Jeanskynebu the audience applauded

Greenes Please don't spend money on this.

ReaderKenka Let's be realistic.

VeteranLight I don't have all the words right now but this film is a work of art.

TheLittleSongbird Was really intrigued into seeing 'The Barefoot Contessa'. Joseph L Mankiewicz was responsible for 'All About Eve', which is one of my all time favourite films, and when you have the likes of Ava Gardner, Humphrey Bogart and Edmond O'Brien one does expect a lot.'The Barefoot Contessa' was disappointing. It is a long way from an awful film and has several very good things, but with such a talented cast and a director who was really good when he is in his prime it could have been so much more. Can totally see the polarising reactions on both sides, while 'The Barefoot Contessa' has a good deal to admire (more so than has been given credit for) it is not going to appeal, and has not appealed, to everybody. 1954 saw some great films, 'Rear Window', 'On the Waterfront', 'A Star is Born', 'Sabrina', 'Dial M for Murder', 'White Christmas' and '20,000 Leagues Under the Sea', 'The Barefoot Contessa' to me just isn't in the same league.Starting with what is good about 'The Barefoot Contessa', it looks great visually with beautiful autumnal cinematography and sumptuous costumes and settings, the very meaning of extravagant. The music score from Mario Nascimbene is lush and subtly done. There are some cracking lines and there is evidence of sincerity. Was very surprised at how daring and ahead of its time it was.Ava Gardner lives up to her glamorous "the world's most beautiful animal" image and character and is positively luminous and graceful, she is very much in her prime here. Late-career Humphrey Bogart, rightly regarded as a cultural icon who died far too soon (only three years later), is as commanding as ever and not only the best actor in the cast but also one of the film's strongest elements. Edmond O'Brien is deliciously oily and in his best moments on dynamite form. Warren Stevens is very good too.Rossano Brazzi was the weak link however in the cast, his role has little if anything to it and the only thing Brazzi brings to it is handsome looks, everywhere else he's very wooden and dull. Mankiewicz really is not at his best in the directing, he delivers on the style but elsewhere it's pedestrian and uninspired.His writing fares even weaker, despite some moments of sincerity and cracking lines the acerbic wit that sparkled in 'All About Eve' four years earlier does not come through enough. Most of the film is too talky and rambling, as well as overwrought, flimsy and too rehearsed. The thin and sometimes muddled story does suffer from dull pacing that rarely fires on all cylinders and an overlong length, and feels both overblown as a result of being overwritten and bland due to the lack of depth to the writing and characterisation. Despite the great efforts of the cast the characters are under-explored and don't have much to allow us to connect properly with them.Overall, beautiful but uneven. 5.5-6/10 Bethany Cox

HotToastyRag The Barefoot Contessa is one of Ava Gardner's most famous movies, and some say it embodied her real-life escapades, but since I don't like her movies and think she was a pretty terrible person, I don't like it. Humphrey Bogart couldn't even fix it.At the start of the movie, we see the attendants at Ava Gardner's funeral. Four men, Humphrey Bogart, Rossano Brazzi, Edmond O'Brien, and Marius Goring, tell fragments of her life story to the audience in flashback. In a way, it reminds me of The Bad and the Beautiful, where four people tell Kirk Douglas's story in flashbacks—but I love that movie and consider it an insult to compare it to Ava Gardner's film. I don't usually like movies told in flashbacks because the audience isn't permitted to follow a linear story, and The Barefoot Contessa is no exception. I won't spoil the plot, but whatever the audience learns about Ava is anticlimactic and a little boring.Unless you really love Ava Gardner, this isn't a classic I'd recommend watching. Personally, I prefer my Barefoot Contessa on Food Network.

michellek10 Spoiler Alerts ahead! There are so many things wrong with this film, that it's hard to know where to begin. As others have noted, the main failing is the overall tone: unrelentingly morose and downbeat. Perhaps the writers were attempting a psychological thriller like "Gilda." However, they made a crucial mistake - the leading actor, Humphrey Bogart, has no romantic relationship with the leading actress, Ava Gardner! The script goes to great pains to stress that they are just friends, and that the Humphrey Bogart character is in love with his on screen wife (a minor character played by an actress I'd never seen before.) Yawn. Meanwhile, no one can interest the Ava Gardner character until late in the film when she falls for Rossano Brazzi. Although it's hard to tell that she falls for him at all.However, they get married, and here's where the script really goes off the rails. RB fails to disclose that his junk was shot off in the War prior to their nuptials. The film just throws this cruel deception out there without comment and then seems to judge the Ava Gardner character for having to cope with it. Of course this was still the era of the Hayes Code, and another thing that the screenwriters seem to be counting on is a certain amount of naivety on the part of the audience, by assuming that the audience would think that a man would need his equipment to, um, make a woman happy. Humphrey Bogart badgers Ava Gardner, "How long was it before you couldn't stand it anymore?", I.e. go without sex? I have a feeling that couples went home in the 1950's and asked each other, ""Why didn't they just..you know...?" Ava Gardner's solution of providing her husband with a baby he can use as an heir is of course misguided, but not too implausible. But I think the script breaks down again when Humphrey Bogart fails to inform Rossanno Brazzi of his wife's good intentions by getting pregnant and just lets him think she a slut. If you have a good quality television this film will be worth watching just for how radiant Ava Gardner looks. She is stunning, especially in sunglasses and a black swimsuit. The locations in the South of France are nice to look at, too.

