Release Date: September 29, 1954
Running Time: 130 minutes
Starring: Humphrey Bogart, Ava Gardner, Edmond O’Brien, Rossini Brazzi, Warren Stevens
Directed by: Joseph L. Mankiewicz
The Barefoot Contessa is a prime example of style overshadowing substance. It is a gorgeous film to look at and the stars are beautiful, too. The acting all around is good to excellent. So why is it just a middle of the road film? What is it about this film that prevents it from being one of the greats from it’s era?
This is the story of Maria (Ava Gardner), a stage performer at a restaurant in Spain who attracts the attention of film producer Kirk Edwards (Warren Stevens), who is in the country scouting out some new talent for a film he is making. In tow is his chosen director Harry Dawes (Humphrey Bogart), Oscar Muldoon (Edmond O’Brien), and a starlet whose only purpose in the film is to demonstrate how ill tempered Kirk can be when he feels someone is insulting him in any way.
After seeing Maria perform, Kirk sends Oscar to try and get Maria to sit with them but he fails. Harry, who is more savvy and less excitable manages to get her to accept the invitation but the mannerisms of Kirk coupled with the abruptness and lack of tact from Oscar causes her to flee the table rather than listen anymore to them. Harry tracks her down to her home and manages to convince her to accept the opportunity to try out for the new film, leaving behind an abusive mother and a downtrodden father.
Naturally, Maria wows the filmmakers and lands the film. This leads to more starring rolls that propel Maria to movie star status. But Maria is not like the typical starlet obsessed with film success and her public image. When news that her father has murdered her mother back in Spain she drops everything to fly home and support her father despite how this may negatively impact her image. Likewise, she finds little to no enjoyment from the immaturity of the men who flock around her at gatherings.
The film opens and closes with Maria’s funeral, a bookend tactic that serves to drench the entire film with a sense of dread and uncertainty. We know immediately that everything in the rest of the film is leading up to her ultimate demise. This makes it difficult to enjoy much of the proceedings because we know where it is all leading to. Early on when Harry first gains an audience with Maria we see that the two have great chemistry together. It is palpable and the banter between them says more than just the words alone. It would be a sheer delight to watch this without the fore knowledge of where this ultimately leads.
The directing really lets this film down. Filmmaking 101 will teach you a fundamental truth: show, don’t tell. This truth is all but ignored in this film. Major important events happen off screen, portrayed by a sentence or two in dialogue, or (even worse) voice over. In one scene Maria gives a spectacular performance in the courtroom defending her father but we never see it or experience it in any way. We hear about it in voice over narration by Oscar Muldoon as he watches it play out. There are many such instances like this that are unsatisfying and keep us at arms length.
It is obvious that Mankiewicz fell in love with the duo of Harry and Maria as these scenes provide us with carefully crafted dialogue that nearly always hits. It is during these moments that we feel closest to Maria as a person and not as a film star. In fact the film never lets us see Maria as the latter. This starts out as intriguing but never pans out and thus leaves us frustrated and at arms length. This is not a knock on Ava Gardner’s portrayal. She is spot on playing a nationality she was not and delivering a strong, yet fragile woman is a foreign world. The blame is entirely on Mankiewicz who elected to explain everything through awful voice overs rather than find a more natural and satisfying way to get these things across.
The final result is an unsatisfying picture that tells an intriguing story in such a way as to dissolve nearly all the intrigue and interest through some very clumsy filmmaking. It is too long by nearly a half hour and tells you in the first minute that this is not going to have a happy ending. Tragedies can and do work in films but they require a skilled hand at developing characters we care about and can get invested in. This film keeps us at a distance at all times, drawing us a little in during just a handful of scenes between the two stars before kicking us back onto the sidelines. In the end it is just too difficult to get invested in what we already know is going to happen in the end.
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