THE FILM-DVD "BAREFOOT CONTESSA": A REVIEW

THEBAREFOOTCONTESSA
Directed by: Joseph L. Mankiewicz
Written by: Joseph L. Mankiewicz
Starring: Ava Gardiner, Humphrey Bogart, Edmond O’Brien, Rossano Brazzi
Academy Awards: Edmund O’Brian - best supporting actor
Released: I954

Ava Gardiner, not Marilyn Monroe, was the real American screen sex-goddess. Ava was fire; Marilyn a flame. This film goes a little over-the-top in its worship of Ava's frank sensuality, but tempers it with the emotional distance of the role. The film’s theme: the tree that's forced to flower continuously will never produce seed. By now, we’ve seen enough international sex bombs to know there’s truth there, but even then it was a cliché. And sometimes it's more interesting to flower continuously than produce seed.

The picture also pays homage to all things Spanish; there are lots of guitars and “Ole’s” and smoldering looks; but in the mid-I950s everyone with pretensions to hipness had bullfight pictures on their walls (now showing in thrift-shops), just above the new HI-FI playing jazz or guitar music; Hemingway's bullfight and Spanish preoccupations cast a long shadow in those days. Also passe´ are the rich playboy types, and the chauffeurs, castles, and other accouterments of wealth that figure so prominently.

The Barefoot Contessa is a biopic of the life of forties superstar Rita Hayworth, who’d been making sensational worldwide headlines a few years earlier by marrying millionaire-jetsetter Ali Khan. Rita was even asked to play the lead, but declined. It must have been strange to watch a picture about your own life, given the film's downbeat mood. The stand-in for Ali Khan, Italian star Rossano Brazzi, is given a back-story similar to Khan’s. He’s a member of the Italian nobility and he’s constantly fulminating on how useless he is in the modern world - which would have been news three hundred years ago. Like many films, it criticizes something (the European nobility) while rolling around in it - witness the title. Americans of this movie's day still had a thing about European nobility, mainly because they did't have an inherited nobility of their own, unless you count film stars. Mankiewicz wanted Americans to see what the real thing was like. They're shown to be vacant-minded morons or else alcoholic ghosts.

Contessa has other pretensions, and it sometimes fulfills them, especially if you like Hemingway and like the filmed version of The Sun Also Rises (I957), which this picture closely resembles. The film comments on the state of the movie business at the time. The character of movie mogul Kirk Edwards is modeled on Howard Hughes. The things that Kirk does or threatens to do in the movie come right out of Hughes' playbook, but were not unique to Hughes. Edmund O'Brian won an Oscar for acting as his greasy yes-man, apparently for sweating so well; he always has a hanky in his hand. Bogart’s in this too, as Mank’s alter ego, and that alone makes Contessa worthwhile; his running narration on the state of the movie business has many unkind comments; Mank settled some scores. Bogie himself looks a bit tired; all those cigarettes having caught up with him by then. Still, things are better when he’s on the screen, or at least narrating.

Ava’s in healthy shape, playing peasant-turned-star Maria she moves with feline grace from her Spanish roots on to Hollywood stardom and the Italian Count, who owns some fine real estate on the shores of a lake. When she gets to talk, it’s to spout philosophy. It’s all very romantic; too bad she’s got to die; not giving anything away; that's established in scene one, at her funeral (the story is told in flashback). Mank’s dialogue crackles and there are fine performances by an ensemble of talented performers. The film’s problems are certain giganticisms - too many characters, too many points of view, too many millionaire playboys; there must be 30 speaking parts in the picture. For instance Brazzi always drives his own car, yet he has a chauffeur, and the chauffeur's part in the film belongs to another age.

This is one of a slew of American movies in the fifties about Americans in Europe. Generally the Americans come off badly, as being very naïve, especially in the arts of love, a tradition as old as America.

Notes:
(a) Check Maria’s Hollywood home interior. Could be compared with the colors of the apartment in the film Blue Velvet.
(b) Later Ava would comment on Bogart’s predilections: “he hated Italy and lived on ham and eggs and steak whenever he could”. She envied his acting experience: “he certainly knew more acting tricks than I did, and didn’t hesitate to use them. I have to admit he probably forced me into a better performance than I could have managed without him”
(c) Bogart’s cough was at this point interfering with his performance. Edmond O’Brien later said, “many takes were printed simply for the lines Mankiewicz could get between coughs”
(d) Mankiewicz on Bogart: “Bogie wanted you to be afraid of him a little. He made perfectly sure that you knew he was going to be an unpredictable man. I caught on to that and I played my own little game of keeping him off balance by never giving him his opportunity. You forestall it by kidding him out of it”.
(e) Mankiewicz on the jet set: “the jet setters essentially fulfill their own dreams and not other people’s. They themselves take their own lives very seriously. They really are the rich scum of the earth, and I detest them”.
(f) Mankiewicz’s original script had Maria find her husband in bed with the (male) chauffeur. But when getting script approval from the studio, writers routinely put in scenes that could then be taken out later in a “compromise” negotiating ploy.
(g) Gardiner hated the film’s promotion: “That damn advertising line, ‘The Worlds Most Beautiful Animal’ will probably follow me around until the end of time”.
(h) Rita Hayworth later developed a memory problem - what was probably undiagnosed Alzheimer's disease, although Hollywood gossip at the time laid the cause to heavy drinking.
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