and Have Not. But Bogart made a lot of other films during his thrity year career in Hollywood. A few of those are stinkers. Most are pot boilers. And some are absolute gems. Joseph L. Mankiewicz's The Barefoot Contessa falls into the latter category. At least in my book it does. And let's face it, my book is the only one I care about. Bogart plays Harry Dawes, a washed up movie director hired by millionaire Kirk Edwards (Warren Stevens), who fancies himself an artistic kind of a guy and wants to produce a movie. They fly to Madrid along with Oscar Muldoon (Edmund O'Brien), Kirk's PR maven, to audition a dancer they've heard about named Maria Vargas (Ava Gardner). Maria turns down all of Kirk's and Oscar's propositions, then changes her mind when Harry comes to talk to her. She makes the movie, she becomes a star, and she and Harry become best friends. Watch where you're going now. It really is possible for a man and a woman to be just friends. Besides, Harry has met and married the lovely Jerry (Elizabeth Sellars), and she's helped him get his life and his career back on track. Well, after several major movie hits, Maria begins to tire of both Hollywood and Kirk Edwards. So she and Oscar give Kirk the bum's rush and take up with millionaire playboy Alberto Bravano (Marius Goring). They go yachting about the Mediterranean for a while, until Maria begins to tire of Bravano too. He is, after all, a consummate bore. When Bravano starts abusing Maria in a Monte Carlo casino, she's rescued by Count Vincenzo Torlato-Favrini (Rossano Brazzi). He soon falls for Maria, and the feeling is mutual. Before you can say noblesse oblige, wedding bells are ringing. But marriage to the count isn't all that 
she dreamed it would be. The count has a secret of his own. Seems his equipment isn't quite in working order. Something to do with a grenade during the war. And he neglected to tell Maria before they were married. Ooopsy! And all those hunky young pool boys and Gypsies hanging about. What's a countess to do? Conclusions? Draw your own. Let's just say that the entire film is narrated in flashbacks from Maria's funeral. And the count's the guy wearing the cuffs. Jealousy, alcohol and a shotgun are always a bad mixture.For Humphrey Bogart fans, The Barefoot Contessa is something of an anomaly. Here, Bogie isn't playing a gangster, or a bum, or a prisoner, or a good man gone wrong trying to do the right thing. Harry Dawes is just a nice guy who happens to work in a not very nice world. Along the way, he tries to be nice to, and help out, other people. He befriends and makes a star out of a lovely girl from Madrid. Ava Gardner sizzles as Maria, the barefoot dancer who never wanted anything more than to be truly loved. She gets just about everything in life but that. Edmund O'brien does a great job as the ever-worried Oscar, always hustling, always looking for an angle, always trying to keep one step ahead of his clients and the vox populi. Warren Stevens is delightful as the money-obsessed Kirk Edwards, who thinks he can buy anything, including love. And Rossano Brazzi puts in a memorable performance as the world-weary count, carrying his dirty little secret around with him, until it drives him crazy in the end. And here's where the film makes an interesting departure from a lot of movies that preceded it - Mankiewicz casts real Europeans to play Europeans. This is one of the hallmarks that sets movies of the 1950s apart from those of the 30s and 40s. Had The Barefoot Contessa been
made a decade earlier, all of the parts would have probably been played by American or English actors. Think of Britishers Claude Reins and Sydney Greenstreet as the French Inspector Renault and the Italian Farari in Casablana. You get the picture. But realism was finally starting to creep into Hollywood. America's isolationism was over. People wanted real, foreign locales and real foreigners in them. About time too. Makes for much better movies.The Barefoot Contessa is rated G and is filmed in Technicolor. Running time is 128 minutes.
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