Though I, too, am a Theater critic and commentator — and have been for 26 years at The New York Times — I have little in common with Mr. DeWitt other than my nominal profession and a fondness for dry martinis. I do not share his withering trans-Atlantic accent, his soigné wardrobe, his social coziness with the people he eviscerates in his column, nor his love for making and destroying reputations overnight.

Nor are the show folk I write about much like the egomaniacal, mythomaniacal, dipsomaniacal crew that Addison chronicles. Yet the musky, intoxicating fragrance that permeates “All About Eve” has everything to do with why I came to New York, and how I wound up in my job.

There have been cases made for “Eve” as a feminist film, and a misogynist one; as a homophobic work and a font of queer folklore (not mutually exclusive); as a serious slice of cinematic auteurism and a preening piece of unconscious camp. (Impersonations of Davis’s Margo were once a staple of drag acts.) There is, inevitably, a fanatic’s guidebook, Sam Staggs’s “All About ‘All About Eve.’”

It has also inspired innumerable other works. The international roster of films that offer variations on the central female mentor and protégée relationship at the center of “Eve” are as varied as Pedro Almodóvar’s “All About My Mother,” John Cassavetes’s “Opening Night,” Olivier Assayas’s “Clouds of Sils Maria,” Yorgos Lanthimos’s “The Favourite” and — lest we forget — Paul Verhoeven’s “Showgirls.”

There have been literal adaptations, too. The movie has been the basis of a hit musical comedy (“Applause,” which opened in 1970, starring Lauren Bacall) and a mixed-media deconstruction from the theater experimentalist Ivo van Hove, staged in London last year (starring Gillian Anderson). Neither captured the essence of the original, though.

Perky, affectionate and upbeat, “Applause” translated the arrogant stiletto thrust of Mankiewicz’s dialogue into the crowd-courting bounce of clunkily rhymed song. The van Hove version, while it stuck close to the original screenplay, drained its vitality, creating a defeated kingdom of walking shadows, where artifice had lost its sheen and poseurs could no longer pose with conviction.