Watched The Bells at St. Mary last night and I understood for the first time why Ingrid Bergman had written to Roberto Rossellini some four years later to offer her service to his project. If roles as in The Bells of St Mary were what a top actress could get back in the mid-40s, then what Roberto was doing at the height of neo-realism Italian cinema was indeed not a breath of fresh air; exciting and adventurously.
Despite the all star cast, the film is dull and the script stagnant. The worst bit though was the scenarios with young children - whose stage performance resembles those of the Chinese counterparts in the dark age of Chinese cinema; between 1949 to 1979 when they were made to talk and behave exactly like adults.
If The Bells was a minor let-down - because I had only picked it up from the shelf thanks to its rather misleading synopsis, then The Bare Foot Countessa could be considered a major disappointment. Probably because of the quality of recording back in the 1940s and his thick voice which made it even more difficult to follow, I have never been able to see the charm of Humphrey Bogart that keeps him 'alive' all these years. What attracted me to it then was Ava Gardner, who, despite her lack of confidence in her acting, was rather good at the job, and I was hoping to find something to convince myself that this was the case.
But the way the story was told put me off entirely: it started from a funeral and ended with a funeral and the part Ava Gardner played was more a case study by her more 'superior' males - all of whom claimed to have some insight knowledge of this female object. In other words, it was a typical example of those films that had been heavily cited and critised by the feminists.
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