All four female stars in this 1950 adaptation of Mary Orr’s short story were cited for Academy Awards, but it was writer-director Joseph L. Mankiewicz who landed a brace of Oscars for the showbiz bitchfest, with a flashback format resembling the one his brother Herman had devised for Citizen Kane nine years earlier.
The stinging bon mots occasionally sound handcrafted rather than raspingly spontaneous, but aspiring actress Anne Baxter’s rise to the top over the corpse of her supposed idol, Bette Davis, remains rousing and endlessly amusing. And the merciless demythologising of the tawdry trappings of fame is acutely relevant in these days of transient celebrity.