Year: 1954
Cast: Humphrey Bogart, Ava Gardner, Edmond O'Brien, Marius Goring, Valentina Cortese, Rossano Brazzi, Elizabeth Sellars, Warren Stevens, Mari Aldon
Director: Joseph L. Mankiewicz
Nominations: Best Supporting Actor (O'Brien), Best Story and Screenplay
By 1954 the Hollywood Machine was firmly established. While it's mutated a lot since then, it remains largely the same. It's run by slick people with a lot of money who don't care about anyone but themselves. It's a game, and you can either be a player or be played.
The Barefoot Contessa is about that game, its players and its pawns, and how you can find yourself being both.
Humphrey Bogart stars as Harry Dawes, a Hollywood screenwriter and director with a reputation for heavy drinking, whose career is winding down. One of the former greats, his drinking habit, which is stated to have raged out of control, has made him something of a pariah in his later years, and now he's forced to work for whomever will hire him, which at the beginning of the film is eccentric millionaire Kirk Edwards (Warren Stevens), who's looking to produce his own movie just because he can. I'm reminded of Howard Hughes, who became a movie producer mainly because he could, and then tried to play the game his own way, only to produce two of the most infamous flops in Hollywood; The Outlaw and The Conqueror. Apparently Edwards was inspired by Hughes, so that isn't surprising.
Edwards wants a "new face" and has heard of a vibrant flamenco dancer down in Madrid names Maria Vargas (Ava Gardner), who has an aversion to wearing shoes, to the point where it kinda defines her. He, Harry and Oscar Muldoon (Edmond O'Brien), an oily public relations specialist, find the nightclub she dances in and after Oscar repulses her and nearly loses her for good, Harry convinces her to do a screen test, turning her into a movie star overnight.
That's not where her story ends, of course, and in fact the movie begins with her funeral, as the various men gathered there, Harry, Oscar, her eventual husband Count Vincenzo Torlato-Favrini (Rossano Brazzi), take turns narrating how they came to know her, and how each came to lose her. It's a tragic tale of a woman whom all desired, yet she desired nothing herself.
Honestly I didn't know what to make of this movie. There were a number of interesting moments, moments that worked quite well, but I'm not sure they added up to a movie that was interesting, and worked well. I never felt my attention wandering, but I did find myself wondering how long this or that scene was going to keep going. I wondered frequently if I was supposed to be on Maria's side or if I was supposed to be just as mystified by her as the various men were. That's the real key to her character; she's a riddle wrapped in an enigma, and the three men who stand at her funeral and tell us her story, mainly through their perspective on it, none of them really understood her. Her motivations, her desires, her drives, they all seem to be an utter mystery to the two men who shepherded her through the Hollywood game, and the man who made her royalty through marriage, despite all three of them needing to understand those very things in order to do what they do.
Several characters point out that life isn't like a movie script, because in a script everything has to make sense, and in life quite a bit does not. This is part of the mystery of Maria Vargas; actors always need to know their motivation. What's Maria's? This is what baffles Harry, Oscar and others. Frequently it's commented on how Maria's life is like that of a fairy tale. But how could such a fairy tale play out in real life? Could it end any other way than tragic?
I'll say for one thing that I don't think Gardner sold this role at all. Let's get this out of the way first; yes, we have a Caucasian women who's as American as apple pie playing the exotic flamenco dancer from Spain whose foreign spice is part of what draws men to her. It was the 50's; happened all the time back then. But other than being able to look pretty, poised and kind of vaguely angry all the time, Gardner didn't really seem to do much. We're told endlessly how intriguing she is, but I found her boring. I've heard that one mark of a bad movie is that the movie keeps trying to tell us something that we can see for ourselves isn't true; a woman is "the most beautiful woman in the world" when she's pretty average, or this newly discovered musician is inventive and going to change the world when they sound pretty much like what we've already heard. And here we keep being told how exotic and mystifying Maria Vargas is, and frankly, nothing about her was particularly captivating and if there was a mystery, I didn't care to solve it. I understand the character is based on Rita Hayworth. This makes sense as Hayworth was Hispanic, began her career as a flamenco dancer and later became a star and married royalty, but she was more interesting than Gardner makes Maria. Like Gene Lockhart, her accent is uneven, and often her performance seems more like just making sure she gets her lines right. She was already an Oscar nominee herself by this point, too. I wonder what I'll think of her in her nominated performance, when I get there?
Bogart, as always, is imminently watchable, and he's the perfect guy to play a Hollywood type that doesn't act, as he's one of the few major movie stars who never looked like a movie star. He looks like a dude. He should have been a character actor, based on his looks alone, but something about him commands your attention, and he's got to be at the center of the story. That's what made him a leading man. He's just as good here as he always is, and it's a little sad to know that this Bogart, looking just slightly grayer around the temples than he did as Rick Blaine, was only a few years away from death at this point.
But what about this movie's sole winner, Edmond O'Brien? Well, I'll level with you; I've never seen him in a movie before, but I have seen others review movies he's been in, and I can't really figure out what I think of him as an actor. I get the feeling that the kind of parts he got are the kind of parts John Goodman gets offered today, and I don't mean due to weight, because O'Brien is just sturdy, not fat, but I mean in personality. If I were remaking The Barefoot Contessa today, Goodman is exactly who I would cast as the sweaty, jowly sleazeball that is Oscar Muldoon. Oddly, despite his sleaziness, Muldoon is portrayed sympathetically, as he attempts to use his charm on Maria but she sees right through him, and works for several bosses his job is to talk up, but he personally hates. O'Brien manages to portray a player of the Hollywood game, a cog in its machinery, that isn't much more than that, if anything, and yet we are interested in his side of the story. This is to O'Brien's credit, and I can see why of all the actors in this piece, he's the one who got the nomination. Whether or not he deserved the win, I can't say yet, as he's the first performance from this category and year that I've watched, but I will say that it's one of the first performances I've seen from these older movies I've been watching that I feel could be portrayed the same way today and would still catch Oscar's attention. Another thing is that I do feel that out of all the performances in this film, his is both the most memorable, and the most honest. While Gardner is obviously acting, and Bogart is still great but has been better elsewhere, O'Brien seems to believe he is who he's playing.
Then again, we're nearly two decades out from the last set of films I watched, so perhaps acting preferences were already changing. While the 30's seemed to like big, theatrical performances, the acting here is much more subtle, all about communicating what the character is feeling or thinking through small looks, tics and movements. Maybe that's why Gardner left me cold; her character doesn't seem to have much in the way of tics or small movements. She's too poised for that.
One odd part of this film is the first scene in which we see the nightclub Maria dances in. Director Joseph L. Mankiewicz chooses not to show us her dancing, which isn't because she can't, but to keep it mysterious, and instead, we see the reactions of the various nightclub patrons. One set of patrons makes me want to know their story; an older man speaking seriously into the ear of a girl who looks young enough to be his daughter, as she struggles to keep from breaking down in tears, and ultimately fails. What was going on there? We never see them again, and I'd love to know what that was all about.
Movies like this, kinda lesser in Oscar's catalog (due to only two nominations, if major ones) make me wonder what it would have been like to have been predicting them back in those days. Would I have been shocked that Gardner didn't get a nomination? Or that Bogart's nod was for The Caine Mutiny instead of this one? Or that it failed to get a Picture or Director nod? I don't know. I feel like the two it got were deserved, and I can see why O'Brien won. It is an intriguing story, even if I feel like it wasn't served well by its leading lady.
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