The Mankiewicz Dispatches: NYFF52. THE BAREFOOT CONTESSA and THE LATE GEORGE APLEY.
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Synopsis: A soulless industrialist seeking entry to the film biz employs a sweaty motor-mouthed publicist and a washed-up director to lure a Madrid nightclub legend to Hollywood. Striding intents both possessive and exalting, happiness proves elusive for the newly-minted star.
Someday I have to watch Mank's CONTESSA and count the number of times the words "fairy tale", "princess" and "Cinderella" are spoken during its running time. If only to ponder how flimsy he demanded his subtext appear, and what exactly its true subtext was, if indeed any exists.
Source inspiration was, according to immediate gossip and subsequent posterity, the beginnings of Rita Hayworth, her perhaps spurious rise and eventual ironclad hold on the dreams and desired sins of movie audiences worldwide. It attracts still not so much as film-à-clef, its one-time blurring of fact, innuendo and fiction ill-served by time’s removal of the latter duo, but as perfect moment for Ava Gardner, for both her talent and beauty, the latter so statuesque it inspires an actual statue on film. One shoeless.
As vehicle for a Bogart that would remain with the world not much longer, it provides. And does not much more. Not necessarily a knock. He serves as lynchpin to the proceedings, a sort of reworking of Mank’s ALL ABOUT EVE, replete with three narrators of loyalties disparate. Main difference being CONTESSA’ s Maria is by no means EVE’s Eve. If Mank sought to eviscerate the New York theater world in EVE, perhaps he sought to spank Hollywood in CONTESSA. No character in EVE has the merest chance at happiness, undone at the start by their own primal natures. Gardner’s CONTESSA, on the other hand, remains pure of heart, even navigating unblemished the sewer that is Hollywood quid-pro-quo. It’s only when she finally gives herself over to true love that she’s undone, done in actually, by an object of fealty who deems her unworthy. Was Mank ultimately saying all objects of worship can never be true, let alone happy? That fan worship is ultimately the province of the impotent, their virulence regained only through the removal of the stimulant? That idols must ultimately be undone, removed of the corporeal and set in their rightful place as beacons of hope at best, tokens for tourists at worst?
Either way I think we can all agree we’d like Edmond O’Brien to broker all our deals, whether they be contractual or who covers the bar tab. The man patted facial sweat all the way to an Oscar. Let’s see Piven do the same.
Synopsis: Turn of the century New England, as exemplified by the title character, bears the blows both irritating and devastating dealt by the progress of time, technology and culture.
How entertaining has this experience been, particularly the taking in of Mank’s pre-“prestige pic” period, the mid-to-late 40’s. How interesting the special focus in even his minor features on the then still highly controversial area of medicine known as psychiatry. Mank showed special focus on the repressed, the neurotic; you may read into the man’s private personality what you will. But in this film he found perhaps his best and most perfect main character, the one most emblematic of that repression and neurosis. Its name? Boston.
Boston. Boston. Boston.
Okay, perhaps, turn of the century Boston, but Boston nonetheless. Bronx boy here?
Ronald Colman properly fills the tailored sleeves of the eponymous fussbudget, one who both maintains his slowly crumbling world and prepares, not quite embraces, it’s modification. As a frictious proceeding of class and manner it mostly succeeds. Once Freud’s leather-bound missive is surreptitiously embraced, however, it pops promisingly, teasing a potentially radical shift in story. A screwball director would've flung convention to the wind, a Stevens or Hawks ready to parade the task. Instead, Mank traversed the Lubitsch trail, perhaps not as successfully but as adeptly.
Next up: 1949’s A LETTER TO THREE WIVES. Tonight at the Francesca Beale Theater. Follow my exploits at www.NitrateStock.net for full coverage of the NYFF52 Revivals series and the Mankrospective. Excelsior!
- Joe Walsh
