CONVERSATION PIECE Movie Review

Violence et Passion
Gruppo di Famiglia in un Interno

Mark Twain once wryly commented that “Wagner's music is actually better than it sounds.” The same comment—in spirit—might be adapted to many of the more “operatic” films of Luchino Visconti, and the unfairly maligned Conversation Piece is most certainly one of them. It's a gentle, introspective chamber piece done on a visually sumptuous, grand scale, about a former professor (Burt Lancaster) who's introduced to a countess's lover (Helmut Berger) and soon becomes obsessed with him. There's always been something silly about Helmut Berger, and in Conversation Piece this quality makes sense for his character, and provides much of the reason for the stodgy professor's fascination with him; yet the outraged, mocking audience response to Conversation Piece when it opened the 1977 New York Film Festival may well have ended Berger's ability to be taken seriously by American art house audiences. It also ended the movie's commercial possibilities, period. Sitting in that audience was like being a new chapter of Charles MacKay's indispensable book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds—the audience had become a mob, and each line of the film set off new waves of derisive laughter. (Intentional laughs were, at a certain point, no longer distinguishable from unintentional.) The film's brave distributor later scrapped the English-language version that produced this horrifying response, replacing it with the dubbed Italian (English subtitled) version in the futile hope that a successful release could be salvaged. Alas, it went virtually unseen here, and too bad—it's better than it sounds. With Silvana Mangano and Claudia Cardinale.

NEXT STOP… The Damned, Death in Venice, The Leopard

1975 (R) 112m/C IT FR Burt Lancaster, Silvana Mangano, Helmut Berger, Claudia Cardinale, Claudia Marsani; D: Luchino Visconti; W: Luchino Visconti, Suso Cecchi D'Amico, Enrico Medioli; C: Pasquale De Santis; M: Franco Mannino. VHS NO