"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.
Review of The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone
