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Italy, United States · 1954
2h 8m
Director Joseph L. Mankiewicz
Starring Humphrey Bogart, Ava Gardner, Edmond O'Brien, Marius Goring
Genre Drama
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Has-been director Harry Dawes gets a new lease on his career when business tycoon Kirk Edwards hires him to write and direct a film. They go to Madrid and discover Maria Vargas, a beautiful nightclub dancer. They turn her into a Hollywood star, but also find themselves embroiled in Maria's troubled personal life.
Pretentious, highly entertaining melodrama about the international movie business, giving Ava Gardner an iconic role as a wayward actress who takes a dangerous step too far when she marries an impotent Italian aristocrat (Rossano Brazzi). [01 Oct 2006, p.14]
The New York Times by Bosley Crowther
The story that's told against this background is a curiously empty tabloid tale, and the title performer, Ava Gardner, fails to give it plausibility or appeal.
CineVue by Christopher Machell
Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s The Barefoot Contessa is at once a deeply satirical depiction of Hollywood and a sumptuous saga of the rise and fall of a star.
It’s overlong, talky, and sometimes stolid, but these are all familiar Mankiewicz failings. He shines in his deft verbal wit and novelistic propensity for detail, backlit by a highly personal blend of romance and cynicism. An imperfect film, but its excesses are as suggestive as its subtleties.
Los Angeles Times by Kenneth Turan
Ava Gardner in the role of her career (Humphrey Bogart isn't bad either) and writer-director Joseph L. Mankiewicz at the top of his form. [03 Dec 2006, p.18]
Chicago Tribune by Michael Wilmington
Mankiewicz's classic Hollywood backstage tale of a tragic sex goddess/superstar (Ava Gardner), her gloomy, intellectual director (Humphrey Bogart) and the retinue of glamorous and/or exploitive movie types around them. [05 Nov 2004, p.C6]
The New Yorker by Pauline Kael
The movie is so ornate and so garrulous about telling the dirty truth that it's a camp classic: a Cinderella story in which the prince turns out to be impotent.
The New Yorker by Richard Brody
In The Barefoot Contessa, [Mankiewicz] shows the sordidness of the money-driven, ego-fuelled, ruthless machinations that are both central to the business of Hollywood and constantly threaten to derail it.
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A midlife crisis represented by a deerskin jacket.