What else happened
this year? Cold War Stuff, and Chinese people starving to death in their millions. Same as most other 1950s years.
What is the plot -
in one sentence? We follow the rise and fall out of a Spanish actor from her humble beginnings to her lavish death.
I don't have time, just spoil it for me? She's dead, leaving behind several former lovers and friends, but the only one who seems to care for her is a director - a director who cares about her so much he's willing to stand in the rain at her funeral instead of wearing an umbrella.
What is the meaning of the title? It refers to the star of the movie, who prefers to be barefoot - she marries a count later on in the movie. I wish that they were all this literal.
 |
| Here's the countess, on the left, a pretty woman dressed at the height of (hideous) fashion of the time. This shot it taken from an extended scene where two wealthy men have a fight about how rich they are: it reads a lot like a big dick competition (note, only one of the men is in this shot). |
Anything that's not aged well? Does a woman get slapped around? Within the first few minutes a spoiled movie producer has slapped a starlet. The countess is herself killed by her husband when she reveals she's pregnant. Luckily, in the scene where they cradle her 'dead' body you can see her breathing very obviously. She looks like she had hiccups or something, did no one notice?
Other than that, one of the 'themes' of the movie is that the Barefoot Contessa is exploited through love and stardom without the need for there to be any violence given to her. The one thing she can really control in her life is her steady stream of lovers, whom she refers to oddly as 'cousins,' but it is a pregnancy from one of them which gets her killed.
Any thoughts? The barefoot Contessa, a Spanish actress named Maria, is first seen dead and being buried. From there we work out the rest of the story. That's certainly a played out mode of storytelling now, but presumably it wasn't then.
There are various mourners, but only one is emotional enough to be standing in the rain without an umbrella, and it's Humphrey Bogart - so you just assume that he'll be some jilted lover. In a surprise, he isn't - he and Maria develop an entirely friendly relationship, which is even avuncular. He even has a wife who he appears faithful to. It's probably the only healthy relationship that Maria has in the movie.
She ends up a star (Humph is a director) and goes through several romances with wealthy men.The last husband that she ends up with discusses with his sister about how they can't have children, but he still wants to marry her. There's a lot of innuendo about it, he's incapable of having kids, and for a long time it reads as him being too gay to father kids. That he was blown up in the war and patched back together at great expense seems a cop-out.
Oh, and why not just raise the kid as the count's own?
It's not like anyone else needed to know he couldn't father kids, and he
could continue his legacy like he was always going on about. [answer, male pride - another theme of the movie: we're told that another of her 'lovers' would rather he didn't have her love, but had the world thinking it so, than having her love in secret].
The whole movie is pretty slow - a lot of action takes place off-stage, and we're told about it and shown the aftermath. That, coupled with voiceover narrations from Bogart's character, and another from a guy called Oscar - who is a legal enforcer for a wealthy and unpleasant producer, before a small voiceover from the Italian Count, it can seem a little cluttered.
Would you recommend this? It is a big, epic, melodramatic thing. I didn't mind it, but it's slow, nicely shot and the story was needlessly byzantine and about the concerns of the very wealthy. I liked it, but...
Final thoughts? Ava Gardner is the Contessa, and I don't think I'd ever seen her as a young woman before*. She looks a little like Carrie-Ann Moss - Trinity from the matrix, but squeezed into unpleasant, 1950s fashion. It seems that her character is analogous to someone in real life, and a very cursory search tells me that it's based on Rita Hayworth. Great.
Ok that's enough of this. I've been doing too many American movies, so I'll try to spread it out a little now into other countries and languages. I'm doing my best. Anyway, this is the 65th movie in this particular thing I've been doing, and you can find the others right at this page here. Thanks and watch your ass.
*I had. I've seen
the Killers, and 55 days in Peking, she's also the old woman who rents the house out at the Sentinel, a movie that caused a break-up for me :S
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