Ava Gardner

Ava Gardner, la gitane d’Hollywood: les années espagnoles de la Comtesse aux Pieds Nus [Ava Gardner: The Gypsy of Hollywood] (2018)

ByChristian Sauvé 2019-11-142023-03-19 Movie Review

(On Cable TV, August 2018) Made-in-France TV documentary Ava Gardner, la gitane d’Hollywood: les années espagnoles de la Comtesse aux Pieds Nus has both a breathless title and a somewhat tight focus on Gardner’s years in Spain during Franco’s dictatorial regime. While there’s clearly some affection for Gardner here (expressed either through interviewees who met her over there, or star-struck commentators), she does get excoriated for her indifference to the authoritarian regime that welcomed her, and her lack of awareness for the role she played in realpolitik between the United States and the Spanish government at the time. A secondary axis of focus for the film is in describing how Gardner was possessed of a beauty that outstripped her ability to deal with it. Coming from modest rural origins, she was celebrated as a world-class beauty but it was a life-long struggle for Gardner to come to grip with what it meant and not being exploited for it. A third area of interest consists in her tumultuous marriage with Frank Sinatra, although there’s a lot left out of that segment. The rest of Gardner’s life and career gets perfunctory but disappointing mention—her apprenticeship in the studio system prior to The Killers, her stardom years, her twilight decades before her 1990 death in London all get comparatively short thrift here compared to the Spanish years. It’s not uninteresting (especially as an occasion to learn more about Gardner), but the film ends up being unsatisfying: It’s focused on too narrow a period in her life when there’s an incredibly rich career barely mentioned. I suspect that much of Ava Gardner, la gitane d’Hollywood’s shortcomings come from its origins as a time-limited TV documentary and ready access to Europe-based sources more familiar with Gardner’s Spanish years—but there’s a lot of material left untouched if anyone else wants to make a better Gardner biopic.

Movie Review

The Killers (1946)

ByChristian Sauvé 2019-10-012023-03-18 Movie Review

(On Cable TV, October 2019) There’s a lot to love in The Killers for fans of classic noir, whether it’s the unusual structure, archetypical characters, glum script, or good dialogue. Burt Lancaster makes his film debut here, and Ava Gardner ignited her career thanks to her performance. It’s all very twisty with a man consenting to his own murder and the film flashing back to what could possibly explain such an event. The opening moments of the film (directly adapted from a Hemingway story) are immediately absorbing, with manly pursuit such as boxing and robbery being touched upon on the way to the end. In many ways, The Killers is pure noir to a fault—if you’re a fan of the genre as I am, you won’t need anything more to appreciate the film, while those who don’t care for noir (is that possible?) won’t see anything here to make them change their minds.

Movie Review

The Barefoot Contessa (1954)

ByChristian Sauvé 2019-08-092023-03-18 Movie Review

(On Cable TV, August 2019) If I had to boil down a review of The Barefoot Contessa to two words, they would be Bogart/Gardner, with Mankiewicz as the third word. Not much else is needed considering that the point of the film is to see Humphrey Bogart as a movie director witnessing the rise and fall of a Spanish dancer (Ava Gardner) groomed to become a movie star. Written and directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, the film is a Hollywood tragedy with strong ties to the European aristocracy, and much of the film’s second-half drama comes from entanglements with an Italian count. Savvily taking viewers from Hollywood familiarity to the escapist melodrama of the old-world, The Barefoot Contessa was part of the “Hollywood on the Tiber” movement which saw studio movies shot in Rome. The Technicolor production values are impressive, and they all serve to reinforce the film’s old-school glamour: in some ways, you can see the film as being very near the apex of the studio system and the style in which old-school Hollywood built itself. It is melancholic, however: the ending is a downer (in keeping with a film that flashes back from a funeral) and Bogart’s character has far less to do than you’d think from his top billing: he is a witness to events outside his control, a chronicler of someone else’s story. (There’s an interesting double-bill to be made here with In a Lonely Place as a glum Bogart-as-filmmaker mini-festival.) Off-kilter touches like that are why I keep going back to Mankiewicz movies—they clearly understood the way that Hollywood worked and used that to create an element of surprise or freshness. But let’s not fool ourselves: The Barefoot Contessa is Ava Gardner’s movie. The title of the film has become closely associated with her (she herself liked to go barefoot), and it still ranks high as a showcase for her specific brand of glamour.

Movie Review

Seven Days in May (1964)

ByChristian Sauvé 2018-05-102019-03-24 Movie Review

(On Cable TV, May 2018) In between Seven Days in May, Dr. Strangelove and Fail-Safe, 1964 was a big, big year for black-and-white techno-thrillers in Hollywood. Dr. Strangelove distinguished itself through black comedy and Fail-Safe made few compromises in showing a nightmare scenario, leaving Seven Days in May as the more average film, although this is a relative term when discussing a film in which the United States government discovers an impending military coup and tries to defuse it before it’s too late. The black-and-white cinematography highlights the non-nonsense atmosphere that the film is going for, trying to make the unthinkable at least plausible. There is something admirable to the way the film builds not to an explosive guns-and-explosion confrontation, but to a quiet climax in which the would-be traitors are sent scurrying, and the country avoids a dramatic confrontation that would have had terrible consequences. The film works hard at instilling a basic credibility to its plotting, even with some then-near-future technological touches such as video screens. The tension is there, and being able to rely on capable actors such as Kirk Douglas, Fredric March (at the close of a long career), Ava Gardner or Burt Lancaster. Director John Frankenheimer made his reputation on thriller much like Seven Days in May, and is still effective today. Compared to its two other 1964 techno-thrillers, the film has aged very well—it may be hard to imagine nuclear war today, but overthrowing a president is still within the realm of possibility…