Word: contessa
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...Prize Novel Contest, but the ribbon it really earns is a piece of black crape. The book is a flaccid throwback to the I-never-had-a-chance school of social protest popular in the '30s. Author Mankiewicz, 32, nephew of movie Writer-Director-Producer Joe (The Barefoot Contessa) Mankiewicz, chooses as his hero-victim an 18-year-old boy of Mexican descent who lives in a Southern California town that draws its color line tight as a noose. Straying from "Mex Town," Angel Chavez makes his first fumbling pass at a local girl on a restricted stretch...
...Barefoot Contessa there are the makings of approximately three first-rank films. Unfortunately, the best two already have been made with more skill and at greater length under the titles All About Eve and The Bad and the Beautiful. What is original in the new picture receives scanty attention because of the time spent on the other two. And it really is a shame that writer-director Joseph L. Mankiewicz could never quite decide on which story to concentrate because he ends with a second rate product in which the flashes of brilliance seem to shake free in spite...
...main theme of the film--the growth and disintegration of a beautiful young girl--is the obsession the motion picture industry has for itself. The Bad and the Beautiful said quite a bit about professional back-stabbing and the ruthless, compulsive people who produce films. Well, The Barefoot Contessa revisits the same territory, using the same map and plots no new landmarks of villainy. Along with the favorite theory of many top movie writers that nothing is quite so worth studying as the workings of their own industry are the corollaries that all these folk, with their immense fortunes...
...being loved. This fixed as her real trouble, the picture goes along its sententious way, proving that wealth and fame don't mean a thing if you're not happy, and that you've got to have true love to be happy. As an argument, The Barefoot Contessa is no more impressive than it is as entertainment...
...even the neat lines, Bogart's expert delivery and some effectively acid scenes fail to make Contessa much more than an international-set soap opera...