Jose Quintero (1961)

Karen Stone (Vivien Leigh), a once celebrated actress of the American stage, travels to Rome to escape her failing career; her businessman husband (John Phillips), who’s also her rock, dies suddenly on the flight to Europe.   The widowed (and presumably childless) Mrs Stone moves into a luxury apartment at the top of the Spanish Steps.  The Contessa Magda Terribili-Gonzales (Lotte Lenya), a gadfly in fashionable Roman society, introduces her to Paolo di Leo (Warren Beatty), a young man who is actually one of the stars of the Contessa’s stable of gigolos.  Karen is, from the Contessa and Paolo’s point of view, frustratingly slow to behave like a usual client but she eventually takes and pays him as her lover.   Almost from the moment of her arrival in Rome, Karen is shadowed by another young man (Jeremy Spenser), also good-looking but ominously bedraggled – he keeps appearing in alleyways and beside her as she looks into shop windows.  This kind of companion seems to be part of the package for bereaved, psychologically troubled Americans in scenic Italian cities, which become metropolitan hearts of darkness.  The stalker in The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone anticipates the less clearly seen dwarf in red PVC in the Venice of Don’t Look Now a decade or so later.  He is also, predictably enough, Karen Stone’s fate (‘She’s the tenant of the room/He’s the ruffian on the stair’).  At one point, Paolo tells Karen that middle-aged American women of her sort are forever getting themselves murdered – by men too young to want their bodies for sex but too needy to resist a well-heeled widow’s financial attractions.  Once Paolo has had enough of Karen, she invites the vagrant young man into her apartment, throwing the keys down to him from her high window.  Then she sits on a sofa, awaiting his entrance, and the film ends with a shot, from her point of view, of his slowly approaching figure.  Fade to black.

Although the husband’s ill health is signalled in his one previous bit on screen, the cut from a summary of Karen Stone’s declining theatre career to the plane journey and his heart attack is so abrupt that you might think, if you didn’t know the basic plot in advance, that she was having a bad dream.   When her husband collapses, Karen is resoundingly hysterical and unreasonable, pleading for an emergency landing while the plane is over the Atlantic:  the circumstances seem terrible enough to excuse panic and suggesting nonsense but Mrs Stone is presented, even in this prelude, as foolish.  Once she arrives in Rome, she can’t win.  At first she holds back from a sexual relationship because she’s reprehensibly frightened.  When she gets into one, she exposes her hunger for sex.  She gives her body to her final visitor for sex and for murder:  the distinction between the two is dissolved.   The source material is a novella by Tennessee Williams (adapted for the screen by Gavin Lambert).   It’s at least arguable that Williams is expressing in The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone a contemporary homosexual predicament under cover of a heterosexual one – as gay playwrights of his generation, including Williams’s exact coeval Terence Rattigan, sometimes did.  Mrs Stone encapsulates the very reasonable fear of a gay man through most of  the last century of expressing his sexual desires, of the danger inherent in fulfilling them, of a sense – because his life is so much centred on sexual self-expression – of being the sum of those desires and nothing more.  As a homosexual story, this would be real and powerful but, thanks to the prevailing culture that fuelled a gay man’s fear of sexual realisation, a writer such as Williams was under pressure to disguise it and, because the object of desire is necessarily male, to present it as a story of female (hetero)sexuality.  But the themes don’t entirely translate:  a woman of Mrs Stone’s time, place and social standing would not be at risk, to the same extent as a gay, of becoming a personality coterminous with her sexual orientation.

Although, on this reading of the material, it’s possible that an element of self-mockery infuses Williams’s portrait of Mrs Stone, that portrait comes across, in this film anyway, as offensively unkind – an effect magnified through the very presence of Vivien Leigh, as well as through her characterisation of Karen.  According to Pauline Kael, the character in the novella is ‘a proud cold-hearted bitch without cares or responsibilities who learns that sex is all that holds her to life’.   Leigh, however, plays her sympathetically; her own fragility, in her personal life and as a film star, is undeniably a factor too.  Her marriage to Olivier was over by the time she made this, her first movie since The Deep Blue Sea six years previously (although she’d done a little theatre work in the meantime).   Mrs Stone is all about age:  anno domini is the cause of Karen Stone’s dying career as an actress and seems meant to make the life she leads in Rome ridiculous.  Leigh is as beautiful as ever and she wears the Balmain clothes superbly but she looks all of Mrs Stone’s supposed fifty years and her beauty is affecting partly because it won’t last much longer (she was dead six years later).   The character’s few moments of relative happiness are poignant, as when she emerges from an Elizabeth Arden salon with a rejuvenating new hairdo.  When she’s listening to someone, Mrs Stone is sometimes subtly attentive but often miles away:  Vivien Leigh conveys this fugue-like quality intriguingly.   Her hand movements, when the character’s fingers are nervously working the sash of a robe or wrapping the apartment keys in a lace handkerchief for their journey down to the street, are wonderful.  As in The Deep Blue Sea, she’s playing a woman whose poise is either natural or so long-practised that it seems natural – and this is both a kind of protective covering and a kind of straitjacket.  There are opportunities for her to be drily witty too; the ability to deliver a well-timed insult that Leigh showed in Gone With the Wind is still intact, in a register that’s quieter here but still incisive.

As Paolo, the gigolo who finds Karen Stone more complicated and emotionally troubling than the women he usually services, Warren Beatty gives an interesting performance.  Getting the Italian accent and mannerisms requires evident effort on Beatty’s part but this isn’t a case of an actor losing rhythm or characterisation by focusing too hard on an accent.   The concentration he brings to the task seems to give Beatty’s playing an extra snap and to allow him to ‘find’ expressions and emotions that are authentic (and look or sound authentically Italian).  Beatty understands and gets across Paolo’s brittleness and petulance – his angry reactions on the two occasions when Mrs Stone laughs at him are particularly good.  Sometimes his understanding and his own intelligence are too apparent, and this tends to obscure the lesser intelligence of the man he’s playing.  But he embodies Paolo’s physical self-confidence perfectly and has a great bit running up the Spanish Steps.

Apart from the two leads, the cast isn’t up to much, although Jeremy Spenser is all right as the fateful young man and Ernest Thesiger’s involved eccentricity gives an edge to the ruin he plays – an edge that’s lacking in most of the other Roman socialites.  (The depiction of their lifestyle is pretty crummy in comparison with the nearly contemporary La dolce vita.)  Coral Browne plays Karen’s unsuccessfully protective friend Meg – the character’s meant to be annoying but so is Browne.  Still, she’s better than the actors playing Karen’s other American friends, Viola Keats and Henry McCarty (who’s terrible), and, I think, than Lotte Lenya.  There’s no doubt that Lenya is vocally distinctive but the stress often lands on the wrong word and her acting is very deliberate.  The style in which Jill St John plays a movie starlet is even more clumsy and obvious than the writing of the role, which is saying something.  Jose Quintero, a famous theatre director, had never made a movie before and it shows:  he can’t get any rhythm going – scene after scene just sits there on the screen.  (Quintero never made another film.)  The score by Richard Addinsell is a curious mixture of what you’d expect in a tragic melodrama of the time and an anticipation of John Barry phrases – needless to say, the latter are the more interesting.   Cleo Laine appears and performs briefly as a singer in a club.

28 November 2013