SparkMore n my opinion it was a great movie with some interesting elements, even though having some plot holes and the ending probably was just too messy and crammed together, but still fun to watch and not your casual movie that is similar to all other ones.

SeeQuant Blending excellent reporting and strong storytelling, this is a disturbing film truly stranger than fiction

mraculeated The biggest problem with this movie is it’s a little better than you think it might be, which somehow makes it worse. As in, it takes itself a bit too seriously, which makes most of the movie feel kind of dull.

Keeley Coleman The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;

bkoganbing Possibly due to illness of director Luchino Visconti, but Conversation Piece no way is up there with other of his work that I've seen like The Leopard, The Damned, and Death In Venice. It was interesting to learn how star Burt Lancaster's contract called for him to step in and direct if Visconti wasn't up to it.Lancaster plays an American classics professor, retired living a well ordered existence among paintings and books and other such Conversation Pieces. But his palazzo which looks like a museum has a big upkeep and he's hammerlocked into renting his top floor to a rather course and vulgar widow Silvana Mangano and her daughter Claudia Marsini. Marsini comes along with boyfriend Stefano Patrizzi and Mangano has tagging along after her boy toy Helmut Berger.The subject of Conversation Piece is decadence, a topic that Visconti loved to make movies about. Still those other films I cited really showed it well. Conversation Piece was aptly named as what we did in a beautiful setting is talk about it. Helmut Berger has the most interesting part and he springs quite a surprise on Lancaster toward the end of the film.Conversation Piece is a beautifully photographed film, but quite static.

lasttimeisaw 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.

werefox08 Luchino Visconti co-wrote and also directed this from a wheel chair, after his first heart attack. The movie reminds me of playwright Henrik Ibsens style. Indeed this is very much like a play. All the action taking place in a retired Professors (Burt Lancaster) plush house in Rome. When a brash young group of mis-fits rent a room upstairs ..the Professors sedate life changes completely. The subtext is vital here, and more than one viewing is recommended. The professor has long given up on communication between humans, and the clash of the old and the new makes him even more certain. Its a brilliant piece of work--although the sound track which was added later is sometimes annoying. Lancaster is great --indeed all of the main players do a wonderful job. Visconti is credited for ushering in the neo-realist cinema. Later he departed from this style and became more melodramatic--with intense character development. This movie is from his later style.

tieman64 "Conversation Piece" stars Burt Lancaster as a retired science professor whose life is turned upside down by the intrusion of a rowdy family of strangers. Director Luchino Visconti goes to lengths to stress Lancaster's seclusion. He's an American born Italian-American living in Rome and has long since settled into a life of quiet study, spending long days browsing his own private art collection. He has a live-in housekeeper and is occasionally visited by art tradesmen, but for the most part Lancaster lives a secluded, contemplative life, his house a tomb of memories, his body awaiting death.Enter Bianca Brumonit, an Italian noblewoman who wishes for her daughter and son to move into the top floor apartment of Lancaster's mansion. Lancaster, of course, doesn't wish for her to move in, but after much argument eventually gives in. The lease will run a year and he will be well paid.But it turns out that Mrs Brumonit also intends for the apartment to be used by her boy-toy, a young lover and erratic Leftist called Konrad Huebel. When Mrs Brumonit's husband finds out about Konrad's existence, however, he gives her an ultimatum: divorce, or find a more suitable "extramarital lover". Brumonit chooses divorce.Unfortunately Konrad doesn't like this. He's tired of being treated as a male hustler and is tired of life itself. He commits suicide, an act which finally gets all these damned strangers out of Lancaster's house and allows Lancaster to slowly and peacefully die himself.So, in typical Visconti fashion, what we have here is a film about very specific collisions. Collisions between classes, between cultures, between classical and modern, between young and old etc. As such, Lancaster's house is clearly demarcated, downstairs secure and ordered whilst the "new order" upstairs is shown to be constantly expanding, building works not only slowly taking over and encroaching on the rest of the house, but destroying the very history, customs and artwork stored within. Meanwhile the Brumonit family is portrayed as the outdated remnants of a selfish aristocracy, the mother trying to retain her status and relevance by latching onto feisty youths who would have opposed her family during its heyday. Like Visconti's own "The Leopard" and "The Damned", the film thus watches as a man witnesses his world vanish into modernity (in contrast to Visconti's "The Innocent", in which a man cuts himself off from the past by embracing a sort of Nietzschean hedonism and/or defiance).This has led to some believing that Visconti feared social change and romanticised the "old order", painting them as men of intellect, art and reason. But the film's web of relationships is too complex to be reduced to such simple binaries. It criticises both the old and the new, and paints Konrad as a sort of synthesis of the two, his inability to exist in these spaces, or synergize the two worlds, resulting in his death. Visconti's question is, with the death of Lancaser and Konrad, who inherits Italy? The film's answer seems to be: the worst of both worlds.7.5/10 – Visconti's style had long since changed by this point, the energy of his early films ("White Nights", "Rocco and His Brothers" etc) giving way to an approach that's just too theatrical and dialogue driven. See Assayas' "Summer Hours" for a sort of modern masterpiece which covers similar material. Worth one viewing.