The Barefoot Contessa (1954), written, produced and directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz.
Looking for new talent, a tyrannical rich man who wants to make movies -- obviously Howard Hughes -- takes his crew to Europe to scoop up Spanish dancing sensation Ava Gardner. She likes and admires writer/director Humphrey Bogart and he convinces her to come back and begin a brilliant movie career. She always has a man standing by and goes through a series of lovers. Take her or leave her, but she knows what she wants.
It is talky and somewhat soapy, but lush and with a great ensemble. In some ways it is a cynical inside-Hollywood tale like In a Lonely Place (1950) and The Bad and the Beautiful (1952). The story is told in flashbacks at her funeral, switching back and forth between three narrators:
Humphrey Bogart: her friend and mentor, sort of a fairy godmother, a rare and welcome case in classic cinema of a man and woman who are close without being romantically involved. This avoids the usual screen cliche of the older man with a younger love interest. Proving that both people could act: Bogart and Gardner didn't get on together at all. This was probably his fault; he was getting sick, always coughing, probably in pain. You see a growing sadness in his performances in those final years.
Edmond O'Brien: the sleazy studio publicist.
Rossano Brazzi: an Italian count, the last of his line, looking for a beautiful countess. Cruelly, what he doesn't tell her until the wedding night: a war wound has made him impotent. Which is a Hemingway plot device in another Gardner film: The Sun Also Rises (1957). In the original script the Count was a closeted gay man; commentators suspect Brazzi was playing it that way, Code be damned.
The title character is suggested by the life of Rita Hayworth (born Margarita Carmen Cansino, she also started by dancing in nightclubs and married a Prince). However, the character strongly resembles Gardner herself. As the commentary track points out, she "got away with" behavior that other actresses couldn't have at the time. She liked sex and hard drinking and saw no reason she shouldn't live for pleasure. She did not consider herself a serious actress and was just in it for the money, but couldn't be bought: she decked Howard Hughes for trying, married Mickey Rooney then Artie Shaw then Frank Sinatra and left him for a bullfighter, and so on.
Photographed by the great Jack Cardiff.
Available on Blu-ray from Twilight Time. The Technicolor registration looks off to me in certain scenes.
The commentary track by Julie Kirgo and David Del Valle has a lot on the biographies of everyone involved. They love the film but admit the plot is talky sometimes.