A Rosa Tatuada

It ain't easy to steal the spotlight from Burt Lancaster, but Anna Magnani in her Oscar winning performance managed to do just that. Of course it helps to have the female role be the protagonist here.

In the 1951 season on Broadway, Tennessee Williams's The Rose Tattoo came to Broadway and ran for 306 performances and starred Maureen Stapleton and Eli Wallach in the Magnani and Lancaster parts. Like all of Tennessee Williams's work it is set in the south, but a different kind of south than we usually see. Surely Serafina Derosse is a lot different than decadent southerners like Blanche Dubois, or Alexandra Del Lago, or Violet Venable. She's from a different world than they, being an immigrant. She brings her culture and its values to the gulf area.

Serafina's husband is killed in a brief prologue in a car crash, he's a truck driver who does a little smuggling on the side. He also does a bit of womanizing on the side as well which comes out at his death. As a result Magnani just withdraws from the world and even tries to turn her daughter, Marisa Pavan, into as a bitter a creature as she is.

Enter Burt Lancaster into her life, who's also a truck driver. His is a pretty expansive role also, but he's just not in the same league as Magnani, few are. Burt was cast in the role because Paramount wanted some box office name as Magnani was not known in this country, though she was Italy's biggest female star.

In a recent biography of Burt Lancaster it said that Lancaster was lucky in this part because he grew up in East Harlem, one of the few WASP types there and had many Italian immigrant friends and their families to draw upon for his character. It's a good performance, Lancaster stops well short of making it a cartoon creation and getting the Italian American Civil Rights group down on him.

Still it's Magnani's picture and she dominates it thoroughly. She did only a few English language films after this, Wild is the Wind and The Secret of Santa Vittoria with Anthony Quinn and The Fugitive Kind with Marlon Brando among them. Brando in fact turned down this film because he was afraid she'd upstage him. Guess he got his courage later on.

The Rose Tattoo is probably the closest Tennessee Williams came to doing a comedy. It's well short of a comedy, there's too many serious parts to this film to consider it that. Still I think it's something different from Tennessee Williams, something unique, and something wonderful.

A great argument can be made that 'The Rose Tattoo' is a classic. It's a wonderful adaptation of a play by one of the most celebrated of modern playwrights, Tennessee Williams. It contains the performance of a lifetime by Anna Magnani, who won an Academy Award for it. The supporting cast also give excellent performances. It even has a fine score written by noted composer Alex North.

Magnani grabs hold of the role of Serafina Delle Rose and wrings everything she can out of it. She plays a lonely widow who is clinging to the idealized memory of her husband. She has little use for men (and not much more for women) until Burt Lancaster, playing an earthy truck driver, comes along and brings her back to life. Their courtship is swift and tempestuous.

Director Daniel Mann does a good job of making a movie out of what was once a play; only a few times do things get so wordy that you are reminded of the work's origin. Lancaster is fine in his role, but his character might be just a bit too broadly drawn. I was impressed with actress Marisa Pavan as Serafina's daughter, though she looks closer to 25 than the age of 15 the script says she is, not a unique occurrence in films. Her story also seems a little truncated compared to her mother's.

Time has not been kind to The Rose Tattoo, a 1955 release that garnered three Oscars, plus additional nominations. Originally written by Tennessee Williams as a play, the film's shortcomings now cancel out much that audiences might have found entertaining about it 47 years ago. The deficits include bad acting all around (with the exception of the star, Anna Magnani) and an uneven script by Williams (who among other things was apparently clueless about how an adolescent boy and girl, attracted to each other, might talk or behave).

Playing the role of the dim-witted but sexy truck driver who courts a grieving widow (Magnani), Burt Lancaster gives a highly exaggerated "comedy performance" that is occasionally embarrassing to watch. A great natural actor in his other films and noted for his controlled physicallity, Lancaster here gawks, bends, waves his arms, makes faces, cries (clownishly), and is generally ape-like, all the while failing to get inside the character he's portraying. (Leading American actors have always had a problem convincingly playing people less intelligent than themselves; see Lon Chaney, Jr. in Of Mice and Men or, more recently, Jack Nicholson in Prizzi's Honor for more examples of this.)

