#The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone

[watchingroger]

Roger's ridiculous cartoon character laugh is everything you need

[bitter69uk]

“In the Soviet Union they considered Vivien Leigh as the greatest movie star of them all and Waterloo Bridge (1940) as one of the great films of all time. In America, they gave her the plum role of Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind (1939) and two Academy Awards. In England she was mainly the wife of Laurence Olivier, the world’s greatest stage actor – no wonder she made so few films and had such an odd movie career. She made ten films before Gone with the Wind, ambitiously acquiring a reputation, and worked in only eight more after that epic made her world-famous – admittedly she suffered from ill-health and considered herself primarily a stage actress, but it does seem as if a fine screen talent was semi-wasted … Her movie persona was a fascinating one. Despite her incredible Dresden doll beauty, she was one of the cinema’s great not-very-nice ladies; not quite the bitch type, more the unscrupulous, wily, kittenish beauty who uses sexual attraction as a weapon to get her own way. The role of Scarlett was the greatest embodiment of this seemingly unsympathetic but actually mesmerizing personality, but virtually all her roles were this type.”

/ From The Illustrated Encyclopedia of The World’s Great Movie Stars (1979) by Ken Wlaschin /

Born on this day 110 years ago: brilliant, fragile and intense English stage and film actress Vivien Leigh (5 November 1913 - 8 July 1967). Alongside Anna Magnani and Elizabeth Taylor, Leigh was one of the screen’s definitive interpreters of Tennessee Williams’ work (my all-time favourite performance of hers is in The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone (1961)).

[bitter69uk]

Released on this day (28 December 1961): The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone. It’s my favourite movie adaptation of Tennessee Williams (based on a novel this time rather than a play) AND my favourite Vivien Leigh performance as the adrift rich widow Karen Stone (it feels inconceivable the role was offered to Katharine Hepburn first). The film is flawed but fascinating and seethes with weird hybrid tensions. With its woman-of-a-certain age in peril heroine, Spring works as a lush old-fashioned conventional melodramatic “woman’s picture” awash with romantic masochism, stoical suffering and deluxe production values (the costumes, sets and Roman setting are pure eye candy). But it also plumbs the depths of some spicy lurid subject matter: self-destruction, sexual humiliation and glittering but empty hedonism in a milieu of pimps and prostitutes in Rome’s La Dolce Vita international cafe society. (Some of Spring’s nightclub and party scenes, with their grotesque celebrants, can be favorably compared to the earlier Federico Fellini film). Intriguingly for modern audiences, the film is shot through with a definite queer sensibility (it’s surprisingly clear that those seeking firm-bodied Roman hustlers on the Spanish Steps are just as likely to be male as well as female; the role of Mrs. Stone would probably make even more sense as an older gay man pining for his younger thug lover). It’s also convincingly permeated by a sense of real fatalistic despair almost from the very start (onscreen Leigh’s depression is almost tangible). And in its tense, shocking final moments, Spring packs the dread of a horror film.  “A glamorous world – a strange romance!” the original theatrical trailer to The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone tantalizingly promised. The film offers a kinky glimpse of sex and dying in high society, viewed through a realm of genteel cocktail parties, little white gloves and gold cigarette cases. I'll have a Negroni, please! Read more here.

Vivien Leigh - The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone

[pierppasolini]

The Roman Springs on Mrs. Stone (1963) // dir. Ray Harrison

[anamon-book]

ストーン夫人のローマの春 テネシー・ウィリアムズ小説集 テネシー・ウィリアムズ、斎藤偕子・訳 白水社 装幀＝平野甲賀

[emmynominees]

anne bancroft as the contessa in the roman spring of mrs. stone

primetime emmy award nominee for outstanding supporting actress in a limited series or movie

[erstwhile-punk-guerito]

[la-cocotte-de-paris]

Top 5 comfort movies ?

Bonjour (ou peut-être bonsoir, je n'ai pas encore dormi lol) !

Oooooh okay I have many comfort films but I think my top five areeee:

Woman Hater (1948) - I hate hate hate the fucking title (the two French titles I found somehow don't seem as bad), but I think the film is very silly and cute. I first watched it to cheer myself up after being under the weather almost three years ago and since then watching it has at times become a near monthly ritual for me :P There are some other sentimental reasons I suppose that got me attached to it. Also Edwige is very pretty and has the most adorable accent when speaking English <3

L'Honorable Catherine (1943) - idek how to describe the plot of this because it's batshit but it's another silly yet fun film to watch that'll always cheer me up. Also random parts of some of the drunk scenes (very embarrassingly) remind me of escapades I've been on with friends lmao

L'Aigle à deux têtes (1948) - There is no logical reason why this is a comfort film for me but I am not a logical person. I do have reasons (sorta?) but they're mine to keep to myself :P Almost every single theme and aesthetic in this is right up my alley <3

Ninotchka (1939) - Greta is soooooo adorable omg <33

Marie Antoinette (2006) - reminds me of a golden last May

Choosing a fifth film was difficult because there are several more I'd wanna mention lol, and I just watched The Philadelphia Story (1940) tonight and I think that's become an instant comfort film for me haha :P A lot of my old comfort films were dramas but more recently they're mostly lighthearted for some reason!

