Like so many other actors, Ava Gardner hated watching her movies. However, she was ranked 25th on the American Film Institute's list of the greatest female legends of the American screen. She said the woman on the screen was not her. But all films tell two stories: the plot and the story of the filmed bodies. This film tells what happened between two images: a close-up of 'Pandora and the Flying Dutchman' and a close-up of 'Harem', the first and last film shot by the actress in Spain. Surely Ava must have thought that neither of these two women had anything in common with herself. Ava went abroad for the first time to film Pandora, and therefore the first country to know about her was Spain, and specifically Tossa de Mar where said film was filmed. Previously, she had already filmed successful Hollywood films, such as: Venus Was a Woman or Outlaws with Burt Lancaster. So Ava lived in Madrid in the 60s before settling in London in 1967 and here she played alongside Charlton Heston: 55 Days in Peking, produced by the powerful magnate Samuel Bronston. Starting with Pandora, she was the main representative of the Spanish Carmen, that is, the typical woman who is the object of desire by various male conquerors and who are the object of their downfall because of her evil charms, thus she interpreted Spanish women. In The Naked Maja, The Angel Wore Red, The Barefoot Contessa, The Sun Also Rises, and The Snows of Kilimanjaro set mostly in Spain.
All the Night Long is the fourth feature film by Catalan screenwriter and director Isaki Lacuesta concerning the attractive actress considered 'the most beautiful animal in the world'. An outstanding documentary that pleased audiences when it premiered at several national and international festivals. While Lacuesta's previous works have tended towards the overly ambitious and slightly pretentious end of the arthouse spectrum, this study of golden age legend Ava Gardner - focusing on her years working and living in Spain - is a documentary playful, accessible but attractively unorthodox that explores countless clips from the actress' catalog, impressively recovered from the archives of the American cable company Turner Classic Movies, which commissioned the film.
This documentary is a good companion to the television series ¨Arde Madrid¨ by Paco León in which the life of Ava in Madrid, played by Debi Mazar, is described, dealing with her usually noisy parties at night and regularly bothering her neighbors, one of which was the Argentine dictator Juan Domingo Perón, which is why the boisterous parties organized by Ava Gardner cause growing tensions with her neighbors below. Both in this TV series and in the documentary we contemplate the life of Gardner, a woman with a strong temperament but extremely lively, who liked vices, drinking, smoking, and dancing. Vices that were partially destroying her life, and wasted at the same time after spending the nights dancing in the public venues of Dolce Vita and in the most fashionable clubs in Madrid. In fact, flamenco became one of her favorite pastimes after learning it in The Barefoot Condesa (1954); increasingly competent and needing little sleep, she often danced all night.
While living in Spain, she became good friends with the writer Ernest Hemingway, whom she and her other friends called "Dad", both of whom were fans of bullfighting. Ava appeared in three films based on stories by Ernest Hemingway, of whom she was a dear friend and who also lived a lot in Spain: Fiesta (1957), The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952) and The Killers (1946). We also see Ava sing some songs such as: "Can't Help Loving That Man" written by Jerome Kern & Oscar Hammerstein II and "Can't Help Loving That Man" written by Jerome Kern, P. G. Wodehouse and Oscar Hammerstein II.
In 1995 she was chosen by Empire magazine as one of the 100 sexiest stars in the history of cinema and the great Ava has been portrayed on film by many actresses, she has been played by Marcia Gay Harden in Sinatra (1992), Deborah Kara Unger in The Sinatra Clan (1998), by Christine Andreas in Mia Farrow (1995), Jon Mack in Dorothy Dandridge (1999) and by Kate Beckinsale in The Aviator (2004).
Ava spent her last years in seclusion in her London apartment; her only companions were her housekeeper Carmen Vargas and her beloved Welsh Corgi, Morgan. Two strokes in 1986 left her partially paralyzed and bedridden. Although she could easily afford her medical expenses, Frank Sinatra wanted to pay for her to visit a specialist in the United States and she allowed him to make arrangements for a private plane with medical personnel. Her last words (to her housekeeper Carmen de ella) were, "I'm so tired," before she died of pneumonia at age 67. Vargas took her body to his native North Carolina for a private burial. None of her ex-husbands attended.
