“The Barefoot Contessa” is perhaps the most elaborately structured Hollywood film since “Citizen Kane.” Like Orson Welles’s story, which begins with the death of the titular mogul, the story of Maria is told as a series of flashbacks—from her funeral—and it’s narrated, in voice-over and from the dramatic point of view of three mourners: Harry, Oscar, and Vincenzo Count Torlato-Favrini (Rossano Brazzi), her husband.... Maria Vargas is a person of character and temperament who lives with a fiercely principled, willful freedom that she embraces with an aura of headlong, tragic destiny. In a way, that destiny is scripted by Hollywood’s own narrow moral codes, bringing punishment to a woman who presumes to exercise sexual freedom, as Maria does, from the start.... contemplates with a lofty, rueful view (that owed nothing to the Hays Code) the cruelly unjust price that women in Hollywood paid for their sexual and personal freedom, the tragic conflicts that they endured for their resolute independence. [Mankiewicz]

Mankiewicz has fashioned a caustic and cynical report on the glittering and graceless behavior of the Hollywood-international set. And, in doing so, he has turned up a group of assorted characters so bitter and disagreeable that they put the teeth on edge.

Sharpness of the characters, the high-voltage dialog, the cynicism and wit and wisdom of the story, the spectacular combination of the immorally rich and the immorally sycophantic – these add up to a click feature from writer-director Joseph L. Mankiewicz.... Gardner is ideal in her spot, looking every inch the femme magnetism around which all the action revolves. Bogart is splendid throughout, taking part quietly and with maximum effectiveness in the twists and turns of the intriguing story. At times, Mankiewicz, the writer, seems over-generous in providing his characters with words.