I walked into The Barefoot Contessa pretty much blind. I knew only two things: the first was that Humphrey Bogart was in the
movie and the second was that Ina Garten named her specialty food store in the
Hamptons and subsequently a cookbook and her television shows after this
movie. I don’t know why, I just know it’s
the truth. People love this movie,
clearly. Not just Ina, but like normal
people who don’t delude themselves into thinking their lives cruising around in
Mercedes convertibles and writing recipes for dinner parties is something
resembling normal life.
I’m not one of those people. I thought that the performances that we see
in this movie, particularly those by Humphrey Bogart and Ava Gardner, are
outstanding. Some of the supporting cast
is equally good. I also think this
story: a kind of expose into the down
side of finding yourself in Hollywood’s spotlight, is enjoyable. Especially back in the day, when studios
basically owned the actors that worked for them and there were LOTS of
actresses particularly suffering under some relatively rough treatment to
get (and stay) in pictures. But, they
seem to veer off that trail frequently, and I wasn’t a fan of any of that
nonsense.
What The Barefoot Contessa did do for me was remind me of the fact that
we were bloody BRILLIANT to rid ourselves of the nobility and that we were
foolish enough to replace the nobility with celebrity. The more “royals” that appeared, the less I
liked this movie and the less I cared what happened to any of the characters,
the Contessa included. I also thought
the loops of flashbacks were occasionally distracting, and I would have been
happier if all these sequences of events could have happened in chronological
order.
This won’t go down as my favorite
classic, but I get why other people like it.
Contessa compares well against
Makiewicz’s other works, notably All
About Eve (although I like that cast a little better than this one). While I think it needed some help to make it
a bit more entertaining, I can hardly fault it for its technical merits.
