On The Barefoot Contessa
Joseph L. Mankiewicz, the writer and director of The Barefoot Contessa (1954), never wants us to think this is going to be a Cinderella story-style movie. Among the most pessimistic dramas about film stardom ever made, it begins with the funeral of its subject: a Madrid-bred nightclub dancer, Maria Vargas (Ava Gardner), who rose to stratospheric Hollywood fame practically overnight. The funeral doesn’t take place decades into the future, at the end of a fully lived life and career. Presumably it’s happening only a little while after Maria’s reluctant move toward the bright lights of America, where she recently finished making her third film.
After the movie-opening funeral, The Barefoot Contessa rears back in time, to the night Maria was first scouted in Spain — by the seen-better-days filmmaker Harry Dawes (Humphrey Bogart); his aloof boss (Warren Stevens) and his long-suffering girlfriend (Mari Aldon); and one of the staff publicists, Oscar Muldoon (Edmond O’Brien) — at the nightclub where she headlines with a popular dancing act. Maria is quick to reject even the suggestion of movie stardom when offers are extended by the conspicuously slimy Oscar. With an exception in her tendency to walk naked-toed, Maria admits to being fearful of being exposed and unprotected — an anxiety at odds with a job intertwisted with public judgment. But after some real-talk-steeped one-on-one time with Harry, whose name she recognizes from his work with Carole Lombard and Jean Harlow, Maria relents. After impulsively leaving home without saying goodbye to family, she dives headfirst into an acting career that burns hot even before she has stepped onto her first red carpet.
The immediate introduction of Harry — who narrates the funeral and most of the first act — made me predict, not knowing much about the movie, that the flashback-heavy drama to follow in the service’s wake would be about an artistic partnership that first turned romantic, then tragic. Maybe this would be a movie like one of the many iterations of A Star is Born or the decades-away The Rose (1979): a drama about how a very talented but impetuous and self-destructive person was pushed over the edge at the peak of their fame.
But Mankiewicz has made a sharper-witted, less melodrama-prone, and more unexpected movie. (Harry, for one thing, doesn’t become a love interest but an avuncular confidant.) The Barefoot Contessa functions double-fold: as an acidic ensemble film about the cold-hearted business-centricity of Hollywood; a tragedy about a woman killed, in a broad sense, for unabatingly refusing to fulfill the visions of and projections onto her by the men in her life.
Maria ultimately feels a bit unknowable. The Barefoot Contessa is not told from her perspective but from shifting vantage points belonging to Harry, Oscar, and an Italian count Maria hastily marries (Rossano Brazzi) late in the film. Yet surprisingly, Maria’s emotional distance from us only enriches a movie savvily deriding an industry more prone to tending to the images of people than to the flesh and blood without whom the image wouldn’t exist. (Even Harry, who is one of the film’s few likable characters, is rendered by Mankiewicz as complicit, perhaps even weak for staying around to help add new people to a system that he knows can be damaging; three of his marriages have broken up, and he’s recovering from alcoholism that has ostensibly resulted in many demotions.)
MANKIEWICZ IS SO DETERMINED TO AVOID unintentionally romanticizing show business that the film markedly has no scenes in which Maria performs (either in one of the movies she starred in or on the nightclub stage, though we do see her dancing outdoors for pleasure once). There are also no extended scenes on a film set or anywhere near a production company. Little of The Barefoot Contessa even takes place in the U.S., in fact. It’s mostly confined to Europe, during periods where Maria has time off from acting and instead harrows a progressively more tumultuous personal life. Mankiewicz seems to want us to obtain no pleasure if it’s laced with artistic exploitation. (Maria already has so many men around so eagerly taking.) The movie is not so much about art and filmmaking as it is about the oftentimes cruel and dehumanizing mechanisms indulged to bring them to a mass audience.
Better at revealing the clashing ideologies of its characters than it is their emotional worlds, The Barefoot Contessa’s while beautiful to the ear overstylized dialogue does admittedly diminish some of its ability to completely work dramatically. (No one talks this wittily and frequently ornately.) It’s openly novelistic, not just thanks to that dialogue but the heavy use of voiceover and a plot structure so opposed to single perspectives or consistent linearity that, for almost no reason other than to show off its cleverness, one moment — of Maria getting publicly slapped — is seen twice, from diverging viewpoints.
But The Barefoot Contessa nonetheless works as such a perceptive rumination on the vicious and patriarchal industry Mankiewicz was long a part of — and such a worthy showcase for its stars — that its dramatic malnourishment in some areas didn’t bother me. What’s being painted is already so dynamic and forward-looking that additional dramatic vigor is almost like a seasoning. Its presence may improve things a bit, but one wouldn’t say they’re altogether essential.
Speaking of those stars: Bogart and Gardner do some of their best work in The Barefoot Contessa. O’Brien was the only actor regularly recognized on the awards circuit after the film was released; he deservedly won both a Best Supporting Actor Oscar and a Golden Globe. The adulation for him makes sense, because his work is the showiest among his castmates. It’s a performance that’s loudly unctuous but also sporadically sympathetic, what with Oscar’s constant sweating and his sometimes-peeking-through humanity in a job that’s all about falsifying the humanity of others to protect financial bottom lines.
But Bogart, with sickly-looking-on-Technicolor pink-and-purple skin, movingly brings us someone years-deep into a job that has brutally, and naggingly, pummeled his morality and self-control. His care for Maria is so touching in part because you can sense him fretting about her potentially getting too close to the flames that have left him with proverbial burn marks. He’s practically a father figure; Bogart and Gardner have a chemistry that feels almost familial. (“But does he see you?” Harry worriedly asks when Maria waxes romantic about a new man she’s fallen for.)
Gardner’s part by necessity can make the character feel a smidge more symbolic than human. But her work is still stunning in its barely bridled fierceness, and in how she highlights Maria’s strength in a way that doesn’t diminish her vulnerability. Shaky Spanish accent aside, it’s solid casting. The movie shrewdly underscores Gardner’s own luminosity to convince us Maria could so quickly rise in the ranks while sagely tapping into Gardner’s real-life personality, which famously marinated in bluntness and self-awareness. You sense, sometimes, Mankiewicz nudging us to notice which of the darker elements of this character and Bogart’s character match up with the people playing them. (Bogart, like Harry, too suffered from alcoholism, and stood out in his industry for his unusually progressive outlook.) The Barefoot Contessa is an inside-baseball movie not as much interested in celebrating the projected image as it is in the concealed complications and idiosyncrasies underneath it.
Peterson Reviews 