Sadly Over-hyped

Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

On a second viewing after a 35 year gap, I am convinced this is indeed a lovely work and a major work of Visconti. This is is also one of those rare films that an actor--Burt Lancaster--helped a director to make a great film. (One recalls Kirk Douglas prevailing on Stanley Kubrick to change the ending of Paths of Glory, only to make it a major work of cinema). Here, Burt Lancaster, staked his own money to complete the film as producers backed out noticing the director was ill and could die before the film was completed.One major fact that I did not realize was the title did not relate to conversations in the movie but was a well known (in the world of paintings) title for a series of paintings. That makes you to reassess the entire film. The film is a study of Italy through the eyes of three generations and their varied values on social interactions, art, politics, architectural design, music, et al.Once you evaluate the film on the basis of the painter's decision to change the very trees and objects in his painting compared to the photograph taken of the same scene, the movie's stature itself changes. The opening credits that begin with a blast followed by the electrocardiogram graph roll streaming out unattended is a Visconti masterstroke.That the film was made by the director sitting on a wheel chair is impressive. Is it a film about acquiring possessions or about understanding people? Both. One realizes the importance of understanding human behaviour of strangers, as one educated professor was withdrawing into solitude surrounded by books, works of art and great music. And his life changes for the richer experience in his sunset years. A great film indeed with superb performances from Burt Lancaster and Silvana Mangano. The cameos of Claudia Cardinale and Dominique Sanda do not contribute much except in providing insights into the character of the professor.Highly recommended for serious viewers of good quality cinema.

Visconti's penultimate feature, CONVERSATION PIECE is made after he suffered from a stroke in 1972, and would pass away in 1976 at the age of 69. The context might make plain that why this chamber piece is entirely set inside an old but palatial palazzo in Rome, where lives the retired professor (Lancaster) who is a conversation pieces collector, and a pall of nostalgia has been waywardly infused through his twilight year rumination over senescence, facing the imminent death and contending with hedonistic younger generations.The professor's solitary life is interrupted when he reluctantly agrees to rent out the apartment to Marquis Bianca Brumonti (Mangano), a middle-aged nouveau riche, soon he will get wind of the fact that Bianca has rented the place for her 12-year-junior kept-man Konrad (Berger), her teenage daughter Lietta (Marsani, Miss Teenage Italy 1973) and her pallidly handsome boyfriend Stefano (Patrizi), the latter two are quintessential rich kids wrapped in cotton wool, impressionable and capricious respectively. His young neighbors have no qualm about encroaching on his territory and breaching his equilibrium of tranquility and detachment, but the most egregious one is Bianca, a wanton intruder who takes Professor's courtesy for granted, her laissez-faire approach towards Lietta, her strained relationship with Konrad, her condescending ordering around Professor's diligent maid Erminia (Cortese), Visconti patently wears his heart on his sleeve that Bianca is an outrageous entity under the aegis of wealth, and Silvana Mangano never disappoints, she can be unapologetically ferocious, which pierces through her ageless make-up and hammers home to the point we cannot help but wondering why and how the professor must countenance such a prima donna!A more plausible reason is the Adonis-like Konrad (although Berger's exquisite look has begun to shown a smidgen trace of waning at this point), who is radical, cynical and self-destructively antagonistic towards the status quo which he has no power to change, and the professor harbors an almost reflexive and one-sided feeling of tendresse to him, Visconti cautiously skirts around the gay undertow, and instead foregrounds professor's reminiscence of his youth (where two legendary actresses Dominique Sanda and Claudia Cardinale appear uncredited in brief flashback as the professor's mother and his wife) and characterizes Konrad as an ideal force of beyond-the- pale dissolution, whose ultimate vengeance is harrowing but futile, soon to be forgotten.Over a decade has passed since THE LEOPARD (1963), Burt Lancaster returns to a similar niche in this elegiac think-piece and stays in top form with opulent compassion where his restrained self- pity, behind-the-time humility and an underlying disillusionment conflict to retain the vestigial of nobility. The professor's study is ornately-decorated in baroque majesty, in sheer contrast with Bianca's modern taste, in Visconti's eyes, the world has not progressed into a better world, CONVERSATION PIECE bemoans a bygone era of blue-blooded etiquette, it speaks volume, but frisson however, never materializes.

