Celebrated theater director José Quintero crossed over into film in order to adapt this Tennessee Williams novel for the screen. Vivien Leigh (already known for her portrayal of a Williams heroine a decade earlier in A Streetcar Named Desire) plays the title character, a American widow who has abandoned a waning career on the New York stage and come to Rome to assuage her spirits. Ready to assist Mrs. Stone is the legendary stage actress Lotte Lenya, cast as a procuress, and a very young Warren Beatty, the gigolo who attracts her attentions. The real star of this film, however, is the Eternal City itself, captured here in its various moods-glimmering and textured, gauzed and misty-by  cinematographer Harry Waxman.