The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone

Karen Stone, an acclaimed American stage actress, travels to Rome with her businessman husband for a holiday. On the plane, her husband, a multi-millionaire, suffers a fatal heart attack. Left with no reason to return home, she chooses to stay in Italy and rents a luxury apartment in Rome. She closes her latest play, As You Like It, because she realizes she is far too old to play Rosalind.

One year later, the Contessa Magda Terribili-Gonzales, a procurer, introduces her to a handsome, well-dressed, narcissistic young Italian named Paolo, who belongs to her stable of professional gigolos. Magda plots and plans, telling Paolo that Mrs. Stone has just begun to taste loneliness. [Paolo] and Mrs. Stone go out for dinner and dancing, but no more. Eventually she begins the affair. She falls in love with him; he pretends to love her. She believes that she is different from other mature women he has known. Her self-deception is aided by the fact that she does not actually pay him, but buys him expensive clothes and gifts, including a movie camera, and pays his bills through charge accounts. They become the subject of gossip columns. It soon becomes obvious that Paolo is only interested in himself. Eventually he is bored by Mrs. Stone’s possessiveness and pursues an American starlet.

Abandoned by Paolo, ridiculed by the Contessa, with her only real friend Meg on a plane to New York, Mrs Stone looks over her balcony and sees the ragged, mysteriously menacing young man who has followed her everywhere since the day she moved in, pacing. She tosses the keys of her apartment down to him and walks back inside, remembering what she told Paolo after he tried to frighten her with a story about a middle-aged woman murdered on the French Riviera by someone she invited into her apartment: > All I need is three or four years. After that, a cut throat would be a convenience. She lights a cigarette and sits down to wait. The youth comes into the apartment and walks toward her slowly, hands deep in the pockets of his filthy coat, smiling faintly as his shadow fills the screen.

Last Updated: October 09, 2025 at 16:49