**½/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring Burt Lancaster, Anna Magnani, Marisa Pavan, Ben Cooper
screenplay by Tennessee Williams, based on his play
directed by Daniel Mann
by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Anna Magnani is the kind of actress people describe using all the wrong superlatives. Everybody talks about her “big” presence, about how she’s a “powerhouse” and a “force of nature,” as though she were the Italian Shelley Winters. This kind of blather hardly approximates the scope of Magnani’s talent. She’s big all right, but she’s more than the pyrotechnic scenery-chewer that “big” normally designates: she’s that rare combination of big and nuanced, a crushing blend of uninhibited physicality and the willingness to take every line, word, and punctuation mark personally. Technically, even a luminary like her has her work cut out for her in something like The Rose Tattoo, what with its middling Louisiana Peyton Place scenario by Tennessee Williams, the dry, emotionless direction of Daniel Mann, and a supporting cast of Hollywood phoneys conspiring to waste her talent. But Magnani never betrays the thought that her part might be less than worth her time, and in so doing, she makes it worth her time. Ours, too, more often than not.
Williams said that he wrote his play on which The Rose Tattoo is based with Magnani in mind. It’s certainly hard to imagine anyone else the role of Serafina Delle Rose, the Italian seamstress pathetically hung up on a husband she idolizes. The husband, of course, dies tragically early on, sending Serafina into a downward spiral of grief; when she’s not wallowing in misery, she’s bullying her teenage daughter into staying away from those devil boys with only one thing on their mind. And that’s it for the better part of an hour: Aside from the Central Casting neighbours, who approach Serafina like villagers menaced by Frankenstein, The Rose Tattoo is basically a one-woman show in mortal combat with Williams’s strangely conventional woman-who-feels-too-much approach to Serafina. Magnani articulates her character to the extent that you believe her pain–you stop noticing the rickety structure around her and concentrate on the white-hot emotion at its centre.
Still, it’s a mighty repetitive first half, so you feel relieved when Serafina is introduced to Alvaro (Burt Lancaster, about as Italian as Kaiser Wilhelm), the inept but gentle truck driver who takes her home after she explodes in front of her long-suffering priest. Now Magnani’s got someone to play off, and she rises to the challenge in these, the pivotal moments of The Rose Tattoo. She’s all detail as her floppy-eared suitor coaxes her out, forces her to smile, does something stupid, and forces her back in again–a big challenge for any other actress, but a gimme for La Magnani: she spikes the ball and does a victory dance. If Lancaster’s performance is a little naïve, it complements the mentality of his character and provides the right tender contrast to the hard masochistic edge of Serafina as she struggles with her conflicting emotions. Lancaster might have been a more serious problem with an actor of his conventionality playing opposite him.
Thanks to Magnani, for great swathes of the movie you overlook that almost everyone else connected to the production is working on autopilot. The deficiencies of the script are nonetheless compounded by Mann’s astoundingly bland style. Handing Tennessee Williams to Mann is like handing The Adventures of Baron Munchausen to Robert Redford: he steamrolls the author’s eccentricities to cram them into the boring melodrama the studio probably wanted. As well, Ben Cooper, the actor playing the daughter’s sailor suitor, is so cherubic and cuddly that it’s impossible to believe he’s been shipped out to several ports–he seems to have barely gotten off the bus from Kansas. I shudder to think of The Rose Tattoo with a regular movie star at its core, because the artifice of a mere celebrity would have completed its all-American tenor. Fortunately, Magnani, awarded a Best Actress Oscar for her work here, is artist enough to avert such a disaster, taking a studio sausage and making a meal out of it worth savouring. She has no peer, and this film is ample proof of that.
THE DVD
Paramount’s DVD release of The Rose Tattoo is sufficient. Sporting excellent fine detail and good contrast, the 1.77:1, 16×9-enhanced b&w image looks pretty sharp. The DD 2.0 mono sound is equally fine, distinct without being too sharp and round without being too soft. Characteristic of a catalogue title from the studio, there are no extras.
116 minutes; R; 1.77:1 (16×9-enhanced); English DD 2.0 (Mono); English subtitles; DVD-9; Region One; Paramount
