The Barefoot Contessa

Hi Aki,

Last night we watched The Barefoot Contessa a 1954 movie written and directed by Joseph Mankiewicz. It stars Ava Gardner and Humphrey Bogart.

The story opens on a small cemetery in Rome where a funeral has just taken place. In the rain Harry Dawes (Bogart) the veteran American movie director and writer, is among those mourning the passing of the Contessa, whose marble statue surmounts her tomb. The movie unfolds in flashbacks. In the first, Harry remembers meeting the Contessa, aka Maria Damata, aka Maria Vargas, for the first time.

It was in Spain. Ultra-rich Texan Kirk Edwards (Warren Stevens) has decided to finance some movies; he has hired a press agent Oscar Muldoon (Edmond O’Brien) and Dawes, who at this point is a washed-up drunkard and has-been who might still have another picture in him based on his latest script. They have come in search of a ‘new face’ and hope to launch a new star to grace the picture. In Rome they heard of Maria Vargas who dances in a small club in Spain; they flew here to meet her and arrange a screen test.

Maria (Ava Gardner) doesn’t know if she wants to go into pictures. She does know she despises Oscar and finds the Texan repulsive. He doesn’t drink, or smoke, and holds himself in total, hypocritical self-control which Maria senses comes out of an innate sickness. But she likes Harry and loves his old movies, and if he can help her become a good actress, she’s willing to go through with it.

In a long scene, Harry tracks her down at her home, a small dirty apartment in a poor part of town where her family lives. There Harry and Maria swap stories and confess who they really are. And Maria tells how when she was a little girl in the Civil War, she dug in the dirt with bare feet and felt safe. To this day she doesn’t like to wear shoes, she likes to feel the dirt on her feet.

Harry does convince her, and the screen test is a great one. Now Harry’s flashback ends, we go back to the funeral, and Oscar takes up the tale.

Everyone agrees Maria has all the makings of a star, and the first picture is a smash hit. But with all the rumors and gossip, nobody ever catches Maria dating her producer, her costars. She doesn’t go to the usual nightclubs or schmooze the business. She shows up at the premiere of her debut picture without any date, accompanied only by her director Harry Dawes and his wife.

The picture is a smash in America, but just as it’s about to be released internationally, Maria’s father is arrested for the murder of her mother.

Back to the funeral, and Harry starts a new flashback. Maria hated her mother. She does everything she can to defend her father. She breaks every rule in Hollywood. And she gets her father acquitted, and emerges a bigger star than ever. Maria goes on to make two more pictures which the Texan produces and Harry writes and directs.

But then she has a falling-out with the producer and goes away with an Argentine playboy to sail with him on his yacht on the Mediterranean Sea.

Harry’s second flashback ends and Oscar starts his second. The Argentine also hired him, and Oscar went on the cruise as well. But even as Maria never would fuck the Texan, so she won’t fuck the Argentine; Oscar doesn’t know it, but Maria only sleeps with common men, men who arouse her and don’t buy her, men who are in the dirt. (This is shown in the earlier Harry flashbacks. Harry understands Maria, so in his flashbacks we see an understanding of her. But Oscar doesn’t ever understand her, and all we see in his flashbacks reveals his befuddlement and what he himself knows and understands.)

On the French Riviera, in gambling casinos, Maria is bored by the ‘International Set’ while the Argentine gambles. Sometimes he wins big. But one day he loses big, and he blames Maria. He’s not getting any sex from her anyway, and he erupts and curses her in front of the socialites in their parties. Another man appears (Rossano Brazzi) and slaps the Argentine, and takes Maria away. And that’s the last time Oscar sees her.

Now we return to the funeral and find the Count who married her (Brazzi) and he gives us his flashback of her. He remembers when, driven out of his mind by sleeplessness and despair, he drove out of Italy into France. His car overheats along the road, and he goes to a gypsy camp for water. There in the gypsy camp he is enchanted to see a woman dancing with one of the gypsies. She is beautiful and no gypsy – she is in fact Maria; this is the Count’s first sight of her. For a couple of seconds they look at each other; then the Count gets a pail of water and returns to his car. He drives away, confident he will see this woman again.

And so he does, at the casino. He sees her collect some of the Argentine’s winnings, cash the chips, and toss the bundle of money out the window to the gypsy she danced with. Then he sees her confrontation with the Argentine, who blames her taking the chips on the change of his luck. The Count slaps the Argentine, and takes Maria out to his car. And so they go to his ancestral home.

To Maria the Count is a perfect gentleman, the Prince Charming of her Cinderella dreams (the fairy tale is mentioned in several conversations between Harry and Maria in earlier and later flashbacks). He never tries to fuck her, he only kisses her hand and gazes at her with love. And she loves him back. But there are warnings we get in a conversation between the Count and his sister. They talk about the end of their family; she is barren, and he – ever since October 25, 1942– The sister tells him she sees that Maria is completely in love with him, and it would be cruel of him to marry her. Just to have a beautiful portrait of the last Count and Countess of their house. But the Count will not be talked out of it.