Merci pour la question ! :)

put “top 5” anything in my ask and i will answer ok go

[aloneandforsakenbyfateandbyman]

My fave performances in retro films about sleazy, narcissistic, washed-up gigolos who desperately sell their bodies to older women to maintain a luxurious, itinerant, carefree lifestyle at the cost of their own sanity, well-being, and morality, in order of release date:

William Holden in Sunset Boulevard

Warren Beatty in The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone

Paul Newman in Sweet Bird of Youth

Richard Burton in Boom

Jon Voight in Midnight Cowboy

Tony Lo Bianco in The Honeymoon Killers

Mircha Carven in Candido Erotico/ A Man for Sale

Richard Gere in American Gigolo

Don Johnson in Guilty As Sin

Javier Bardem in Huevos de Oro

[bitter69uk]

Born on this day: brilliant, fragile and intense English stage and film actress Vivien Leigh (5 November 1913 - 8 July 1967). Coincidentally, that weird British TV station Talking Pictures here screened Leigh’s rarely glimpsed, forgotten and unloved 1955 melodrama The Deep Blue Sea (tagline: “What happens to a married woman when she’s trapped between the devil … and the Deep Blue Sea”) on Sunday. (You always know when you’re watching Talking Pictures: the ads are all for walk-in bathtubs, mobility scooters, funeral and will-making services and Dormeo mattresses). For her first film following her Oscar-winning triumph in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), Leigh chose this adaptation of Terence Rattigan’s hit stage play. (In between, she was forced to drop out of Elephant Walk (1953) due to mental health struggles and was replaced by Elizabeth Taylor. After this one, Leigh wouldn’t make another film for six years). The Deep Blue Sea is a movie about stoical, genteel suffering and suicide notes over cigarettes and glasses of scotch, with everyone speaking in posh old-school received pronunciation. Costumed by Pierre Balmain, her face a white-powdered mask of pain, Leigh portrays Hester, an upper-crust middle-aged society woman who abandons the security of her fifteen-year marriage to a judge to embark on an ill-fated love affair with a feckless younger man. Anatole Litvak’s direction is stodgy and indifferent (weirdly, he gives Leigh virtually no close-ups). But it can’t help but exert fascination as an addition to Leigh’s gallery of troubled, self-destructive women who either go mad or die by the end of the film: think Myra in Waterloo Bridge (1940), Anna Karenina (1948), Blanche DuBois in Streetcar and Karen Stone in The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone (1961). Deep Blue Sea was clearly filmed within the confines of a studio, but the view from Hester’s window is Battersea. (London is delineated by shots of black cabs, red phone boxes and red buses. British character actress Dandy Nichols from the sitcom Till Death Do Us Part plays Hester’s cockney landlady). (The Deep Blue Sea was very interestingly remade in 2011 by Terence Davies with Rachel Weisz in Leigh’s role).

[bitter69uk]

“Her movie persona was a fascinating one. Despite her incredible Dresden doll beauty, she was one of the cinema’s great not-very-nice ladies; not quite the bitch type, more the unscrupulous, wily, kittenish beauty who uses sexual attraction as a weapon to get her own way. The role of Scarlett was the greatest embodiment of this seemingly unsympathetic but actually mesmerizing personality, but virtually all her roles were this type.”

“Her movie persona was a fascinating one. Despite her incredible Dresden doll beauty, she was one of the cinema’s great not-very-nice ladies; not quite the bitch type, more the unscrupulous, wily, kittenish beauty who uses sexual attraction as a weapon to get her own way. The role of Scarlett was the greatest embodiment of this seemingly unsympathetic but actually mesmerizing personality, but virtually all her roles were this type.”

Cinema historian Ken Wlaschin’s appraisal of brilliant, fragile and intense English stage and film actress Vivien Leigh (5 November 1913 - 8 July 1967) in The Illustrated Encyclopedia of The World’s Great Movie Stars (1979). Leigh - who died on this day aged just 53 - was one of the definitive interpreters of Tennessee Williams’ work. My all-time favourite performance of hers is neither Scarlett O’Hara nor Blanche DuBois but Karen Stone, the widowed, adrift actress with a death wish in The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone (1961). It’s a great screen depiction of depression. Pictured: portrait of Vivien Leigh by Tom Kublin for Harper's Bazaar magazine, 1956.

Vivien Leigh

[pierppasolini]

The Roman Springs on Mrs. Stone (1963) // dir. Ray Harrison

[gatutor]

Jill St. John "La primavera romana de la señora Stone" (The roman spring of mrs. Stone) 1961, de José Quintero.

[too-antigonish]

Maybe you can blame Roger...

(Or give him credit)

Last week I did a retrospective of the various 'staches that Evans has sported at one time or another. It got me thinking about Roger Allam's many and varied adventures in facial hair.

Given the amount of time these men spent together and the basic dynamics of peer pressure, I think it was really only a matter of time before Evans gave the 'tache a try.

Here are some of Roger's best (and worst) looks:

The English Civil War (2001) Rating: Ouch!

2. Foyle's War (2002) Rating: Almost a Morstache

3. Manchild (2003) Rating: Every bit as smarmy as the character

4. The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (2003) Rating: Even the 'tache has an accent

5. The Curse of Steptoe (2008) Rating: Bold and bushy

6. Henry IV (2010) Rating: Glorious. Really.

7. Game of Thrones (2011) Rating: Bold but a touch dwarvish

8. Parade's End (2012) Rating: Impeccably hilarious

9. The Tempest (2013) Rating: This rough magic

10. A Royal Night Out (2015) Rating: Morstache goes Dad-stache

11. Rutherford and Son (2019) Rating: Shaggy late Orson Welles

All photos sourced from the Gallery at all-allam.com

[emmynominees]

helen mirren as karen stone in the roman spring of mrs. stone

primetime emmy award nominee for outstanding lead actress in a limited series or movie