This is Luchino Visconti's first feature film after his almost fatal heart attack. He was in a wheel chair and his left side was completely paralyzed. Enrico Medioli's original story about a man who's facing the end of his life, whether consciously or unconsciously seemed very close to the knuckle. I've read a lot of material and talked to people connected to the production before actually seeing the movie. Nothing had prepared me for what the film presents to the audience and I wondered if the film that ended up on the screen was the film that Visconti intended. Starting from the cast: the first rumors that Visconti was ready to go back to work, announced the film with Laurence Olivier and Audrey Hepburn in the roles that went to Burt Lancaster and Silvana Mangano. Anne Marie Philipe and Martin Donovan (the director) in the roles that went to Claudia Marsani and Stefano Patrizi. For what I gather, Olivier was sick at the time and couldn't accept. Audrey Hepburn turned it down, Donovan and Philipe found themselves outside the co-production regulations where two Italian nationals were required for those roles. Helmut Berger was the one who survived all the changes and I'm tempted to say: unfortunately! His character is the one who doesn't ring true. Clearly, Lancaster's character would have seen through Berger's. There is nothing in his character that made me believe Lancaster would feel attracted and fall for. Berger is a prissy, emotionally flabby, pretty boy. He is also unbelievable as Silvana Mangano's lover. The film as a whole takes place in Lancaster's dark and elegant apartment. Against his better judgment he rents the upper floor to this new, rich, beautiful and vulgar family. His world is going to start to collapse under the weight of the young invaders without soul. Solemmn, sad and a bit static the film however has a masterful center that makes it compelling viewing. Two brief cameos by Dominique Sanda as the mother and Claudia Cardinale as the dead wife bring some unexpected oomph to the grim proceedings. Even if I sound a bit down on the film I'm actually recommending it.

"Gruppo di famiglia in un interno" has a special meaning for me, `cause it was the first Visconti`s film I`ve seen. It was a successful beginning for "Gruppo di famiglia" has concentrated all the most significant themes of his late works - death, solitude, disintegration of family and decay of traditional values, human searching for harmony in conditions of hostile environment and internal dissonance. I guess this movie is a kind of psychological puzzle - the director gives us some fragments of picture and a slight allusion how to make it up. So you'd better watch this movie several times ( at least two).Is it a precise sketch of decaying society or a drama of solitude and misunderstanding? I think both. The old Professor fenced himself off with beautiful pictures, classical music, exquisite trinkets. He seems disillusioned, he dislikes people and prefers things, they create. We conceive the environment from the Professor's viewpoint, the action of movie is restricted with his apartment - so we have exact and oppressive sensation of his voluntary hermit-existence, externally calm, but desperate like the Death. This measured life is abruptly broken off by the group of people - eccentric, tactless, obtrusive and noisy. Despite the Professor's resistance, the newcomers involve him in the storm of their passions and collisions. The epicenter of this storm is Conrad - an unscrupulous young man, a gigolo of the rich marchesa. But it's just one side of his figure, the first and quite deceitful impression. It also refers to other characters who turn out to be different from the impression they produce at first. The part of Conrad was gorgeously played by Helmut Berger who seems to embody in last films of Visconti the dangerous temptation of beauty - fatal for other people and finally for its owner. Suddenly it becomes evident that the unapproachable Professor dreams of family. The reality is pierced now and then by his reminiscences of the youth, of his mother, his young wife who'd left him (or he'd left her?). Those memories are always interrupted by irritating noise of his guests. The Professor exists at the joint of two realities and rush from one to the other with torment and hesitation. At last he realizes that feels more affection to those people with all their problems then to his exhausting reminiscences or imaginary interlocutors from "conversation pieces". He told sensitively: "It could have been my family!" Blinded with this unexpected affection he doesn't notice the doom sneering at him. He doesn't realize that he neither knows nor understands those people and there's very little time to achieve something new. There's only death ahead for him. That's why like a sudden intolerable blow he takes a suicide of Conrad who attracted the Professor most of others. Indeed Conrad is the least false figure in that "family". Beside his ruthless awareness the Professor looks like a naive idealist. His bedroom transformed into a hospital ward, a tape of cardiogram - it's a price he pays for his illusions.