When he wrote and directed ‘The Barefoot Contessa’ (1954), Joseph L. Mankiewicz was coming off the huge success of one of his previous films – ‘All About Eve’ (1950). That film depicted the twilight of a Broadway star’s career, and it is very possible that Mankiewicz wanted to make a kind of sequel focusing on the lives of Hollywood actresses. However, to fully understand the context and sources of inspiration for ‘The Barefoot Contessa‘, I think we need to refer to two other films also released in 1950: Billy Wilder’s ‘Sunset Blvd.’ and Akira Kurosawa’s ‘Rashomon’. From the former, I think Mankiewicz took on his extremely critical point of view towards the film industry and its patrons. From the latter, he was inspired in terms of narrative technique.
‘The Barefoot Contessa‘ begins at the funeral, in a torrential rain, of the film’s main heroine – actress Maria Vargas. Three men attending the funeral recall, in turn and alternately, episodes from her life, from her discovery in a restaurant in Madrid where she sang and danced, through the main episodes of her life as an actress in Hollywood and as a beautiful woman admired by the public and coveted by the rich men of the world, to the tragic end. The voice-over process, which I generally dislike, works very well here, because each of the three narrators presents his or her own personal perspective, well differentiated from the others. Each had meant something different in the heroine’s life, and the testimonies of the three fill in to a complete vision of the discovery, rise and fall of a woman who becomes, despite her modest origins, a screen diva, but is also a victim of the system that promoted her and especially of social prejudices.
The character of Maria Vargas deserves careful examination. Screenwriter Mankiewicz clearly started from the figure of Cinderella in the fairy tale, even making the metaphor explicit. The singer, who comes from a modest family and is also struck by the tragedy of her mother’s murder by her father, will spend her life searching for the right prince. She does so by moving from one of the world’s richest men to another – an American multi-millionaire and producer, a South American tycoon, an Italian count. All her choices prove to be catastrophic in one way or another. It is a critique of a world dominated by rich and powerful men, but perhaps also a Freudian reflection of the conflict with her mother, who had behaved like the evil stepmother in the fairy tale. Unfortunately, Ava Gardner does not rise to the complexity of the role in this film. She is beautiful and dignified, but not naive and is not believable as a victim. I can only do an exercise in imagination by recasting the young Sophia Loren (she was 21 at the time) in this role. Or Rita Hayworth, whose life inspired the screenwriter, who was offered the role but turned it down. Humphrey Bogart, on the other hand, is formidable in a more ‘soft’ role than the most famous other roles in his career, although the signs of the illness that would take him down three years later are already visible. The script is interesting not only because of the narrative structure that is influenced by Kurosawa but also because it is a film about the film industry, but without any scenes filmed on a set. Life sometimes imitates film, Bogart‘s character says at one point, but of course, it is about life on the screen. The ending is one of the memorable classic endings of Hollywood in the ’40s and ’50s. It is worth getting to it.