Humphrey Bogart is famous for playing tough guys, criminals, and fast operators on the margins of society, but he was at his best playing what he was—an artist. That’s just what he did in his two greatest films, which, not coincidentally, are also among the greatest of all inside-Hollywood movies: “In a Lonely Place” (1950), in which he plays a screenwriter, and “The Barefoot Contessa” (1954), which is running through August 5th as part of the final week of Film Forum’s Humphrey Bogart series. (It is also widely available streaming, including on Amazon.) “The Barefoot Contessa”—which was both written and directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz (he also produced the film, uncredited, through his own independent production company, called Figaro, Inc.) presents a deeply insightful view of Hollywood filmmaking, but it doesn’t take place in Hollywood. It’s set mostly in Europe—Spain, France, and Italy—and shows up in California for only one sequence, a house party. It takes an extraordinarily abstract, psychologically astute view of the conjoined miracles by which the essential Hollywood alchemy takes place—by which a star is born. Those two miracles are the inherent talent of the incipient actor and the director’s discernment about how to foster and deploy that talent, which Bogart’s character, the writer and director Harry Dawes, calls his “sixth sense.”
The new star in question, Maria D’Amata, is played by Ava Gardner, in a role of vast but tautly contained fury. She is first seen at a night club in Madrid, where she dances under her birth name of Maria Vargas. Harry and the brash, slick P.R. man Oscar Muldoon (Edmond O’Brien) are brought there by their employer, the very rich and very crudely imperious heir Kirk Edwards (Warren Stevens). Having gotten wind of Maria’s reputation as the local star, Kirk there to put her under contract so that he can make a big splash in Hollywood as an independent producer making his first film, which Harry—who’s trying to rebuild the illustrious career that he’d trashed through alcoholism and related bad behavior—will write and direct. Cannily, Mankiewicz doesn’t introduce Maria by showing her dancing; he shows the hypnotic, devastating effect that her performance has on the patrons of the somewhat louche venue where she works. Rather, he introduces her offstage, behind the scenes at the club where Harry is sent to get her—because, in Mankiewicz’s incisive view, that, and not onstage, is where the art of the star is revealed.
Maria Vargas is a person of character and temperament who lives with a fiercely principled, willful freedom that she embraces with an aura of headlong, tragic destiny. In a way, that destiny is scripted by Hollywood’s own narrow moral codes, bringing punishment to a woman who presumes to exercise sexual freedom, as Maria does, from the start—when Harry finds her backstage, in her dressing room, behind a curtain, she’s entwined with a man whom she sardonically calls her cousin, and he’s not the only so-called cousin with whom she has sexual relations in the course of the drama. Lured not by Kirk’s money but by Harry’s gruff warmth, worldly wisdom, artistic insight, and sincere friendship, she takes the plunge into the movie world and, indeed, is quickly vaulted to stardom. Oscar, the P.R. man, eventually calls her “the world’s number one symbol of desirability, on display all over the world’s number one showroom.” By that time, Maria has already sloughed off the advances of two mightily wealthy men, not just Kirk but also the South American mogul Alberto Bravano (Marius Goring), on whose yacht she, Oscar, and some hangers-on are voyaging. Maria has no illusions; she has confided to Harry about enduring the crude advances of “evil men” since she was a young girl: “to a girl with nothing, a man with hundreds is just as rich as a man with millions.” As for Bravano’s yacht, “Just because it is big and white and a yacht, is it not still dirt?”
The punishment, however, is built in from the start. “The Barefoot Contessa” is perhaps the most elaborately structured Hollywood film since “Citizen Kane.” Like Orson Welles’s story, which begins with the death of the titular mogul, the story of Maria is told as a series of flashbacks—from her funeral—and it’s narrated, in voice-over and from the dramatic point of view of three mourners: Harry, Oscar, and Vincenzo Count Torlato-Favrini (Rossano Brazzi), her husband. (Mankiewicz even, daringly, shows the same crucial sequence from the different narrative—and visual—perspectives of different men.) Mankiewicz was, after Welles, Hollywood’s most literature-mad filmmaker; in such films as “A Letter to Three Wives,” “All About Eve,” and “People Will Talk,” he wrote floridly caustic dialogue for complex characters facing intimate conflicts. He also developed a style, less flamboyant and less comprehensively imaginative than Welles’s but more modestly lyrical, that seems to stick close to the dialogue, setting it for the actors to deliver with a stylized, heightened flair. Here, Mankiewicz, working for the first time in color—in a palette on the edge of the alluring and the acidulous—relies on a determinedly moving camera to convey the passage of time and evoke the drama’s elegiac mode. (The sense of destiny at work is hinted at in the Torlato-Favrini family motto—“che sara sara.” When the songwriter Jay Livingston saw the movie, he was inspired to compose the song of that name that later ended up in Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Man Who Knew Too Much,” sung by Doris Day.)
Mankiewicz was a consummate movie-studio insider, having started as a screenwriter atin 1930 (and getting an Oscar nomination the following year, at the age of twenty-two). He became a producer in 1936, and he observed enough crack-ups and tragedies to know that Hollywood and happiness didn’t rhyme. In “The Barefoot Contessa,” he 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. And he contemplates with a lofty, rueful view (that owed nothing to the Hays Code) the cruelly unjust price that women in Hollywood paid for their sexual and personal freedom, the tragic conflicts that they endured for their resolute independence. He also holds the mirror up to a star behind the scenes to show how her passion on screen is merely a magnification of her passion in life. Maria Vargas, dancer in a night club, has never been anyone but herself, and evinces little interest in imitation or impersonation; like all the great stars, she doesn’t become her characters—she not only remains herself but makes them into herself. The elegant grandeur of her bearing and the dramatic flair of her breathlessly impulsive, sublimely audacious actions—by which she wrests dignity from indignant circumstances—are the kind of acting that transcends the playing of a role.
Gardner was precisely such a star. So was Bogart, who, here, in playing a writer and director, has a double role. He is the film’s central consciousness, whose perspective on Maria, in both his voice-over recollections and his dramatic scenes, offers the prime, and most discerning, account of her rise to fame and her devastating end. He also plays the prime mover in Maria’s film career, in her launch to the movie screens of the world. Harry Dawes is the agent of destiny, the living force of modernity that exalts the spectacular character of Maria and also extracts it for profit. He brings her wealth and fame and power. He also thrusts her ever higher aloft into ever more fabulous milieu to live out ever more extreme passions. Harry is living out his destiny, too, in Maria’s, bearing the auteur’s burden, one that Mankiewicz understood intimately, of being the catalyst for the dramas of others, who take the biggest risks. In “Barefoot Contessa,” Bogart conveys that ambiguous burden with grizzled, worldly grace.
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