just watch it!

Don't listen to the negative reviews

The joyful confection is coated in a sparkly gloss, bright enough to gleam from the darkest, most cynical corners.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

The film is beautifully acted and the casting is spot-on. Vivien Leigh is perfect in this role, neither sickly sweet or icy cold. Beatty is great to look at and plays the gigolo without any histrionics. The Contessa is great and earned a well deserved Oscar nomination. The story is relevant even today (although unfortunately nowadays these things happen with far less elegance and finesse. What holds it back from a higher rating is that the character development between Mrs. Stone and Paolo should have gotten more focus and development. No real explanation is given for how the relationship developed as quickly and strongly as it did. Of course that aspect plays into the cool nature of the film in general which many might find correct for this material but I would have liked a bit more development between the 2 principles. Perhaps neither was able to express much in the way of "emotion" and that is surely part of the point, and the finale when Mrs. Stone throws the keys to the gigolo on the street because, realizing that love is elusive, physical needs can still be met and that provides a great ending to the film, very unsentimental and leaves one with a shiver.I enjoyed the film and recommend it but don't expect anything warm and fuzzy here because that is not in the cards, folks.

Vivien Leigh was so brilliant portraying damaged-goods, faded beauty Blanche DuBois in the 1951 film adaptation of Tennessee Williams' "A Streetcar Named Desire" that it was perhaps inevitable for her to be asked to play another Williams character who's been beaten up by life, 10 years later. Thus, in 1961, Leigh--more damaged herself now after a recent split with Laurence Olivier following a 20-year marriage--appeared in the screen adaptation of the Williams novella "The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone." In it, she plays Karen Stone, a middle-aged stage actress who has just suffered two major life traumas: professional retirement and the death of her much older, millionaire husband. She retreats to a villa above the Spanish Steps in the Eternal City to hide from the world and just "drift," and is soon romanced by a handsome young Italian man, Paolo di Leo (Warren Beatty). But what Karen only dimly realizes is that Paolo is nothing more than a lira-grubbing gigolo, working for an elderly pimp/procuress named Contessa Terribili-Gonzales (Austrian legend Lotte Lenya)....Those viewers who come to "Mrs. Stone" expecting some kind of light romantic comedy, a la the Katharine Hepburn/Rossano Brazzi Venetian affair in 1955's "Summertime," will surely be surprised at how the film unreels. Despite the fact that it is a quiet picture, with a sad theme song that plays in a subdued manner only occasionally, it is nevertheless a dark and seedy one, featuring some truly unsavory characters. The scene transitions are often accomplished in a manner that beggars my poor powers of description, and director Jose Quintero gives a brooding, unsettling mood to this, his first picture, a great-looking one with sumptuous sets. Leigh, of course, is just marvelous--touching and sympathetic--here in her penultimate film, but the real surprise is how convincing Beatty is at playing an Italian, in his second screen appearance. Lenya is snakelike and sinister in her role, plotting the destinies of her victims with a purring cat on her lap, a la Ernst Stavro Blofeld; two years later, of course, Lenya would play opposite Blofeld (and that cat) in "From Russia, With Love." And speaking of future Bond alumni, "Mrs. Stone" also features fine supporting work from Jill St. John ("Diamonds Are Forever"'s Tiffany Case) and Paul Stassino ("Thunderball"'s Maj. Derval). Coral Browne, the future Mrs. Vincent Price, is well cast as Karen's school friend Meg (both actresses were born in 1913), and how great it is to see Ernest Thesiger ("Bride of Frankenstein"'s Dr. Praetorius) again, here in his final screen role! From its lengthy pretitle sequence to its eerie, ambiguous ending, "The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone" manages to impress. As regards that ending, with the disillusioned Mrs. Stone tossing her house key down to the street ruffian who'd been stalking her throughout the film, Jill St. John, in one of the DVD interview extras, suggests that the thug is merely looking for a "soft berth," whereas Williams AND Lenya biographer Donald Spoto discerns something a lot more homicidal. I tend to concur more with Spoto here, but the matter is certainly open for debate. See the film for yourself and make up your own mind....

There are three major problems here, and not just for millennial-era viewers: 1) Jose Quintero's emotionally numb direction, 2) Warren Beatty in a role he wasn't cut out for until ten years later, and 3) Tennessee Williams's severely dated high concept.Quintero's lack of experience in film is evident. He was a stage director, and it shows here. The lines are spoken for the words to be understood from a distance. Quintero seems to have little sense of using the faces of the actors to convey anything in the one- or two-shots... save for what the estimable Ms. Leigh manages on her own.Beatty's Paolo needed at least some of Richard Gere's Julian (in "American Gigolo") to make this fly, but either he had no sense of the character himself or Quintero got in his way.William's book is a reflection of Williams himself as the title character. "TRSOMS" is Williams trying to work through the fear of his own histrionic narcissism too many years in advance of what he pictured aging to be for a "queen" rather than what it really is. He was only 38 when he wrote the novella, after all. Leigh's character is him, but only insofar as he could project a future that he had merely envisioned rather than actually experienced.I've read plenty about Ms. Leigh's own struggles and supposed identification with her character. But if that is the case, I don't see much of it on screen, again, perhaps, owing to the wooden direction.Younger viewers will have to interpret this as a "period piece." 1950 and 1960 are to them what the Victorian Age was to us: Anachronistic. The conflicting values expressed by the characters do not make much sense to those raised on either Lady Gaga or "Cougartown." Today's 48-year-olds "go for it" on the basis of peer-approval, not despite it.

Moravia's later novels, largely forgotten today, describe the world of Mrs. Stone. In them, wealthy people drift purposelessly, attended by lubricious procuresses offering compliant young persons to either sex of either leaning. Nobody ever manages to find an aim, let alone achieve anything. It is almost a mark of honour among Moravia's post-war Romans to have lost all conviction, and to pay to indulge idly in empty sexual encounters with equally aimless rent-boys and rent-girls. The Eternal City provides the beauteous and cynical backdrop.Obviously a homosexual in the strait-laced 1950s could not write frankly about his mid-life crisis and encounters with much younger rent-boys, so playwright Tennessee Williams was obliged to sublimate himself into the role of Mrs. Karen Stone, failing actress and inheritor of her husband's fortune. His choice of Rome was a perfect 'objective correlative' (T.S.Eliot) for his own predicament, permitting a frank treatment of mercenary poncing in the heterosexual context, of the kind pursued in the world of homosexuals.The result is a cloyingly sad story of drift and failure on the part of Mrs. Stone (Vivien Leigh), who manages to delude herself into believing that she loves her Italian gigolo (Warren Beatty), and, worse, that he loves her. There's a double irony in the fact that Leigh/Stone really is very desirable. Her face is divine, her breasts superb when she wears her nightgown, and her smooth upper back uniquely dimpled near the neck, echoing the dimples that doubtless lie below. She is, quite simply, delectable, and obviously hungry for sexual fulfilment.There's a delicious ambiguity in the last scene, when (as far as I am concerned), in her newly-aroused identity Mrs. Stone feels able to embark on pure lechery, through which she will doubtless triumph and even go back on to the stage. Others don't see it that way, but a lover of Moravia's tantalising fiction of boredom certainly would.