Entertainment

Cult Movie: Bogart and Gardner shine in 50s classic The Barefoot Contessa

Ava Gardner and Humphrey Bogart in The Barefoot Contessa
Ava Gardner and Humphrey Bogart in The Barefoot Contessa Ava Gardner and Humphrey Bogart in The Barefoot Contessa

THE Barefoot Contessa may not be the greatest film from director Joseph L Mankiewicz – for that you’d be hard pushed to nominate anything other than his sublimely stylish, acid-tongued Oscar winner All About Eve – but it remains one of the most insightful slices of media-based melodrama ever to grace the silver screen.

Freshly re-released by Eureka! on Blu-ray, it’s a glorious study of Hollywood in it’s so-called golden age when the old-fashioned star system was rampant and sharks and chancers circled the fresh meat of the movie business like never before.

Released in 1954, it’s theme of female exploitation in the movie industry still seems powerfully relevant today and the performances, from a quality cast led by Ava Gardner and Humphrey Bogart, still sparkle despite the passing decades.

Bogart is Harry Dawes, a writer and director who finds himself reduced to working with a nasty piece of producer jet trash by the name of Kirk Edwards (Warren Stevens). Charged with finding a fresh sexy lead actress for his new film, Dawes meets the enigmatic Maria Vargas (Gardner), a beautiful flamenco dancer who is given to kicking off her shoes at every available opportunity.

Lifted from a simple Madrid nightclub and placed right in the Hollywood spotlight, Maria becomes an instant sensation but finds it hard to adapt to the shallow world of cinema or get to like the mostly seedy men she has to work alongside.

Bogart is predictably brilliant as the washed-up director – nobody does world weary regret quite like him, after all – and Gardner is stunning as the reluctant star exposed to the movie machine's nastier side.

There is a memorable, and indeed Oscar-winning performance from Edmund O’Brien as Oscar, a fast talking, two-faced publicist who embodies everything that is false and duplicitous about the world of 1950s movie making, but this is Gardner’s film through and through and she floats through it with an ethereal quality that is very special.

Even as her character makes some dubious decisions on the way to the top, we still feel like we like her and we still root for her in the world of big, bad, predatory males who are lurking on every film set corner and well-appointed LA office.

It’s a beautiful-looking film, shot boldly in colour and lensed by the legendary Jack Cardiff, that unfolds at a leisurely pace and tells its story with a sophisticated soulfulness you simply don’t get anymore.

It may lack the iconic clout of All About Eve but writer-director Mankiewicz digs deep into the clichés of the Hollywood studio system to unearth the unpleasant truth about how young women were, and indeed often still are, treated as they try to make a success of their careers in front of the camera.

As a full-blown melodrama it can get a little overwrought at times but that only adds to the appeal of a golden-age epic that deserves to be seen again.