Today TCM airs two movies, The Old Maid and Old Acquaintance, both starring Bette Davis and Miriam Hopkins, about rivals in life and love. Of course, Bette Davis made another movie about a rivalry that’s a little more familiar to people, and we’ll get to that in a second, but first let me just state how much I love a good rivalry on film. Sometimes people confuse a nemesis for a rival and while a nemesis isn’t necessarily a rival, a rival is often a nemesis. True rivals; two or more people pursuing the same goal, prize, lover, etc.; can be competing benevolently or downright maliciously. Below are some of my personal favorites through the years.
I’ll start with the classic All About Eve, that other Bette Davis movie I mentioned above, while fully admitting that it’s a one-sided rivalry and Eve is just as much a nemesis as a rival. It’s one-sided because, while they are technically competing for the same thing, Broadway stardom, Margo (Davis) has already achieved it and is looking to defensively deflect Eve’s chances while Eve is hoping to knock Margo off her throne. In other words, Eve is the main driver of the action. So, maybe it’s definitely more of a case of Eve as Margo’s nemesis but Eve woos all of Margo’s friends and even tries to seduce her boyfriend. In a way, it’s like their rivalry is built around becoming Margo. Margo thinks she’s a faded shadow of herself and Eve fancies herself the new Margo and so Margo’s soul becomes the object of the rivalry. Either way, it’s always been a personal favorite (as it has for a lot of people) and I think the reason why is because Margo and Eve have so little malevolent interaction. The scheming and bad mouthing all takes place behind the other one’s back. It’s not an open rivalry, it’s a subverted one. One in which they publicly show no ill will towards the other while privately hoping the other one crashes and burns. That keeps the action tight and the bitter resentment simmering, rather than boiling over. When it ends, they both have what they want and a third rival makes herself known. Margo can transition into the mature roles of the theater she now accepts and Eve will have to compete with every Phoebe that strolls into her apartment.
Another great rivalry is oddly related to All About Eve in an interesting way. Anthony Shaffer’s Sleuth is another personal favorite (and I don’t care that it’s stunningly obvious the detective is Michael Caine, I still love it – no, that’s not a spoiler because there’s no way you can watch it and not know the detective is played by Michael Caine) and it was directed by the same man who gave us All About Eve, Joseph L. Mankiewicz. The two rivals at the center of the film (and the left, right, and outer edges), Andrew Wyke (Laurence Olivier) and Milo Tindel (Michael Caine), are after the same woman and that woman, Andrew’s wife and Milo’s mistress, is named Eve Channing, a combination of the Eve Harrington and Margo Channing from All About Eve.
In Sleuth, the rivalry is deadly and, at a couple of different points in the movie, it appears that one of the two rivals has been killed though it is not immediately made clear to the viewer. In the end, both rivals win, so to speak. One rival takes the other’s life, for real, but the other makes sure the murdering rival goes to prison, but how that comes about I won’t reveal, nor if Eve Channing lives or dies. But, yeah, the detective is Michael Caine. Sorry. They really should have done a better job with that part of the story.
Raiders of the Lost Ark provides probably the best adventure movie rivalry out there, that between archaeologists Indiana Jones and Rene Belloq (pronounced “Bell-Ock” not “Bell-Oh-sh”). What makes it so good is that it’s set up from the very start of the movie that the two have been competing for years, always after the same antiquities. What’s so unintentionally hilarious, but wasn’t at the time of its release, is that Jones is meant to look better than Belloq because Belloq takes the antiquities and sells them whereas Jones puts them in a museum (“That belongs in a museum!”) instead of both of them simply leaving the items in their rightful homes. Jones is just as much a thief, he just doesn’t sell the items for profit. And, of course, he doesn’t constantly attempt to kill Belloq, something Belloq can’t seem to stop doing with Jones. So there’s that. Still, I wouldn’t mind seeing a tv series featuring the two characters (and not like that Young Indiana Jones series!) that takes place before Belloq’s unfortunate demise in Raiders of the Lost Ark where each episode they vie for the same artifact with the victor changing from week to week. After all, I feel like the deck is stacked a bit too heavily in Jones’ favor in the movie. I bet there were a few times where Belloq got there first and Jones stole it from him instead.
We have rivals for success and fame, rivals for a woman’s love, and rivals for the Ark of the Covenant. How about rivals for King of the Pool Table. The Hustler is that movie and despite all the great interplay between Fast Eddie Felson (Paul Newman) and Bert (George C. Scott), it’s the rivalry between Fast Eddie and Minnesota Fats (Jackie Gleason) that intrigued me the first time I saw it. One of the reasons why was that it was so congenial. The rivalry is purely about the game and while Bert and others exploit it and the players to their advantage, to Eddie and Minnesota it’s all about playing a clean game of pool and may the best man win. There’s no animosity, no violence, no hatred. They respect each other and the game. It’s a friendly rivalry, the kind you don’t often see in the movies, but no less exciting.
As always, I run out of space with dozens of choices left unwritten. There are bitter rivalries I love (Amadeus) and farcical ones (Bedtime Story and its remake, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels), too, but serious or comic, the one thing they all have in common is great performers matched equally against each other. A rivalry may look great on paper until you cast the wrong actors and suddenly, it’s not so great anymore. All the movies I mentioned above have two actors working perfectly off of each other. A great movie rivalry isn’t just the characters, it’s the actors, the directors, the writers, all working together to leave the audience captivated, rooting for one over the other, or for both, or neither. And when it’s done right, it’s a formula that can’t be rivaled.