Contessa <\/em>is, in many ways, a natural continuation of Mankiewicz\u2019s celebrated All About Eve<\/em> \u2013 another poison-penned valentine to popular entertainment, filled with quotable dialogue, memorable characters, and winking nudges to real people. But Contessa <\/em> is comparatively forgotten (aside from the convoluted imprint made by celebrity chef Ina Garten), and that\u2019s a shame; if anything, it\u2019s even more of an inside job than All About Eve<\/em>, as Mankiewicz was a filmmaker first. Bogart\u2019s Harry Dawes is clearly intended as the writer\/director\u2019s stand-in \u2013 there were, keep in mind, comparatively few writer\/directors at the time \u2013 so he understandably serves as something of a hero in the film, helping to make the title character, Maria Vargas (Ava Gardner) a movie star and sex symbol, while acting as her sounding board, confidante, and armchair psychiatrist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He\u2019s not the only unambiguous avatar. The story\u2019s inciting action finds Dawes accompanying Kirk Edwards (Warren Stevens) to a nightclub to recruit Maria \u2013 as a leading lady, as a lover, or as both. Edwards is clearly inspired by Howard Hughes: an independent producer, (mostly inherited) millionaire, playboy, and SOB, as established in that scene, when he smacks a starlet in public. The buzz on The Barefoot Contessa<\/em>, from its production forward, was that it was inspired by the exploits of Rita Hayworth, who not only ascended from Mexican dancer to movie star, but who had engaged in a brief marriage to a prince. But \u201cthat was crap,\u201d Gardner insisted, according to Karina Longworth\u2019s excellent book Seduction<\/em>. \u201cThere was too much sh*t in the script about my affair with Howard\u2026 It could have been called Howard and Ava<\/em>, it was so f*cking obvious.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n These sequences ring with crystal clear authenticity \u2013 they\u2019re written and played by people who have observed the ease with which men like Hughes get those around them to eagerly ask, \u2018How high?\u2019 Bogie\u2019s Dawes can barely contain his contempt for Edwards, though Oscar, his sweaty PR guy, has no such trouble. (Edmond O\u2019Brien won an Oscar for his performance, and earned it.) But Mankiewicz, to his credit, sees through these users; when Edwards sends Dawes to fetch Maria and convince her to screen test for him, Mankiewicz pauses the narrative for a long scene of conversation and connection between these two strangers. It sets up the relationship that propels the picture, but there\u2019s more than that \u2013 it shows Dawes (and by extension, Mankiewicz) seeing this woman as a person, rather than a commodity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He\u2019s about the only one. Oscar describes her as \u201cthis bundle of passion, this hot flame that burned from the screen,\u201d in a voice-over that signals the film switching perspectives, a strategy that marks The Barefoot Contessa<\/em> as Mankiewicz\u2019s closest approximation of his brother Herman\u2019s Oscar-winning script for Citizen Kane<\/em>. As with that screenplay, this one begins at the end, with its focal character dead, and the witnesses to their lives piecing together who they were \u2013 though those notions are often contradictory. The Barefoot Contessa<\/em> even retells key scenes from different perspectives, an ingenious directorial flourish that matches the showiness of the script.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Mankiewicz was truly one of the finest screenwriters of his era, and the genuine poetry of his dialogue is striking here. (His direction is also noteworthy; the frames are cleverly blocked, and Jack Cardiff\u2019s lush color photography spotlights the beauty of both the international locations and the luminous leading lady.) Though the script is somewhat mired in the era\u2019s attitudes about what, exactly, a woman can do and be, he gives the character a noteworthy and welcome complexity; she\u2019s a bit of a player and user herself, we discover, and Gardner is so charismatic, it doesn\u2019t render the character any less sympathetic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s also hard to overstate the value of the film as, if nothing else, an insider\u2019s snapshot of How It All Works, from a pre-Entertainment Tonight<\/em>, pre-Entertainment Weekly<\/em>, pre-TMZ period. The only real \u201cbehind the scenes\u201d information of that Hollywood, besides the trades, was found in the fan magazines \u2013 carefully planted and unquestionably controlled by the studios. Mankiewicz supplies a more complicated picture of the Dream Factory, grimly dramatizing the essential emptiness of celebrity, as well as how much of the industry serves at the pleasure of a handful of egos.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But most of all, The Barefoot Contessa <\/em>is a fascinating exploration of the friction between fantasy and reality \u2013 and not just in terms of the industry where its characters attempt to bridge that gap. It\u2019s a film about fairy tale roles, not just movie stars, but millionaires and royalty. No matter the dream life they aspire to, it seems, once the role is filled and played, it becomes a trap. Some escapes are more painful than others. \u201cThe Barefoot Contessa\u201d is<\/em> <\/em>currently streaming on Amazon Prime<\/em><\/a>. It is also available on Blu-ray from<\/em> <\/em>Twilight Time<\/em><\/a>.<\/em> \u201cLife, every now and then, behaves as if it had seen too many bad movies.\u201d So notes Harry Dawes (Humphrey […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":531,"featured_media":13852,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1399,1381],"tags":[1431,1422,162],"class_list":["post-13849","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-looking-back","category-movies","tag-classic-corner","tag-looking-back","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13849","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/531"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13849"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13849\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22856,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13849\/revisions\/22856"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13852"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13849"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13849"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13849"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/04\/barefoot2-1024x550.jpg\")
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