Under the direction of Daniel Mann (who also directed the play), and intended as a comedy-drama, almost everything in Rose Tattoo is either loud or overblown (though it may have been Williams' wish that it be played this way in a misguided attempt to heighten the humorous dimension of the story). The host of supporting characters are all portrayed as one-dimensional grotesques or harpies who telegraph their every thought or emotion by arm-waving, facial contortions, or semiphoring the kind of villainousness that went out in the early '30s. Nor does Mann seem to have fine control over the physical goings-on by cast members. In some scenes small groups of people rush back and forth like obedient cattle, too obviously responding to off-camera direction; and at the high school prom a male extra noticeably freezes for a second or two as he waits for Marisa Pavan and her sailor dance partner to leave the floor ahead of him.

Magnani, for whom the play was written (though she just appeared in the film, after she had mastered the rudiments of the English language), comes across as the only real human being among a slew of posturing marionettes. Her portrayal of a terribly put-upon Sicilian widow fighting off the knowledge of her dead husband's infidelity and desperately trying to maintain her dignity in the face of snide remarks and out-and-out insults is awe-inspiring. I doubt that her performance has ever been matched by any American actress before or after. (Only Vivien Leigh, a Brit, comes to mind as a mentally disintegrating Blanche du Bois in the film version of Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire.) Williams, who was famously homosexual, understood and probably identified with vulnerable women. (Years before, his own sister, when a young woman, had been seriously mentally ill, "put away," and had undergone a lobotomy. It was no coincidence that her name was Rose.)

The Rose Tattoo is a solid film with terrific performances by 3 Oscar winners: Anna Magnani, Burt Lancaster, and Jo Van Fleet. Magnani landed the film version after Maureen Stapleton had originated the part on Broadway, and she is terrific as the smouldering Italian woman whose husband is killed when he is caught smuggling. The Tennessee Williams play touches on the usual ingredients of sexual repression and denial and hypocrisy. After years of mourning the dead husband (the Baron), Magnani finally gives in to sexual urges (with Lancaster) only after the swarm of village women (a pack of Italian harpy hags that acts as a Greek Chorus) convince her that the husband had been unfaithful. The subplot involves the purity of the daughter who is dating an equally pure sailor (Marisa Pavan and Ben Cooper). The subplot is boring. Lancaster is good as the simpleton truck driver who serves as the double for the dead husband, right down to the rose tattoo on his chest. Another rose tattoo shows up on the chest of the husband's floozie girl friend (nicely played by Virginia Grey), which serves as the "proof" Magnani needs to finally believe her husband's cheating. Lots of symbolism and circular plots, but the bottom line is the excellence of the acting. Magnani won a well-deserved Oscar for this film. Her scenes with Lancaster are electric. And Van Fleet is super as the shrieking customer (Magnani is a seamstress); it's no coincidence that Van Fleet won the supporting actress Oscar that year for East of Eden, since her performance in The Rose Tattoo is a world apart from that film. And yes Tennessee Williams can be glimpsed as a barfly at the Mardi Gras Club.

Ten out of ten for Anna Magnani's tour-de-force performance in "The Rose Tattoo," but the film itself falls a notch or two below that level. From time to time, a performance comes along that is so brilliant that the work of all other actors in the same year pales in comparison. Ben Kingsley in "Gandhi" and Daniel Day Lewis in "My Left Foot" come to mind, and Anna Magnani as Serafina Delle Rose in "The Rose Tattoo" can be added to that short list. The actress seems to physically transform herself before your eyes from a depressed, self-pitying widow, who has been swallowed by grief over the death of the husband that she worshiped, into a flirtatious, earthy woman, who cannot resist the attention and physical attraction of Alvaro, a truck driver, who is played by Burt Lancaster. Unfortunately, Lancaster, who often overacted when there was not a strong director to control him, lets loose at times in a nearly buffoonish performance as the suitor. Fortunately, nearly half the movie passes before he arrives on screen. Since Lancaster is capable of subtle restrained work such as that in "Atlantic City" and "Field of Dreams," one can only fault director Daniel Mann for not reining in the actor's over-the-top gestures and shameless mugging.

The original Tennessee Williams play has been effectively opened up and only occasionally betrays its stage origins. James Wong Howe's black-and-white cinematography beautifully captures the atmospheric art direction, and two of the film's three Academy Awards deservedly went to the cinematographer and art director. The third, of course, was presented to Anna Magnani. The film has some dry stretches, Marisa Pavan is obviously much older than the 15 that she portrays, and Lancaster is definitely miscast, which was possibly a studio decision for marquee value. However, despite its flaws, "The Rose Tattoo" remains a worthy film for its Tennessee Williams lines and the brilliance of Magnani's performance. Unfortunately, the great Italian actress made far too few films and died much too young, so film lovers should relish this diamond-caliber performance, even if its setting is only gold-plated. .