All About Eve a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. The film has been selected by the American Film Institute for many of their 100 Years lists. When AFI named Bette Davis #2 on its list of the greatest female American screen legends, "All About Eve" was the film selected to highlight Davis' legendary career. The Writers Guild of America has ranked the film's screenplay as the fifth greatest ever written. The film opens with the image of a fictitious award trophy, described by DeWitt as the "highest honor our theater knows: the Sarah Siddons Award for Distinguished Achievement." The statuette is modelled after
All About Eve involves the post-World War II pressure placed upon women to acquiesce agency. This pressure to resume "traditional" female roles is especially illustrated in this film in the contrast between Margo's mockery of Karen Richards for being a "happy little housewife" and her lengthy and inspired monologue, as a reformed woman later, about the virtuousness of marriage, including how a woman is not truly a woman without having a man beside her. This submissive and effeminate Margo is contrasted with the theatricality, combativeness, and egotism of the earlier career woman Margo, and the film's two homosexual characters. Margo quips that Eve