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.
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.