Harry gives us his final flashback. He was in Italy scouting locations for a new picture. Maria of course has written to him many letters of her newfound love. Now she comes to him and takes him to meet the Count. Harry gives her away in the marriage ceremony. But Harry has a foreboding. Something is wrong about the whole setup, but he doesn’t know what it is.

Harry doesn’t see Maria for some time after that. Thirteen weeks later, she comes to him in the middle of the night. He’s hard at work rewriting the scene he’s going to shoot tomorrow. She confesses the dreadful secret to him, the thing that made him uneasy. Her husband never did anything more than kiss her hand. In a flashback-inside-a-flashback, Maria tells Harry about her wedding night, when the Count came to see her, handed her a military medical form, and explained how in the war he almost died in an explosion, and the doctors saved his life but not his manhood.

And ever since then, Maria confesses, she’s been sleeping with one of the lusty earthy men she can’t help fucking – one of the servants. But she’s going to break it off now, because the affair did what she wanted: she is pregnant and she will give her husband a child and heir.

But when Harry watches her car drive away, he sees another car drive after her. Worried, Harry gets in his car and follows … to the Count’s palazzo … where he sees her statue, finished at last … and hears two shots fired.

The count comes out of the gardener’s cottage carrying his dead Countess. He has shot both of them. Maria never got to tell him she was pregnant. And Harry doesn’t have the heart to tell him.

Back at the funeral, the rain has stopped. The sun has come out to shine on the statue of the barefoot contessa. The mourners break up. The Count is led away in handcuffs. Harry bids her a final farewell and walks away.

The picture was shot in Italy in Technicolor but I always remember it in black and white. It would have been better in black and white; Gardner’s coloring and cheekbones and chin dimple come out great in black and white with kickers and rear cross key and obi lights. The color in the print was a little washed out, uneven. Jack Cardiff was the DP, he’s famous for his nature photography, but this is mostly on sets. But the production ownership might be mostly responsible for the unevenness of the print; it wasn’t made and owned by a major studio that could safeguard the elements.

What is most curious about the film to me is the attitude toward sex, and lust. Maria is a woman of great physical beauty and desires; there are many men in her life; not one of them fucks her. Much is made in the script about the difference between how stories turn out in real life and how they turn out in scripts. So maybe Mankiewicz is deliberately going against type here. Of course the ad campaigns all stressed Maria’s many men and hinted at wild sex orgies. And of course the film would have sold a lot more tickets with even one hot love scene. Did Maria even get to kiss a man? I mean a passionate kiss? I don’t recall one. I only remember kisses to the cheek and hugs.

Beyond this, the men seem to fall into two categories, or three: the least important are the nameless ‘cousins’ that Maria beds down along the way, unable, she says, to help herself (although today we would probably call these the most healthy and ‘normal’ expressions of love/sex in the story, oddly enough). None of these guys gets a name or a single line of dialogue, they don’t really count, which is why they don’t really deserve to get a category of their own.

The other two categories are the big shots, the money men, who try to buy Maria’s favors, and the men who are gentlemen and understand her, but for all intents and purposes might as well be gay. The failure of the money men is foreshadowed in the first scene in the Madrid nightclub: Maria Vargas has a rule, never to come out to sit with the customers. She ends up working for the Texan, and ‘sitting with’ the Argentine, but won’t sleep with either.

As for the gentlemen, Dawes is the father figure, too old to fuck her, too tired. He is saved from being the ‘gay friend’ (only just saved, mind you) by having an attractive young wife (his third or fourth according to the script) and being played by Bogart. But this character might as well be George Cukor for all that, and I wonder if Mankiewicz really intended to code Harry Dawes as the gay friend. As for the Count, he too seems gay – my old dad thought that would be the Count’s secret, although the mention of a specific date that begins his misery told me it couldn’t be that – but impotent is just as good, and if he were gay, then there couldn’t be the fullness of irony that he loves her with all his heart, but hasn’t the body to follow through on it.

Ava isn’t given really enough to do here. The role seems written around her limitations as an actress; as a sex star, she could have given a lot more with the right cameraman and if only Mankiewicz had stooped to giving us fans a little more of the salaciousness we crave, and that the ads promised. But Ava had a reputation of looking good but not remembering lines so good. We should be glad she manages to suggest a Spanish accent – really not an accent so much as a foreigner’s way with English.

The movie also is one of a long line of ‘inside Hollywood’ pictures that they seem to relish so much. As though the plumber really is that interesting when he goes on at length, down at the bar, about how he fixed the leaky faucets…

(17 April 2009)