CONVERSATION PIECE

Burt Lancaster

CONVERSATION PIECE (aka Gruppo di famiglia in un interno/1974). Director: Luchino Visconti. 

In an absolutely gorgeous old house in Rome, there lives a professor (Burt Lancaster), a widower, who only wants to be left alone with his books, his art, and his housekeeper. An aggressive and vulgar woman, the Marchesa Brumonti (Silvana Mangano), importunes him to rent her the upstairs apartment for her daughter, Lietta (Claudia Marsani), Lietta's boyfriend Stefano (Stefano Patrizi), and the marchesa's younger lover, the German Konrad (Helmut Berger of Ludwig), who is also sleeping with Lietta. To his horror the professor discovers that this "family" is making wholesale changes to the apartment's very structure. In spite of his annoyance over this and other matters, the lonely professor comes to see these people as a surrogate family and seems to develop unspecified feelings for Konrad, who may not be as frivolous as he seems, leading to a literally  explosive finale.

Aging gay prostitute? Helmet Berger as Konrad
 

Visconti's penultimate film, Conversation Piece, which was filmed in English and has an English soundtrack (a dubbed Italian version is also available), is a modestly interesting failure that never realizes its potential. Although Burt Lancaster should be given credit for trying something challenging as a character actor in his later years, he is still too young and robust to make a convincing fussy old professor. The next most important character is Konrad, played by Visconti's then-boyfriend, but although Konrad is apparently strictly a hetero gigolo, he comes off -- as Berger generally did -- as a kind of sleazy aging gay prostitute, making his characterization rather unconvincing. We can hear his real voice for a change, but his accent is often too thick to be understood, and his acting in this is only adequate. 

Patrizi, Marsani and Mangano on the professor's balcony

Silvano Mangano can perhaps be forgiven for going over the top at times because she's playing an imperious, overbearing wealthy woman who is constantly jealous of the young man she actually seems to despise. Claudia Marsani is a bit too perky for my taste, but Stefano Patrizi makes a creditable Stefano. At one point the young couple and Konrad engage in a strictly straight menage-a-trois which is not terribly sexy. The lack of homoerotic material, aside from the vague intimation that the professor might be attracted to Konrad, actually makes the film seem more dated than daring. I confess that because the characters, including the professor, are so underwritten and the film so half-baked, that when somebody dies I actually laughed out loud. Dominique Sanda and Claudia Cardinale have cameos as, respectively, the professor's mother and wife. 

Verdict: Hardly Visconti at his best. **.