Colibel Terrible acting, screenplay and direction.

Chirphymium It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

Allison Davies The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Gary The movie's not perfect, but it sticks the landing of its message. It was engaging - thrilling at times - and I personally thought it was a great time.

Mikel3 This is a sad film about a beautiful woman who believes only youth matters. She equates aging with a fading ability to be loved. Perhaps this really is how aging actresses feel. After all, sadly, many only get parts based on their beauty and youth more than talent. Once they get older they feel useless and unloved. She has wealth and fame even a still impressive beauty, still that is not enough. She is vain, she must have youth too. Perhaps she also feels her youth was wasted on a much older husband. She looks for youth/love in the wrong places now. Places she knows are wrong. She lets obviously seedy characters take advantage of her, not because she was naive, it was because she didn't care. She's experienced enough to have known better in fact she did know better so did her friends. It's hard to sympathize with Mrs. Stone in this movie. We still do. All the warning signs are there for her, still she insists on driving off that cliff ahead eyes wide open to it. That said Vivian Leigh is wonderful in this role and makes the film well worth seeing. Her talents make her character Mrs. Stone and the film believable. I've read that some feel Warren Beatty was miscast in his part. Personally I thought he did fine for this early point in his career. No he was not on a par with Ms. Leigh's talent, still he pulled off the character well. The directing, the photography and secondary characters are all excellent. The feeling of sadness and impending tragedy hangs over the film like a fog. It's personified by Mrs. Stones stalker. The ending is left open for interpretation. Some people might find the final scene annoying, I found the ending appropriate. I won't go into that here. I'll save it for the discussion board to avoid spoilers. I'll just say...the ending was chilling !

edwagreen In her mid and later movie career, Vivien Leigh seemed to thrive in fading woman roles. Naturally, we think of her as Blanche, in 1951's "A Streetcar Named Desire." Her last film "Ship of Fools," she was also a fading starlet and 1961's "The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone," she played a washed up actress desperately searching for a way out of her loneliness with a younger man, Warren Beatty with a great Italian accent.The 'Roman Spring' basically fails because it could be viewed in comic terms. Lotte Lenya's supporting Oscar nomination performance as a woman in charge of matching up young gigolos with older women is comic at best. I would have laughed heartily if I didn't realize that Lenya tried to be serious. As the Contessa looking for a quick buck, Lenya constantly came across as a Brooklyn or Bronx yenta constantly on the phone to drum up business. Lenya may have been talented but she was extremely homely. That ugliness served her better as Rosa Klebb in "To Russia With Love."Leigh's portrayal of Karen Stone presented one very sick woman with emotional ups and downs. The film is depressing at best, with an ending suitable for a Hitchcock thriller.

rajah524-3 There are three major problems here, and not just for millennial-era viewers: 1) Jose Quintero's emotionally numb direction, 2) Warren Beatty in a role he wasn't cut out for until ten years later, and 3) Tennessee Williams's severely dated high concept.Quintero's lack of experience in film is evident. He was a stage director, and it shows here. The lines are spoken for the words to be understood from a distance. Quintero seems to have little sense of using the faces of the actors to convey anything in the one- or two-shots... save for what the estimable Ms. Leigh manages on her own.Beatty's Paolo needed at least some of Richard Gere's Julian (in "American Gigolo") to make this fly, but either he had no sense of the character himself or Quintero got in his way.William's book is a reflection of Williams himself as the title character. "TRSOMS" is Williams trying to work through the fear of his own histrionic narcissism too many years in advance of what he pictured aging to be for a "queen" rather than what it really is. He was only 38 when he wrote the novella, after all. Leigh's character is him, but only insofar as he could project a future that he had merely envisioned rather than actually experienced.I've read plenty about Ms. Leigh's own struggles and supposed identification with her character. But if that is the case, I don't see much of it on screen, again, perhaps, owing to the wooden direction.Younger viewers will have to interpret this as a "period piece." 1950 and 1960 are to them what the Victorian Age was to us: Anachronistic. The conflicting values expressed by the characters do not make much sense to those raised on either Lady Gaga or "Cougartown." Today's 48-year-olds "go for it" on the basis of peer-approval, not despite it.

Spikeopath " And when the time comes when nobody desires me for myself:I would rather not be desired at all"As with all Tenessee Williams adaptations it's the characters that keep the viewer interested, always intriguing and seemingly fractured with personal demons. The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone is no different, and much like the other adaptations the actors on show here come up trumps to realise the heavy dialogue driven story. This film centres on an ageing actress whose husband dies and leaves her to face her fears whilst holidaying in beautiful Rome. Here she is pimped a male companion for company and the film then fleshes out the respective characters to a craftily ambiguous ending. But it's the journey that each characters psyche takes that lifts the film above average.The back story to the film is a belter and knowing this back story helped me to enjoy the film much more than perhaps I would have. Vivien Leigh is here as the scared and alone ageing actress who falls in love with a much younger man, in real life Leigh's husband Sir Laurence Olivier had just left her for a younger woman. You can't help believing that the wonderfully tragic performance she gives here is really from the heart. The character of Karen Stone is actually based on Tenessee Williams himself, all the fears and stresses of the title character are how he felt has he penned this novella. Warren Beatty is a fine choice as the gigolo of the piece, he looks the part and actually looks like an Italian man, but I really can't vouch for his accent because during scenes where he gets angry he actually sounds more Soviet! That aside tho, he gives a well solid performance that didn't deserve the negative reviews that it got on release. Lotte Lenya {who later on would thrill me as the villainess Rosa Kleb in From Russia With Love} is brilliant here, in fact she almost steals the film as high society pimp, Contessa, all devilish charm with money signs sparkling in her eyes.Great writing, fine acting, and poignant to the last with a cracking and worth waiting for ending. 7/10.