda, The Postman Always Rings Twice). But we're here to discuss Best Supporting Actress and these five women were having a moment...

THE NOMINEES For the 1946 Oscars the Academy invited back two previous winners (Gale Sondergaard & Ethel Barrymore), tossed a bouquet in the form of 'career' nomination to a legend (Lillian Gish), honored a character actress for stretching (Flora Robson) without realizing how poorly that kind of stretch would age, and invited a new starlet (Anne Baxter) into the club. That's a typical mix in some ways though the films were a fun mix of genres rather than five straightforward dramas. We've got a culture clash historical epic (Anna and the King of Siam), a thriller (The Spiral Staircase), a camp western (Duel in the Sun), a post-war spiritual journey (The Razor's Edge), and a restless genre-hopping whatsit (Saratoga Trunk).

THE PANELISTS Here to talk about the performances and films are (alpha order from left to right), playwright Peter Duchan, film critic Guy Lodge, Statueseque's Allen Nguyen, and Actor Tory Devon Smith. And, as ever, your host Nathaniel R. Let's begin...

 SUPPORTING ACTRESS SMACKDOWN + PODCAST  
The companion podcast can be downloaded at the bottom of this article or by visiting the iTunes page...  

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Judy Holliday @ 100: The Oscar Winner's Fascinating Career

by Brent Calderwood

I’m just going to say it. I’m glad Judy Holliday won the Best Actress Oscar for the 1950 comedy Born Yesterday. I’m not saying she should have won—I’m not even saying I would have voted for her if I’d been a member of the Academy. But if I could have been there when the winner was announced on March 29, 1951, I would have been cheering the loudest.

Today—100 years after Holliday’s birth and 56 years and two weeks after her untimely death—Holliday’s Sea Biscuit victory over frontrunners Bette Davis for All About Eve and Gloria Swanson for Sunset Boulevard is still a topic of discussion and debate...

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Best Supporting Actress 1946: Getting to know the nominees

by Cláudio Alves

The Supporting Actress Smackdown of 1946 is fast approaching, and with it comes one of the most head-scratching lineups in the category's history. To call this bunch of films, performances, and legacies problematic is to undersell just how much racial insensitivity plays into this particular Oscar race. Still, what complicates matters further is that the nominated actresses are all artists with considerable talent, superlative careers – most of whom started on stage – and undeniable historical importance. Unpacking all this mess is too great a task, but I'll try to introduce you, dear readers, to this impressive quintet of Old Hollywood thespians...

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The Furniture: The Magnificent Amberson Mansion

"The Furniture" is our weekly series on Production Design. You can click on the images to see them in magnified detail.

by Daniel Walber 

Much has been written about the making of The Magnificent Ambersons, the conflict between Orson Welles and RKO, Robert Wise’s studio-mandated shorter version, Bernard Herrmann’s refusal of credit, and the loss of much of the original footage. It’s a fascinating story.

However, this column isn’t about that. There remains plenty to celebrate in the version that was released to theaters, 75 years ago today. At the top of that list is the Amberson mansion, a triumph of design that should stand next to Citizen Kane’s Xanadu. It’s like a Victorian ancestor to the great palace of Charles Foster Kane, a previous iteration of wealth’s excesses. But the story of The Magnificent Ambersons is not about a meteoric rise in fortune, but what comes after.

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