Shards from the Fractured Mirror: The Barefoot Contessa, Fool's Paradise, The Miracle of the Bells, The Player and Super 8

For the last year or so much of my time and energy has been devoted to working on The Fractured Mirror, my upcoming book about movies about the movie business. I’ve posted much longer versions of some of the pieces that I’ve written for the book on this website but the vast majority I only shared with people who pre-ordered the book through Kickstarter and Backerkit or who donate to this site’s Patreon page. 

I’m quite proud of the work I’ve done on the book, as well as the kooky assortment of movies I’ve covered so I figured that every month I would share a handful of pieces I’ve written for The Fractured Mirror with y’all. I’ve written up 298 movies so far and will cover 365 in total so I am very open to recommendations on movies to write about. 

In conclusion, please donate to my site’s Patreon page. I desperately need the income and I’d love to share these new pieces with as many people as possible. 

The Barefoot Contessa (1954) FM

Mank angrily tried to convince a public that, while Academy Award-winning All About Eve writer and director Joseph L. Mankiewicz might have been one of the wittiest and most accomplished screenwriters in film history he wasn’t even the wittiest or most accomplished member of his immediate family. That’s because the Guys and Dolls director had the fortune and misfortune to be the younger brother of Citizen Kane screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz, whose intellect and talent Mank depicts as downright spooky, if not preternatural.

Writing about show-business brought out the best and the bitchiest in Joseph. Four years after his All About Eve picked up a whopping fourteen Oscar nominations and won six, including Best Picture, the filmmaker returned to the juicy subject of actresses with 1954’s The Barefoot Contessa.

The Barefoot Contessa does for film what All About Eve did for Broadway but structurally and thematically it bears an unmistakable resemblance to Citizen Kane.

Like Citizen Kane, The Barefoot Contessa unfolds in flashback as it explores its title character’s enigmatic, larger-than-life existence from a variety of perspectives and angles. In The Barefoot Contessa that tantalizing enigma is Maria Vargas (Ava Gardner), a Spanish dancer of humble origins who rockets to superstardom in a series of films written and directed by sharp-witted, sardonic Hollywood survivor Harry Dawes (Humphrey Bogart).

Maria’s stormy sensuality and continental charisma makes her an overnight success and an international sensation but she frustrates as well as impresses the opportunists around her with her fundamental unknowability. The strong-willed, headstrong heroine doesn’t want any of the things that are supposed to matter in a capitalist society. She doesn’t care about money or sex or status or any of the rewards of fame and fortune. All that matters to her is survival and being true to herself.

The writer-director picked up a much deserved Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay for a rich, exquisitely verbose script that delights in the infinite possibilities of language. Much of The Barefoot Contessa’s wonderfully writerly script consists of wry, philosophical and bitterly funny narration delivered by Dawes as well as press agent Oscar Muldoon (Edmond O’Brien), who is an oily pragmatist by nature as well as by trade.

O’Brien deserved the Academy Award he won for Best Supporting Actor for stealing the film from the perfectly cast Gardner and Bogart in two of their signatures roles.

Gardner is impossibly beautiful as well as ineffably, unmistakably sad as a goddess for whom money and celebrity are a burden rather than a blessing. In The Barefoot Contessa movie stardom is a crucible that destroys even the strong.

The Barefoot Contessa is an elegantly written and beautifully acted tragedy about a star too beautiful and pure for our degraded world and the seedy realm of show-business.

Fool’s Paradise (2023)

Fool’s Paradise, Charlie Day’s cinematic debut as a screenwriter and director, isn’t influenced or inspired by Hal Ashby’s 1979 masterpiece Being There so much as it’s the cinematic equivalent of a musical cover that changes a few notes but leaves the core fundamentally the same. Ashby isn’t the only filmmaker Day channels here. He’s nearly as indebted to the fussy compositions and innate sadness of American film’s preeminent Andersons, Wes and Paul Thomas. Day even hired Paul Thomas Anderson’s regular composer Jon Brion for that signature sad carnival sound, mood and vibe.

