Burt Lancaster and the Intruders

Luchino Viscontis Penultimate Film

Mar. 04, 2012

1:42 p.m.

Talk about home invasion: The 1974 film Conversation Piece stars Burt Lancaster as the Professor, an American expatriate in Rome cajoled into leasing the top floor of his palazzo to a strange band of Eurotrash. Leading the way into the Professor's secluded palace is an aggressively vulgar Italian noblewoman (Silvana Mangano) and her German boy toy Conrad (Helmut Berger), along with her daughter and the young girl's boyfriend. A cultivated man of taste, the Professor is flummoxed at first by the visitors, whose access to wealth seems to jar open every door. He prefers the great works of humanity (books and art) to the messy business of humankind itself; representations of reality are easier to handle than real people. But despite his misanthropy, the Professor proves kind when presseda man of conscience who turned his back on the noisy world from disappointment and disgust. Unsuspected veins of patience surface during his dealings with the almost sociopathic strangers who take roost in his carefully ordered life. With its many foreshadows, Conversation Piece keeps us guessing where the dialogue among this odd jumble of people might take themprison or even murder? Conversation Piece was the second last film by Italian director Luchino Visconti, an aristocratic Communist Party comrade whose nostalgia for the disappearing old order of Europe always seemed in conflict with his Marxism. Perhaps he glimpsed the future as a society with no values but consumption, not Marx's utopia. Lancaster's aged Professor can even be seen as a stand-in for Visconti himself, who may have sympathized with the '60s but felt unable to join the party. The screenplay fumbles as it reaches its climax into stilted political propaganda, yet the scenario remains strangely compelling nevertheless. Conversation Piece is out on DVD.