krocheav
I had often wondered why it took so long to finally catch up with 'Contessa' now I think perhaps I understand. This must have either played to half filled movie houses or emptied them rather quickly. The undeniably multi-talented Joeseph L. Mankiewicz must have been hoping to cash in on his earlier success with the similarly themed 'All About Eve' here, he transfers the setting from Broadway to Hollywood - but with very different results. Where Eve bristled, Contessa fizzles out like Champaign left uncorked overnight. Gardener only had to look delicious (for those who like their women overly thin) and it often seemed as if she was taking her lines from a prompter. Bogart (foolishly chain smoking) is well cast but looks very unwell and perhaps not comfortable with some of his lines. He fares best of all the cast - even though, surprisingly, Edmond O'Brian took the acting Oscar for his overcooked portrayal as the soulless producers press assistant (what were the Academy thinking?) Jack Cardiff's location footage glistens but is rarely allowed to shine -saddled with a turgid script that flounders ponderously under its somewhat melodramatic themes. How this painfully obvious treatment garnered so many Rotten Tomato raves is quite beyond belief. Many of the press reviews of the day were more on-the-money, along with numerous IMDb users comments.
Not the best representation of its day and coming in at 2hr 10mins way too long to maintain complete interest. Maybe OK for lovers of the stars or movies about Hollywood, although I think "The Big Knife" may have summed much of it up with less gloss & more succinctly.
christopher-underwood
This starts very well, more than a little reminiscent of Sunset Boulevard, with initially Humphrey Bogart as the narrator. This is probably one of Bogart's finest performances, certainly his is a stand out performance in this fairytale romance that can never have a happy end because that is where we come in, in the graveyard. Ava Gardner is good, I don't know about the claims as to her fabulous beauty, Blue Ray does her no favours, exposing the thickness of make-up but her costumes also seem most constricting and unflattering. But she puts in a good performance, especially in her scenes with Bogart. It is just a shame that the promise at the start of some Hollywood expose and an attack upon the bullying and abusive producers comes to nothing and we talk once more of Cinderella. The last act could lose twenty minutes easily and indeed I would remove the entire performance of Valentina Cortese as the Count's sister who does not help at all as we descend into an appalling Hollywood cop out ending. Remains watchable, however, for the first half, Ava's early scenes and the complete Bogart performance only a couple of years before his death.
george-purdy
This Director is OK as a director and has directed some great films, but is generally not so good as a writer. This one is spectacularly bad. He did write and direct the very successful "People will talk", but that had originally been written as a play by someone else, so he was really mainly being a director. Also, "Barefoot" was an inside Hollywood story by a Hollywood insider, and so perhaps he lost his objectivity. They say that autobiographies are nearly always bad.
adamkings
7? this movie doesn't deserve anything over 4.it's hard to imagine a movie so bad in a time when there were plenty of good movies were made. what was bogart thinking.there's no real conversation in this film. it's a child imagining and analyzing people's thoughts and motives. every sentence is an over generalized over dramatized explanation. it's like a very bad and boring book. I don't know what they were thinking when they made this movie.
AD