Day journeys back even further, all the way to the Silent Era when conceptualizing the lead role of Latte Pronto. Day’s baby-faced protagonist is an angelic man-child with the intellect of a five year old or agreeable puppy. Also, he doesn’t talk. He is fundamentally a mute with an unfortunate habit of looking at the camera while acting but when self-destructive lookalike movie star Sir Tom Bingsley (also Day) dies Latte improbably takes over for him and becomes an overnight celebrity.

Protagonists don’t get more passive than Latte. He seems content just to exist and is flummoxed by the curious ways of movie world folk, with their massive egos and insatiable desires.

Latte doesn’t want anything. In the movie business that makes him an anomaly. Day’s silent passivity wouldn’t be a problem if the movie weren’t so hopelessly pokey in its pacing and sloppy in its storytelling. A lot of thought and care clearly went into individual images and moments but the slim excuse for a plot just sort of ambles sideways before ending up nowhere.

Day is a tremendous talent but this feels like a vanity project from a popular entertainer who, alas, may not get a second chance to establish himself as a cinematic auteur as well as a beloved, scene-stealing film and television star.

The Miracle of the Bells (1948)

Ben Hecht reportedly agreed to adapt Russell Janney’s best-selling 1946 novel The Miracle of the Bells on the basis that he did not have to read the book. Co-screenwriter Quentin Reynolds apparently read Janney’s novel and gave his co-screenwriter enough information about it for the task at hand. If true, Hecht’s behavior betrays a lack of respect for Miracle of the Bells as a piece of storytelling as well as a very deserved dearth of confidence in the book’s suitability for film. Whatever magic Miracle of the Bells possessed on the page is lost onscreen.

Miracle of the Bells unfolds in flashback as narrator and preeminent publicity man William 'Bill' Dunnigan (Fred MacMurray) recounts how he found himself in a sleepy coal town trying to arrange a funeral at a small church for Olga Treskovna (Alida Valli) along with a very dramatic gesture involving all of the bells in Olga’s hometown ringing non-stop over a period of days in mourning and remembrance.

Olga played Joan of Arc in her only film performance then followed in her footsteps by dying before her first, last and only film could be released theatrically.

When Olga perishes melodramatically the studio decides to re-shoot the Joan of Arc film with a new, less dead actress in the lead. This leads MacMurray’s love-struck publicity man to resort to extreme measures in order to make the beatific actress’ dying dreams and final wish come true.

A hilariously out of place Frank Sinatra costars in the shockingly minor role of Father Paul, a baby-faced, tough yet tender priest in a dreary coal town who looks like he’s still a few years away from being able to drink legally.

Sinatra is a bizarre distraction as a seemingly teenaged man of the cloth who helps those coo coo crazy bells ring-a-ding ding righteously. The legendary sinner makes for a wildly unconvincing priest in a hokey spectacle that confusingly pays tribute to our nation’s heroic coal miners though the death of a glamorous movie star.

The Player (1992) FM

Robert Altman scored some of the best reviews of his career for 1990’s Vincent & Theo but his comeback did not kick into high gear until the zeitgeist-capturing success of his 1992 show business black comedy The Player. Altman’s celebrity-festooned adaptation of Michael Tolkin’s 1988 novel of the same name, which Tolkin himself adapted for film, finds Altman turning his simultaneously fond and withering gaze in the direction of a motion picture industry fueled by cowardice, arrogance, greed and the mindless worship of famous people.

With his slicked back hair and expensive suits, a never-better Tim Robbins channels the sinister swagger and evil yuppie energy of Gordon Gekko, Phil Jackson and Patrick Bateman as Griffin Mill, a studio executive who has developed a reputation as a writer’s executive because while he is a mercenary philistine he is not a COMPLETE philistine. That just barely sets him apart from less cultured peers who can’t contain their contempt for writers and the written word.

