“Tennessee Williams wanted the lead in The Roman Spring of
Mrs Stone to go to Katherine Hepburn, after seeing her performance as the
scheming mother in Suddenly Last Summer. But Hepburn, who resented the way her
advancing years had been treated in that film, had no intention of inviting
comparison between herself and the lonely middle-aged actress who buys the
attentions of a male hustler. Although the public was intrigued by rumors of
an off-screen liaison between the film’s subsequent stars, Vivien Leigh and
Warren Beatty, Spring was a disappointment at the box office. It seems that
audiences were uncomfortable with the film’s depressing theme, and with the
painful similarities between the lives of Vivien Leigh and the mentally
unstable Mrs Stone.”
Penny Stalling. Flesh and Fantasy (1978)
If The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone (the 1961 film adaptation
of the Tennessee Williams novel) is remembered at all today, it’s as a dusty
and obscure minor footnote to the career of its leading lady Vivien Leigh (it would
be her penultimate film; Leigh died of tuberculosis aged 53 in 1967). It seemingly
never crops up on TV and is unavailable on DVD in the UK. As a fan of both
Leigh and Williams (and intrigued by Spring’s sordid subject matter!), I had
long been intrigued by this curiosity. When the British Film Institute in
London held a retrospective season commemorating the 100th
anniversary of Leigh’s birth in November 2013, I finally got to see it.
/ Make mine a Negroni: Vivien Leigh in
The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone /
It certainly feels like a “lost” film. The BFI always
sources the best quality prints they can – and this one frequently looked
pretty scratchy and moth-eaten. In 1961 the film suffered by comparison with
Leigh and Williams’ earlier triumphant collaboration on
A Streetcar Named
Desire (1951), for which she won her second Academy Award, and it was neither a
critical or commercial success. Seeing it in 2013 for the first time, I would
argue
The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone is ripe for a more generous reappraisal. Williams
himself rated it highly, saying, “I think that film is a poem” in his 1972
memoirs (but then he also loved
the catastrophic 1968 Liz Taylor-Richard Burton mega bomb Boom!). Call me perverse, but I find
Spring infinitely more enjoyable
than the more highly regarded
Streetcar.
/ Vivien Leigh and Warren Beatty in
The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone /
The film is flawed but fascinating. It seethes with weird
hybrid tensions. With its woman-of-a-certain age in peril heroine,
Spring
works as a lush old-fashioned conventional melodramatic “woman’s picture” awash
with romantic masochism, stoical suffering and deluxe production values (the
costumes, sets and Roman setting are pure eye candy). But it also plumbs the
depths of some spicy lurid subject matter: self-destruction, sexual humiliation
and glittering but empty hedonism in a milieu of pimps and prostitutes in
Rome’s
La Dolce Vita international cafe society. (Some of
Spring’s nightclub
and party scenes, with their grotesque celebrants, can be favorably compared
to the earlier Fellini film). Intriguingly for modern audiences, the film is shot
through with a definite queer sensibility (it’s surprisingly clear that those
seeking firm-bodied Roman hustlers on the Spanish Steps are just as likely to
be male as well as female; the role of Mrs Stone would probably make even
more
sense as an older gay man pining for his younger thug lover). It’s also
convincingly permeated by a sense of real fatalistic despair almost from the
very start (onscreen Leigh’s depression is almost tangible). And in its tense, shocking
final moments,
Spring packs the dread of a horror film.
/ The original theatrical trailer for
The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone /
/ Leigh, draped in
haute couture by Balmain /
Leigh portrays the titular Mrs Karen Stone – a
recently widowed and affluent middle-aged American actress adrift in Rome. Rich, lonely and vulnerable, Stone is easy
prey for heartless gigolo Paolo (Warren Beatty) and his malevolent female pimp The Contessa (Lotte Lenya). Leigh is only 47 here but it has to be said she
seems dramatically older. (And in the context of the story, the age of 47 seems
to represent something significantly older than it does in 2013). Draped in
haute couture by Balmain (shame about the gruesomely unflattering blonde wigs), she
is still waveringly beautiful but careworn, ravaged and fragile. (Late-period Leigh’s
deep bass voice may come as a surprise; it was strikingly lower by the 1960s
after years of poor health and heavy smoking).
/ Ladylike and demure - but tortured /
Leigh is so perfect for the role, it's hard to believe it wasn't conceived with her in mind or that she wasn't the original choice. He
r thin-skinned and delicate
performance is a portrait of someone deeply wounded but striving to maintain a
haughty dignity and detached froideur
(she boosts her confidence and self-soothes with vice, chain-smoking and
drinking Negroni cocktails). And yet Leigh had a tough core: she was a
profoundly unsentimental actress. Whether
as Scarlett O’Hara, Blanche Dubois or the complex and troubled Karen Stone, she
never solicits the audience’s sympathy. Considering
Spring is her second last
film, Leigh ended her movie career on a high. My favorite moments of Leigh’s
performance here are probably the simplest: the segments of Stone drifting
aimlessly alone through Roman streets like a melancholy somnambulist, severely-etched and alienated in her ladylike suits, white gloves and cat’s eye sunglasses, are haunting. Thank God Katherine Hepburn
didn't accept the role.
