Conversation Piece

Burt Lancaster gives “one of the finest performances of his career, perhaps his best since The Leopard” (Kevin Thomas, Los Angeles Times) as an aging American art historian who has retreated from the world into the dark Roman palazzo he inherited from his Italian mother. When he rents the upstairs flat to a Roman matron (Silvana Mangano) and her glibly amoral gigolo (Helmut Berger), his life’s denouement is invaded by la dolce vita. “On one level, a very Italian comedy of mayhem in an apartment house; on another, a rich and unmistakably personal treatment of an old theme, the invasion of a refined and sensitive intelligence by the anarchic-erotic forces of the Id” (Donald Lyons, Film Comment).