In Conversation Piece Visconti's themes appear as contrasts don't they? Age versus youth, the established versus the new. Does Visconti use contrast to throw into relief just who these people are? Gregarious versus reserved. Pleasure versus culture.
Is it the use of contrast that sharpens the picture of just what 'gregarious' is? 'Crows' rather than the 'eagle'. Conversation Piece's gregarious people are noisy and attend hugely to the mundane. Within the contrast of this elegant and quiet apartment, gregarious people perpetually need a background racket ('simple' music) to whatever they do, and what-they-do is itself usually noisy. A large part of being gregarious involves, seemingly, the daily arrangements of life, and managing the storms and calms of people's feelings. To 'make a big thing' of arguments with a family-member or a lover, to 'make a big thing' of leasing disputes, to 'make a big thing' of organizing a weekend somewhere. The crap of life (in the view of people like me). The mundane. All this seems to be balled-up within gregariousness.
And what is it to be reserved? Coping within this noisy gregariousness, is the professor's years-long habit of returning to the past in the particular way that daydreams do. Do gregarious people look back less often than these reserved professors or look back not at all, and do they look forwards to the weekend more, and if they ever do recall the past, is it only to retell a good anecdote to entertain their audience?
And then Visconti can rub some polish on one of his pet themes - 'the end of things'. For Lancaster's professor it is the end of isolation, the end of reservedness. This professor, after a while, feels that he could actually benefit from mixing it with the gregarious set. He finds that he is not happy in his reserved state and begins to welcome the intrusion of this pseudo family and all its dramas. They seem to open something up. The professor's willingness to entertain this 'family' is one of the happinesses within Conversation Piece and it's typical that it's cut short so early.
And 'pleasure' versus 'culture' in Conversation Piece? Gregarious people and reserved people - but gregarious in order to do what? And reserved in order to do what? The second contrast in Conversation Piece shows you the answer surely? Some people live for pleasure: some people are absorbed by culture. 'Professor' pushes aside all mundane room-design problems, rises from his desk, and steps over to a good 'Conversation Piece' painting, fascinated by a painting from another artist (apparently) whose tone and form seem identical to the one he's got. And above his ceiling - Lietta walked-in-on before (after?) 'having' her brace of men. The film is good at portraying just how very different these two types of people are, surely.
What they do differently with their day is easy to portray, but Burt Lancaster and Silvana Mangano are able to give insight into how differently these people in Conversation Piece even think. How a man of culture will occupy his mind so very differently from someone who wishes to find pleasure all the time, is also portrayed very clearly in the scenes between Lancaster and Claudia Marsani (Lietta), but I suspect that this is more down to Marsani's script than to her acting skill (which isn't bad for an actress who is either late fourteen or early fifteen years old, but it is only just convincing).
Conversation Piece tracks some experience-seekers who are a little fascinated (particularly Lietta) by cultured types, at least in the beginning, and who want to get close to them at least while they don't know what it's going to be like; and it tracks one cultured gentleman who can perhaps find something to interest him in fun-seekers after all. But for how long would his interest last? And then the film deliberately cuts short the experiment to make way for a more important Visconti theme, which is the end, the death, of things.
Visconti has a signature camera-pan doesn't he? The slow pan around ballrooms and deserted storerooms in The Leopard, the slow pan around a hotel lounge on the Lido in Venice (Death In Venice - on this blog), and the slow pan around the professor's several spaces here in Conversation Piece - an unhurried eye turning within lofty rooms. The one memory of this film that I kept with me for decades was the rooms. It's Visconti and his rooms again. He loves to inhabit rooms of taste doesn't he. And he really is one of the masters of room proportion and colour and loftiness (in two senses of the word) and though usually his interest is in the classical and the Italian, he can perfectly understand the minimalism, the geometry and the sculpture of for instance a huge stairwell or a Roman balcony (Conversation Piece) or of disused rooms with their isolated furniture (The Leopard), though it is usually of the 'faded elegance' type of minimalism. I came deliberately hunting Conversation Piece down after these decades, at first solely to revisit these rooms, and I know I shall do the same ten years from now. Odd, perhaps, that every now and again we open up a film solely to revisit rooms.
Though a fine film (for some) there are problems in Conversation Piece aren't there? The deathbed scene - yes. But don't most of the problems lie in the delivery of lines (English version)? The screenplay contains banalities, which makes things difficult, and Vincent Canby in the N.Y. Times Review makes a perceptive point about how people don't appear to think a second before they say something (please look the review up). Lancaster, Mangano, and Stefano Patrizi (Stephano) are good - but Claudia Marsani's words (Lietta) are not convincing, and Helmut Berger (Konrad) presents a peculiarly ugly problem (if indeed it is his own voice on the English version soundtrack). His is in fact a very good performance - turn the soundtrack off and you can see this. He has a visual range and a subtlety. But turn the soundtrack back on and you learn a message loud and clear - don't ever try swearing in the English language if you possess a thick German accent. Ungracious audiences will laugh at you.
On the positive side, Burt Lancaster is acting a 'presence' that owns the rooms that are indeed his in Conversation Piece. He can take command over something as simple as 'the family' moving through one of those huge marble doorways of his. Part of it is in the way he moves, surely? It is always at one unaltered speed and purpose, everything he does, lifting a painting off a wall, turning on a lamp, opening a door, everything governed by an unbroken purposeful progress that is the mark of this sort of academic. At no point does he jerk: this sort of man would not do that. Of course many good actors find the 'pace' of their character just as Burt Lancaster has here, but it's always worth registering it when it's there for it is a bit of the contrivance that is good acting.
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