James Hitchcock The early fifties saw several excellent films made in Hollywood about Hollywood itself, such as "Sunset Boulevard", "Singin' in the Rain" and "The Bold and the Beautiful". "The Barefoot Contessa" also falls into this category. The main female character, Maria Vargas, is a famous actress and the leading male one, Harry Dawes, is a veteran director and screenwriter, although the film does not deal with the technicalities of movie-making quite as much as, say, "The Bad and the Beautiful". The emphasis is more on Maria's private life than on her professional career, and we never see any clips from her films. The film begins with a scene set at Maria's funeral, with the main story told in flashback. It follows the normal structure of the "woman's picture", which was a popular genre in the forties and fifties. Such films were primarily aimed at a female audience and generally had a strong female figure as their leading character. The plot revolved around this female character and her life and loves, with male characters being defined in terms of their relationship to her. Maria becomes a Hollywood star after she is discovered dancing in a Spanish night club story by Kirk Edwards, a business tycoon turned film producer. Her story is narrated by three of the men in her life- Harry, who becomes her friend but not her lover (he is happily married), Oscar Muldoon, a publicist working for Edwards, and Vincenzo Torlato-Favrini, the Italian Count who becomes her husband. (The title derives from the title Maria acquires on her marriage and the fact that she likes to dance barefoot). Another important character is Maria's lover Alberto Bravano, a wealthy Latin American playboyAs with "The Bad and the Beautiful" there has been a lot of speculation as to whether any of the characters were based on real-life individuals. (Howard Hughes, for example, has been suggested as the model for Edwards and Rita Hayworth for Maria). I suspect, however, that Joseph L. Mankiewicz, who acted as both writer and director of the film, would have been too cautious to risk upsetting any of his Hollywood colleagues by basing his characters too obviously on any living individual, and the studio would not have wanted to risk a possible libel suit. Certainly, one can always find significant differences between the characters and those individuals upon whom they were supposedly based; Hughes, for example, may have had his faults, but he had a real passion for film- making, unlike Edwards who has only moved into the industry because he sees it as a money-making opportunity. 1954 was a vintage year for Humphrey Bogart, as it was the year when he made three of his finest films, this one, "Sabrina" and "The Caine Mutiny". In his early days as a major star, he tended to specialise in a few genres- gangster pictures, films noirs, war films and Westerns, generally as a tough guy or action hero. In the last few years of his life, however- he was to die less than three years after completing "The Barefoot Contessa"- he was to extend his range, into comedy ("We're No Angels"), romantic comedy ("Sabrina") and into playing flawed, emotionally vulnerable characters ("The Caine Mutiny", "The Left Hand of God"). Harry Dawes is in some ways, such as his world-weary cynicism, a typical Bogart character, but in others he too represents a new departure for the actor. Although Harry is the leading role- he has more screen time than any other male character- he is (unlike most Bogart characters) a bystander, someone who comments on the action rather than participating directly in it. Edwards, Bravano and the Count all play much more active roles in Maria's life. This was one of a number of films- others include "The Killers" and "Bhowani Junction"- which show that Ava Gardner deserves to be remembered as a serious actress, not just as a sex symbol. Maria can be seen as a tragic heroine- not in the sense that she is destroyed by a flaw in her character but in the sense that she falls victim to a cruel irony of fate; in a desperate attempt to please the one man whom she truly loves she only succeeds in provoking his anger and jealousy. I have always had a high regard for this film, so I am surprised at some of the negative comments on this board. One reviewer compares it to a soap opera, but few soap operas can call upon actors as gifted as Humphrey Bogart, or Edmond O'Brien, or have dialogue as witty and literate as that written by Mankiewicz. Soap operas tend to be excessively melodramatic, but this is not the case with "The Barefoot Contessa"; much of the film, particularly in the first half, is taken up with dialogue rather than physical action, and potentially melodramatic elements in the plot, such as the trial of Maria's father for the murder of her mother, tend to be played in a low-key manner. Only at the end, when we learn the manner of Maria's tragic death and the reason for it, does strong emotion predominate, and it would have been ridiculous to have played these scenes in anything other than an emotional way. This is not perhaps Mankiewicz's finest film- in my view that is probably "All About Eve", another film with an actress at its centre. It is, however, a fine study of the rise and fall of a twentieth-century goddess. 8/10