Where to start

The beginner's guide to Ava Gardner's six best films

Most of Ava Gardner's 70-odd movies can wait. Choose by director, start with The Killers, and leave 55 Days at Peking off the list for now.

Photo: DoctorMacro.com

Ava Gardner tends to get remembered as a weather system that passed through other famous people’s lives, which makes her films sound like an afterthought. Dennis Drabelle did not help in his 2006 Washington Post review of Lee Server’s biography, Ava Gardner: “Love Is Nothing”, where he grumbled that its 500-plus pages wore him out and that most of her 70-odd movies were “slop.”

Yet the same review concedes that a careful director could get intelligent work out of her, and that is the beginner’s whole map: choose by director, not by co-star. Start with The Killers, go on to Mogambo, and work down the list in order, stopping before the epic at the bottom.

The viewing order

The Killers (Robert Siodmak, 1946)

Drabelle’s account is that MGM signed her, polished her and then more or less forgot her, and that it took Universal to make her a star with this noir, loosely drawn from Hemingway. Film Daily’s review, reprinted in Canadian Film Weekly on September 25, 1946, called it “a screen masterpiece” and, with fine trade-paper tact, filed her among the “important principals.”

That review’s plot summary sends an insurance investigator (Edmond O’Brien), checking a $2,500 claim, toward a $250,000 payroll robbery, with Gardner helping Albert Dekker dupe Burt Lancaster’s ex-prize-fighter. Our State magazine adds that her waist usually measured 19 inches in films like this one, a statistic best passed along without comment.

Mogambo (John Ford, 1953)

This one earned her an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress, and the trade press noticed at the time. The Canadian Moving Picture Digest of January 16, 1954, named her among those up against Audrey Hepburn for the New York Critics’ Best Actress prize, and its columnist listed her work here among the “surprise performances,” which tells you how low expectations had been.

As for the director, Gardner’s verdict on Ford, quoted in Drabelle’s review, began “The meanest man on earth,” and finished “Thoroughly evil. Adored him!” That is about as good a notice as any director could hope for.

The Barefoot Contessa (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1954)

She plays Maria Vargas, a Madrid nightclub dancer who likes to go barefoot and gets turned into a movie star, and her own lifelong barefoot habit helped persuade her to take the part. MGM lent her out for $200,000 plus 10 percent of the box office, while Humphrey Bogart took top billing and less than half of her compensation.

The set was no party. On her first day Bogart shouted to Mankiewicz that he couldn’t hear “a goddamn word” she said, and she wrote in her memoir that he “did not make my life any easier.” Mankiewicz, during a camera test, called her “the sittingest goddamn actress” he had worked with, a stupid joke, he told his biographer Kenneth L. Geist decades later.

Critics split. Bosley Crowther of The New York Times saw a “grotesque barren film,” and François Truffaut praised its “freshness, intelligence, and beauty.” Twilight Time’s high-definition Blu-ray of December 13, 2016, was limited to 3,000 copies, so grab one if you see it.

The Night of the Iguana (John Huston, 1964)

Her last major leading role, and the one to show anybody who thinks she was only a face. Film Daily, reprinted in Canadian Film Weekly on September 2, 1964, called this Tennessee Williams adaptation “a stirring, disturbing tale,” with Gardner running a crumbling jungle hotel in Mexico and keeping two native beachboys as “playthings.” She drew Golden Globe and BAFTA nominations.

Huston insisted on black-and-white in Puerto Vallarta, a decision he later regretted because the local flora was so vivid. The publisher of Ava: A Life in Movies, by Kendra Bean and Anthony Uzarowski, says it looks closer at her screen roles and her friendships with Huston and Williams, so it makes a natural companion here.

Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (Albert Lewin, 1951)

Save this one until you are a convert, because it is a very odd film. She is an American nightclub singer in a Spanish port, adored by the men around her and unable to love any of them, until James Mason’s doomed Dutch captain turns up.

Howard Thompson of The New York Times called it “serious, complex but unexciting” while praising Jack Cardiff’s camera work, and he was half right. Seek out the digital restoration released in February 2020, a 4K project funded by the Cohen Media Group, with more than 700 hours of work across 177,120 frames. A statue of Gardner went up in 1996 on the hill over the main beach at Tossa de Mar, where most of it was shot.

Bhowani Junction (George Cukor, 1956)

Cukor is the draw, and the casting is the catch. Gardner plays Victoria Jones, an Anglo-Indian serving in the British Army in 1947, and the film profoundly changed the brown-skinned heroine of John Masters’s novel by giving the part to a white American. India’s government wanted script approval and imposed high taxes, so MGM went to Pakistan and shot in Lahore.

55 Days at Peking (Nicholas Ray, 1963)

The one to skip, at least for now. Charlton Heston did not want to work with her and pushed for Jeanne Moreau, and during the shoot she turned up late, disliked the script and drank heavily. According to Heston, she struggled to remember her lines by the time her death scene was filmed, and he suggested handing them to Paul Lukas.

His journal drew the moral: never begin a picture without “a good finished script.” Its oddest footnote is that it appears to be the last movie John F. Kennedy watched in the White House Family Theater, on November 10, 1963.

Once you have seen The Barefoot Contessa, the companion piece on how Maria Vargas dies, and how Gardner herself died in 1990, settles both questions.

Quick answers

Where did Ava Gardner live in london?

Ava Gardner lived at 34 Ennismore Gardens in Knightsbridge, her final residence when she died. She moved to London from Madrid in 1966, and Our State says she went there to get away from press gossip.

How did Ava Gardner die?

Ava Gardner died of bronchopneumonia on January 25, 1990, in Westminster, London, at age 67. Accounts record a stroke in 1986, while Our State says she had emphysema and two strokes that year, which left her paralyzed and bedridden.

Why did Ava Gardner divorce frank sinatra?

Ava Gardner’s divorce from Frank Sinatra ended a tumultuous marriage that Our State describes as cheating, fighting and much martini drinking. She filed in 1954, and the divorce became final in 1957. They stayed good friends for the rest of her life.

How did Ava Gardner and frank sinatra meet?

Frank Sinatra first spotted Ava Gardner on a set at MGM in the late 1940s, while he was still married to Nancy, People reports. They began spending time together in 1948, despite a warning from Louis B. Mayer against dating a married man.

The full story is more complicated: How Ava Gardner and Frank Sinatra met: a nightclub in 1943, then MGM in 1949