Adapted from a novel by Tennessee Williams, Vivien Leigh stars as Karen Stone, an aging stage actress. After a failed comeback and her husband’s sudden death, she voyages to Italy, rents the top floor of a Roman Palazzo and has a sordid affair with a gigolo (a wildly miscast Warren Beatty). This is not the Rome of pastoral erotic escape on view in Summertime and Three Coins in the Fountain—it is a landscape of moral decrepitude populated by grifters eager to exploit her taste for suffering and tragedy. Giving in to a masochistic desire that leads to her humiliation and debasement, while clinging to the accouterments of a refined, respectable lady, Karen Stone gives the greatest performance of her unheralded career. The tension between these two states reaches a climax in the final scene, when, bathed in dying light on a penthouse terrace filled with ancient sculpture fragments (symbols of time's wreckage and broken dreams), Leigh reveals the true depths of the character’s loneliness and longing.