Despite an image as a suit who understands ink-stained scribes Griffin finds himself receiving cryptic, ominous postcards from an enraged mystery man who posits himself as the avenging spirit of every screenwriter who ever died broke, alone and unknown with closets full of unwanted screenplays while executives like Griffin receive the money, power and validation writers desperately crave.

Griffin plays gumshoe and guesses that the man behind the malevolent missives is David Kahane (Vincent D’Onofrio), a rage-poisoned loner even angrier than most failed screenwriters.

Robbins’ anti-hero ends up killing David, who he posthumously humiliates further by seducing his mysterious artist girlfriend June Gudmundsdottir (Greta Scacchi), who is cold in a manner at once appealing and vaguely sociopathic.

While trying to stay one step ahead of the police Griffin contemplates a pitch from screenwriting team Andy Sivella (Dean Stockwell) and Tom Oakley (Richard E. Grant) for a movie designed to rebel against stars and happy endings.

When the screenwriters vow to make a movie with no stars or a happy ending it becomes inevitable that their artsy ambitions will be realized with ALL of the stars and a preposterously upbeat finale. The Player tells us exactly what it’s going to do and then does it. The pleasure consequently comes from the masterful execution rather than surprise.

Altman’s return to the A-list is a satire of glossy, irresistible surfaces and deep underlying cynicism. Altman’s contempt for the childish games of the movie industry is palpable, but so is an unmistakable affection for Hollywood and all of its ridiculousness. Besides, The Player looks amazing and in its supremely superficial world that’s all that really matters.

The Player served as a sleek, darkly funny reminder that Altman wasn’t just one of our greatest artists and auteurs: he was one of our greatest entertainers as well. This is one of his most entertaining films.

Super 8 (2011) FM

Producer Steven Spielberg revisited his storied past and proved that sometimes you can go home again by producing writer-director J.J Abrams 2001 hit Super 8 through his Amblin’ production company. Chronologically as well as thematically the science-fiction adventure takes place in 1979, in between 1977’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind and 1982’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.

Super 8 is set in fictional Lillian, Ohio, one of those magical Spielbergian suburbs full of relatably traumatized latch-key kids lacking moms and/or dads riding bikes alongside their wisecracking buddies at night in the golden hour.

Joel Courtney leads a cast of talented child actors as fourteen year old Joe Lamb, a teenager reeling from the death of his mother in a workplace accident. Joe and his buddies are collaborating on an adorably amateurish Super 8 zombie short film helmed by Charles Kaznyk (Riley Griffiths), a pint-sized wannabe George Romero who is precocious in his polished professionalism even as his work is ingratiatingly inept, when they encounter a fiery train wreck so impressively rendered that it comes close to single-handedly redeeming the oft-disparaged tool of CGI.

Joe sees the scrappy horror movie shoot as an excuse to get closer to its similarly traumatized leading lady Alice Dainard (Elle Fanning), a sad-eyed beauty too talented and magnetic for the boy’s silly shocker and even Super 8 itself. The high spirited lads who make up the film’s cast and crew go from making a horror movie to being in a real-life fright flick when they make a close encounter of a potentially deadly kind.

As they investigate further, the horror movie loving youngsters come to suspect that the eerie disturbances in their small town are caused by an unhappy extra-terrestrial eager to head back home.

Writer, director and producer J.J Abrams, no stranger to aliens or alien invasion movies, lovingly travels back to the happiest days of his own childhood while paying reverent tribute to Spielberg’s iconic forays into kiddie science-fiction as a prolific producer as well as director.

Super 8 begins more strongly than it ends but it’s nevertheless a nostalgic crowd-pleaser with particular appeal to members of the generation that grew up on Spielberg’s iconic tales of lonely children and fantastical creatures coming of age in the spooky, sad suburbs of the 1970s and 1980s.

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