Vivien Leigh is an aging beauty living in Italy in "The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone," based on a novel by Tennessee Williams. Director Jose Quintero took on the job of directing and he does a fine job with quite a cast, which includes Warren Beatty, Lotte Lenya, Coral Browne, Jill St. John, and Cleo Laine.Leigh plays Karen Stone, an actress pushing 50 who travels to Rome with her elderly husband. Her husband has a fatal heart attack on the plane, and Karen doesn't return to the states. Instead, she stays in Rome and leases a gorgeous apartment. She is visited by Contessa Magda Terribili-Gonzales (Lotte Lenya) who, for a cut, pimps out gigolos to older women. Karen is hooked up with Paolo (Warren Beatty) and soon finds herself falling for him.Vivien Leigh looks beautiful, but haunted, and she's perfect for this role, which dovetails her own life, as she Olivier told the manic-depressive actress that he was going to marry Joan Plowright around the time of the filming.Warren Beatty doesn't have much of an Italian accent or, in my own opinion, much presence. He looks good, which is most important.A very good, haunting movie.

Worth seeing as a gay lib film. It is "Tod in Venedig" updated to 1960 Rome, and so that the plagiarism is not so obvious, the old queen's sex is changed. Otherwise it is Mr Mann's storyline verbatim.Lush lush colors and a great window on the decadence of Rome ready to be renewed (albeit while damaging the Church) via Vatican II.And Warren Beatty at 22? Like Splendor in the Grass, he is all dick, all the time. His acting is decent, but as an Italian, he is laughable. And I guess that is how he lived his life. Be careful what you wish for...As for Leigh, clearly she was playing her mentally ill self, and she does a fine job.Finally, the movie is worth seeing for Lenya brilliant performance as a procuress. As she sings in the 1950s version of The Three Penny Opera: "What keeps a man alive? He lives on others? As long as he can forget, they're his brothers..."

"Are you trying to--touch me, Contessa?" No one who sees Vivien Leigh on film can remain unmoved by her for long, if they are sensitive to beauty. Or pain. Despite whatever faults it may reveal to some, this film is a truly beautiful representation of the singularly tormented art of a hypnotically compelling actress. Watch her eyes in the introductory scene on the sofa, as she glances at the Contessa and her boy, over the smoke rising from her filter-less cigarette. Or at the villa lunch party--is anyone more graceful on screen with a fork and an awkward plate of food in their hands while managing to consume, register taste, swallow, and speak "sophisticated" dialog in the best postwar style, in a foreign (American) accent? Watch her in the café scene with Lotte Lenya's voracious pimp zeroing in on its prey: Leigh was tormented by the word "Beautiful"--friends and fans called her that to her face almost involuntarily, yet she couldn't tell them it drove her crazy, that her English convent school upbringing made that word synonymous with "shallow", at least to her way of thinking--but what other word describes her? Vivien Leigh casts a spell on all who see her, long after her death from tuberculosis in 1967. Oh, and the 1961 Lincoln convertible is as beautiful as any of the "Roman" scenery in the background; it is the perfect choice for Karen Stone's car.

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.