The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone

As some of you may know the 37-year old Tennessee Williams had an affair with 15-year-old boy, who was orphaned in the war, and likely had been forced into male prostitution in Rome in the late 1940s. He and the likes of Gore Vidal were there because post war Italy had a specific market for that.

Williams' biographers and Williams himself tell us that the basis for Roman Spring is Williams own experience as an older man with a young boy. This film though is really difficult to watch once you know its roots because the 14 year old is turned into a mid-20s year old predator, inverting the relationship's predation.

Tenesee Williams is marvelous, but this is really awful.I am a huge Mirren fan but she is miscast as an ageing fading "beauty".Olivier is' way too old at pushing 40 to be a young gigilo and I have real problems with his "acting" and not just in this movie.I have seen all his early French movies as well as his newer ventures into English.There is a harsh cold arrogance within him that yells male macho pig that lacks any depth or finer feelings.He seems always so stiff and unnatural,his acting is really wooden.( The scene where he lifts his hand to hit Helen/Karen had me in stitches ) The Santoro chap without uttering a word, was truly mesmerising and far more of a breathtaking hunk,one wonders what all the fuss over OM is really all about.The entire movie was wooden and forced.I truly loathed it.I am old enough to remember the original which was not that brilliant either, but knocked the socks of this sad re-make.I felt sorry for Mirren selling her huge talent up the river in this bilge and OM needs roles wherein he is and acts his 40 rather than this 'nonsense in this, and Unfaithful, of being a cheeky 23 year old which he patently is not.he looks his age.He seems very arrogant vain cold in all his movies..the French press call him the "Mannequin who wants to act".. which may be a bit harsh as they loathe him for his misogyinist treatment of their divine la Binoche..but grains of truth maybe.Given that I do admit as a TW fan this is the hardest story to get right on screen it seems..or maybe no-one can get the 'casting just right? Borrow it it is harmless viewing, but do not waste money buying DVD

Since the other users have provided details, ad nauseam, I will only say that Mirren seems to be channeling Vivien Leigh at times, especially in the last half. Many mannerisms are nearly identical to Leigh's actions in the 1961 studio version.

Also, strangely enough, I prefer the sound stage artifice of the 1960s. This cable movie was actually filmed on location, but in muted, boring colors. The 1961 feature has the wonderful Technicolor hues.

I found the actor portraying The Young Man/stalker to be far more sexy than Martinez's Paolo, even though he eats food off the ground, urinates in public, hacks up phlegm and never speaks.

Bancroft is fine, although I would have loved to have seen Sophia Loren take a stab at it.

And will you cable movie directors STOP overusing the "atmospheric" smoke machines?!! It looks like your entire film crew was smoking cigarettes during the interior scenes.

It must have been an interesting film to attract such an array of comment which both support the film and criticises it. The interest for me lies not in the fact that it is of itself a good film or a bad film, nor in the fact that it is a remake of a Beatty/Leigh film. The interest lies in the fact that such a range of comments both approving and disapproving could be made about the performances of the actors, including Dennehy, with such vehemence. I must say that I do not find comments like; "He's hot! He gets to take his shirt off a lot" any more an objective comment about acting ability than Leigh was much better at acting 'the neurotic' than Mirren because that wasn't acting either, she really was that way! Williams often concentrates upon characters who are emotionally fractured or ragged: Kowolski in "... Streetcar ..." and Laura Wingfield in " ... Menagerie." Karen Stone is likewise emotionally frail. Cossetted by a rich husband for years and harbouring doubts about her acting talent, she is also physically unfulfilled. When her husband apologises to her for not fulfilling the physical role in their marriage, she retorts: "If I'd wanted to behave like an animal, I would have married an animal" but clearly she does want to behave like an animal as is evidenced by a string of marcetta that escort her in Rome. She is damaged goods, She is emotionally scarred and physically and emotionally vulnerable, a fact recognised by the Contessa, a vengeful, embittered, exploitative, parasitic harpy, whose business it is to know these things and arrange for a remedy. Ironically, Karen is anything but hardened like stone, whatever her name suggests. She embarks on a series of assignations culminating in Paolo, an arrogant aristocrat whose genius for story-telling rivals the Brothers Grimm. We cannot be sure he is even a Conte, when Karen attempts to phone him using the number on the gilt-edged card he has given her, the line rings strangely, but not unexpectedly, dead. Nor is Karen Stone unaware of what is going on. She remarks upon the series of young men that the Contessa has supplied, all of whom coincidentally had some friend in dire (fiscal) need. But she is content to be 'shook down' (to a degree) in order to have the attention of these attractive young men who could and would do with enthusiasm what her husband could not. I wanted to shake the woman, not for her stupidity because she wasn't stupid, but for her susceptibility and vulnerability. I wanted to say: "Act you age, woman, you're making a fool of yourself." Mirren's eyes flicker almost imperceptibly when Paolo changes his story about the six brigade members who were killed. First, they were killed "on the plains of Africa" but hours later they were killed "on the boat". He doesn't bat an eyelid, she does! But neither of them seem to care. He is so self-assured in his supposed aristocratic arrogance and she is so needy, the lie passes.

Williams's preoccupations were generally local, or at least American. In this story, however, he has introduced a European/American theme and I wondered if Williams had not been recently reading some Henry James. Here we have the American ingenue confronted by the might and deviousness of the European sophistication and tradition. The Italians may be impoverished, they may be reduced to running scams and fixing up lonely ladies with gigolos, they may be living in penury and have to beg but they have the weight of the European tradition and culture to support them in adversity. So the age of Rome is mentioned at least twice, overstating its age by some hundreds of years, and Paolo draws attention to the oldest street in the city. Whether it is or not, it serves his purpose to say it is. But to Karen he says: "You are only fifty years old" which to her should be an unspoken criticism, and shocks her that he should say it aloud. But he is really saying: You Americans have no history compared to us", a sentiment espoused earlier by the Contessa who opines that any country with less than 400 years of history, has no tradition. We see in advance the pathetic contempt that the vanquished European has for the triumphant ( and sometimes triumphal) American. It is fully articulated in the last scene with the Contessa in a bitter attack born of frustration. Without assessing the relative moralities of Karen Stone or the Contessa or Paolo, it is the American who morally crumbles at the end, inviting an unwashed, unkempt, possibly very smelly young man (he's a bit too old to be an 'urchin') into her bedroom. Her degradation is complete. It doesn't require anyone to murder her. She is already destroyed. The Italians still have their culture, traditions, and history to fall back on.

Much has been said of the acting of various characters so I don't want to comment on this other than to say that Olivier Martinez seems to have received special attention for being wooden. Having not seen him in anything else, it's hard to make a comprehensive statement about his acting but I thought he conveyed the stiffness and arrogance that one would expect of a 'titled' person. Others may disagree.

This beautifully costumed and photographed update of the 1961 film is vibrant, honest, and wonderfully acted. Helen Mirren's performance as the aging actress is at times playful, as when she brushes off an old "friend" with a lie about having a tumor, and heart-breaking as when her eyes travel from the perfect body of her lover to her own arms and then breaks down. Unlike most Tennessee Williams' works, "Stone" relies more on silences than on dialogue. Mirren registers every step in Karen's journey from humiliated actress to grieving widow to woman in love to woman scorned. Anne Bancroft, as the Countess, is also dead-on. Her arch manipulation of Karen conceals a passionate outrage at her own poverty that pours out with devastating effect in the film's final moments. Martinez and Santoro as the two young men are also effective.