Oh, the good life
Full of fun, seems to be the ideal.
Mm, the good life,
Let’s you hide all the sadness you feel.
—‘The Good Life’, Jack Reardon
The Barefoot Contessa seems to exist for three reasons: to expose the vapidity of Hollywood; to give a good cast some great dialogue; and to serve as a testament to the beauty of Ava Gardner. It succeeds in all of these endeavours, but moves at such a glacial pace, you begin to wonder if the whole business is worth the time.
We begin with an ending: the funeral of Maria Vargas (Ava Gardner), a Spanish dancer and actress who found fame in Hollywood, but not fulfilment. Among the mourners is Harry Dawes (Humphrey Bogart), a close friend who narrates her story in extended flashbacks. Harry first met Maria in a night club in Madrid a few years before. He was a once-vaunted, now down on his luck director shackled to the employ of Kirk Edwards (Warren Stevens), a tycoon who fancied himself a producer. She was the dancer Edwards was determined to put under contract. Cunningly, writer-director Joseph L. Mankiewicz makes us work to figure out why. Edwards and his party arrive late, missing Maria’s performance. And although we’re in the room before them, we never see Maria dance either. Her allure is measured by her effect on her audience: the men who lean forward, enraptured; the young couple who passionately embrace. Anyone who can harness that on screen will make a fortune.
Maria loves American films, admires Harry as an artist who has directed the likes of Jean Harlow and Carole Lombard and has heard of Edwards (“He is the owner of Texas,” she tells Harry definitively), but isn’t interested in Hollywood stardom, at least not when it’s brokered by men as small as Edwards and his publicist-cum-lackey Oscar Muldoon (Edmond O’Brien). It’s Harry who persuades her otherwise—a decision he comes to regret.
For a film about filmmaking, The Barefoot Contessa shows us precious little of it. Harry never appears hunched over a typewriter, fine-tuning a script; there are no scenes of Maria being directed or even running lines. The dreams Hollywood manufactures don’t interest Mankiewicz half as much as the nightmare he perceives the industry to be. After Maria films her first screen test, Harry arranges for it to be viewed not just by Edwards, but also his competitors. Men who, mere days before, would have shunned Harry as a has-been, trip over themselves in their rush to assure him of their good will. “The difference between American and European movie magnates is astonishing,” he tells us. “There is absolutely none.”
The Hollywood we are shown is hollow, which is why it attracts people who are lacking something. Warped by greed, Edwards knows he is without talent and worth less than the people he seeks to control. He will never be satisfied. Obsequious to the point of obsession, Muldoon relies on his employers, the public and his ability to mediate between them to give his life meaning. When Maria refuses to abandon her scandal-riddled family even on the cusp of stardom, he is horrified, not to mention confused by the impulse.
What Maria lacks is harder to define. Harry compares her to Cinderella, although she has little interest in glass slippers, or shoes of any kind. She prefers to walk barefoot, close to the earth. Gardner plays her as a paradox made flesh: an approachable goddess, remote yet just within reach; a free spirit who walks willingly into a gilded cage; a realist who clings to the illusion of perfect love. When her Prince Charming (an Italian count played by Rossano Brazzi) arrives at last, the scene feels so like a fairy tale, it’s a little disappointing when we discover he doesn’t have a white charger waiting for her, just a stylish two-seater.
Yet despite being built around Gardner, The Barefoot Contessa is really Edmond O’Brien’s film. Muldoon says much and much of what he says is patently false. But he believes it, or rather, he believes what he’s saying at any given moment in the hope that you will too. A permanent sheen of sweat, the patina of a false grin—these are his stocks in trade. As Edwards’ stooge he exists in a perpetual state of precarity and it’s his attempt to escape that brings the film to its zenith. Edwards and wealthy playboy Bravano (a magnificent Marius Goring) squabble over Maria at a dinner party—the guests watch them lob insults back and forth like spectators at a tennis match—but it’s Muldoon who provides the climax: a torrent of contempt for Edwards so dazzling even Harry is impressed. The speech is both Muldoon’s La Marseillaise and a showcase for O’Brien that helped win him a much-deserved Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor (so far, he remains the only actor to win an Oscar for playing an ‘Oscar’).
The film’s other chief virtue is Jack Cardiff’s exquisite cinematography. Just look at the chiaroscuro in the nightclub in which Maria dances, a smoky cavern where, at one table, four call girls sit, picked out in amber light, knitting, reading and painting their nails. Rembrandt might have painted them. Cardiff’s camera also treats Gardner with reverence, most clearly in an early scene where Harry and Maria talk at night and he mentions, half jokingly, that she’s using the moon as a key light. The light catches Gardner’s hair and washes over her skin and we know exactly what Harry means.
Still, not even Cardiff or O’Brien can disguise the fact that the film’s material is stretched thin. Mankiewicz treats his characters as if they were specimens under glass, to be poked and prodded, and takes his story far too seriously for its own good, weighing it down until it resembles a state coach—gilded, a trifle gaudy and a serious drag. For a film that decries shallowness, there’s much less to The Barefoot Contessa than there should be.
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