The Barefoot Contessa Articles

Ava Gardner as a disguised version of Rita Hayworth in Joseph L. Mankiewicz's The Barefoot Contessa Ava Gardner is back on Turner Classic Movies on Thursday evening (well into Friday morning), with four releases from the 1950s followed by the "Find Ava" section — seven titles from the '40s in which Gardner had bit roles. The two highlights of the evening are John Ford's Mogambo [...]

Ingrid Bergman, Gary Cooper in Sam Wood's For Whom the Bell Tolls (top); "The Last Supper" scene in Luis Buñuel's Viridiana (middle); Marlon Brando, Maria Schneider in Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris (bottom) The ludicrous censors at the Motion Picture Association of America and their precursors at the Production Code Office have always had counterparts in other countries. Whether for political, religious, social, economic, [...]

Four-time Academy Award winner screenwriter-director-producer Joseph L. Mankiewicz will be saluted by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences with a special 50th anniversary screening of a recently restored print of Suddenly, Last Summer, starring Katharine Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor (above, and right, with Mankiewicz), and Montgomery Clift. The screening will take place on Thursday, May 21, at 7:30 p.m. at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater [...]

Cinematographer and director Jack Cardiff, one of the early masters of color cinematography, has died. He was 94. Cardiff's work as a cinematographer was quite eclectic, ranging from his partnership with Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger in the British-made Black Narcissus (1945) and The Red Shoes (1948) to prestigious international productions such as John Huston's The African Queen (1951) and King Vidor's War and Peace [...]