The Reluctant Star /What Ava Gardner played best

 

Ava Gardner

The Reluctant Star

What Ava Gardner played best.

David Denbey

19 August 2013

Joseph L. Mankiewicz, who wrote and directed “The Barefoot Contessa” (1954), a bitter fable about the movie business, gave the picture’s star one of the most craftily prepared entrances in the history of cinema. The setting is a night club in Madrid. A dancer named Maria Vargas is performing, but Mankiewicz shows us only the reactions of the crowd: the men rapt and ravenous; the women irritable. As Vargas finishes her act and goes backstage, three men from Hollywood arrive to meet her. She refuses to come out, but Harry Dawes, a down-on-his-luck writer and director (Humphrey Bogart), barges into her dressing room, where he notices her bare feet below a drawn curtain; she is embracing her lover. Dawes teases her, and, enraged, she yanks the curtain aside. Then, at last, we see her: Ava Gardner, with her thick black hair, bowed lips, cleft chin, and green eyes, wearing a scarlet necklace that matches her lipstick, and a white peasant blouse pulled off one shoulder. Admiration struggles against disbelief: how could anyone look that good?

Ida / A Film Masterpiece

“Ida”: A Film Masterpiece

BY DAVID DENBY

The New yorker

MAY 27, 2014

We are so used to constant movement and compulsive cutting in American movies that the stillness of the great new Polish film “Ida” comes as something of a shock. I can’t recall a movie that makes such expressive use of silence and portraiture; from the beginning, I was thrown into a state of awe by the movie’s fervent austerity. Friends have reported similar reactions: if not awe, then at least extreme concentration and satisfaction. This compact masterpiece has the curt definition and the finality of a reckoning—a reckoning in which anger and mourning blend together. The director, Pawel Pawlikowski, left Poland years ago, for England, where he linked up with the English-born playwright Rebecca Lenkiewicz. After making documentaries for British television, Pawlikowski began directing features in English, including “My Summer of Love” (2004), with Emily Blunt, then unknown, and “The Woman in the Fifth” (2012), with Ethan Hawke and Kristin Scott Thomas. “Ida” is a charged, bitter return. Set in 1961, during the Stalinist dictatorship, the movie pushes still further into the past; almost every element in the story evokes the war years and their aftermath. The filmmakers have confronted a birthplace never forgiven but also never abandoned.