Conversation Piece

“A tangled web of bizarre mystery”

In a palazzo in Rome, a retired American professor (Burt Lancaster) lives alone among his books and his collection of conversation-piece paintings. His quiet ends when a loud marchesa, Bianca Brumonti (Silvana Mangano), arrives with her lover Konrad (Helmut Berger) and talks him into renting them the apartment upstairs. Luchino Visconti keeps the professor mostly indoors, an old man listening to footsteps overhead and unable to ask them to stop.