/ Like I said, the film has a genuinely queer sensibility: Warren Beatty wears very tight pants throughout and gets more than one lingering, admiring ass shot /
The film’s weakest link is callow young Warren Beatty, whose
thick comedy Italian accent is frankly awful (his acting would improve
considerably by
Bonnie and Clyde in 1967). Why not cast an actual Italian actor
as Paolo? The dark, swarthy and sensual Franco Citti had already smoldered
playing sexy low-life pimps in two Pier Paolo Pasolini films,
Accattone (1961)
and
Mamma Roma (1962). Or perhaps the French art
cinema heartthrob Alain Delon, who at least was Continental - and by all
accounts in real life every bit as predatory and amoral as Paolo!
LuchinoVisconti’s bisexual
protégé would have invested the part with some of the icy
sociopathic menace he brought to
Plein Soleil (1960). (In fact Delon
had been
considered for the role – but Leigh rejected him as “too pretty.” Perhaps she
didn't want to share close-ups with him. Who could blame her not wanting to be compared
to young Delon?).
/ Don't Smoke in Bed: Two ultra-sultry and homoerotic portraits of very young Delon by
John S Barrington, a pioneer of gay beefcake / physique photography. Delon could have played the role of Paolo in his sleep. (Apparently Delon tried to suppress these photos later on. Read the biography
Physique: The Life of John S Barrington by my friend, journalist and author Rupert Smith)
It could be argued the film is well and truly stolen from
both Leigh and Beatty by the frankly amazing
Lotte Lenya, nominated
for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her performance as the toxic Contessa
(two years later she would play Rosa Klebb in the James Bond film
From Russia
with Love – her most famous movie role). The 63-year old Austrian actress and
chanteuse
(the definitive interpreter of her husband Kurt Weill’s songs, name-checked in
the English lyrics to “Mack the Knife”) is utterly compelling: she practically
purrs with smiling, serene evil. I literally
gasped when she calls Stone a “chicken hawk”
(a very
John Waters moment. I told you this was a queer film). And don’t even
get me started on how much I love The Contessa’s apartment. All the sets in
Spring are amazing, but her flat – shared with a menagerie of cats - is truly brothel-like,
a tart’s boudoir of crimson velvet furniture, flocked wallpaper and gilt.
/ Stirring up trouble: Lotte Lenya as the sinister Contessa. I love her blood-red and gold apartment /
As well as
La Dolce Vita, for me
Spring echoes Josef von
Sternberg’s
The Blue Angel (1930) in its themes of sexual humiliation, cruelty and death,
and
Bonjour Tristesse (1958) for the joyless European jet set debauchery and
luxurious settings. The story is full of Tennessee Williams’ essential recurring
preoccupations: loneliness, fear of aging,
compassion for human fragility, the need to live with illusions and
occupations especially the concept of the
beautiful young gigolo doubling as an angel of death (See also:
Boom!).
One of Spring’s other intriguing themes is American new
world naivety versus European old world decadence. During a heated argument,
Paolo spits at Stone, “Rome is 3000 years old. You’re what – fifty?” Later,
when someone describes Stone as “a great lady”, The Contessa is contemptuous,
arguing there is "no such thing as great American
lady" because great ladies do not occur in country less than two hundred
years old. Stone is out of her depth in Italy – against the corrupt and damaged
likes of Paolo and The Contessa, she doesn't stand a chance.
No spoilers, but
Spring also raises the possibility Stone has
a death wish or unacknowledged suicidal impulse, subliminally motivating her. Aiming
to shock and offend her, Paolo taunts she’ll be discovered dead in bed with
her throat slit ear-to-ear by a gigolo three or four years from now. Stone
merely laughs “a cut throat three or four years from now would be a convenience”.
In a weird encounter on the street with some nosy American acquaintances Stone
lies to them that she’s been diagnosed with a fatal illness so that they won’t
bother her anymore. In the context of the film, this is fatalistic – she’s
sealing her own fate. Even more disturbingly, throughout the film Stone is literally
pursued by death – stalked by a completely silent, gauntly handsome angel of
death street urchin hustler who at first might even exist only in her
imagination. (He’s a very poetic Williams-ian touch: with his wraith-like cheekbones he
looks like a Giacometti sculpture come to life and is arguably more attractive
than Beatty). His recurring presence
foreshadows certain doom.
“A glamorous world – a strange romance!” the original
theatrical trailer to
The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone tantalizingly promised. The
film offers a kinky glimpse of sex and dying in high society, viewed through a realm of genteel cocktail parties and gold cigarette cases.
/ Ominous: Karen Stone, stalked by death /
Further reading:
This
great blog has some beautiful screen shots of
The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone's lavish sets and costumes
My reflections on another Tennessee Williams adaptation, the notorious
Boom! (1968)
The screenplay for
The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone was adapted
by
Gavin Lambert (1924-2005). During the
making of the film, Vivien Leigh was freshly divorced from Laurence Olivier and
struggling with mental illness - and yet was consistently elegant and professional
throughout. Read his sympathetic and insightful account of working Leigh
here.
/
"Oh show me the me way to the next pretty boy ...": The incomparable Lotte Lenya (in 1962) singing us out with Kurt Weill's "Alabama Song"
