The Rose Tattoo

Comment: My Grandma told me 1 year ago, that she wanted this movie couldnt find it any where but here and other janky sites...If my Grandma is happy, I am happy.

Comment: Let me set the scene of when I first saw this 1955 Masterpiece. The year was 1973 and it was a Saturday Night at the US Merchant Marine Training Center (Lundenberg School of Seamanship) at Piney Point,MD. I was a 19 year old Seaman going through training. A movie was shown on Saturday night in the Rec Hall. This night I was lucky enough to be able to attend the show and view real Hollywood history."The Rose Tattoo"...what a movie. Being a vintage movie buff even at the young age of 19 I did not know what a great treat that I was in for.
My God when that movie started playing I thought I was in Little Italy back in Baltimore City. Burt Lancaster was over the top...but when Sarafina DelleRosa took the stage she was untouchable!!!Her acting and motions were like nothing ever seen on the Silver Screen before. What a performance (note how she goes through the motions and grief when she explains about her husband and the Rose Tattoo on his chest to Lancaster).
When her daughter Rosa brings the young Seaman Jack Hunter home and they tell Sarafina that they want to be married she had them kneel down in front of a statue of the Blessed Virgin and pray. At that scene I remember one of the guys shouted out "Who in the hell orders these damn movies - he should be shot!". You must remember this was '73 and all those hippies and heads with their mops and faces shaved wearing a USMM uniform were not all happy campers and they found excuses to complain about anything...even a five star vintage movie - enough said.

This is a great movie that really holds you to your seat and takes you down an ethnic road into the lives of several old world Italian Gems.This is one movie that will ever be hard to beat. After watching it 35 years ago on that Saturday night in the Rec Hall I was sold for life.In no way does this flick make any fun of the Italian People but project them as a proud and proper group as they really are!
"Enjoy" Joe Kopeck - Parkville,MD by way of the Merchant Marine!!!

Comment: This movie has superb acting and a great script. I highly recommend it for those who want to see raw emotion and the turbulence of a relationship.

Comment: The first couple of paragraphs here have been used as introduction to other plays written by Tennessee Williams and reviewed in this space. This review applies to both the stage play and the film versions with differences noted as part of the review

Perhaps, as is the case with this reviewer, if you have come to the works of the excellent American playwright Tennessee Williams through adaptations of his plays to commercially distributed film you too will have missed some of the more controversial and intriguing aspects of his plays that had placed him at that time along with Eugene O'Neill and Arthur Miller as America's finest serious playwrights. Although some of the films have their own charms I want to address the written plays in this entry first (along with, when appropriate, commentary about Williams' extensive and detailed directing instructions).

That said, there are certain limitations for a political commentator like this reviewer on the works of Williams. Although his plays, at least his best and most well-known ones, take place in the steamy South or its environs, there is virtually no acknowledgement of the race question that dominated Southern life during the period of the plays; and, for that matter was beginning to dominate national life. Thus, although it is possible to pay homage to his work on its artistic merits, I am very, very tentative about giving fulsome praise to that work on its political merits. With that proviso Williams nevertheless has created a very modern stage on which to address social questions at the personal level like homosexuality, incest and the dysfunctional family that only began to get addressed widely well after his ground-breaking work hit the stage.

"The Rose Tattoo" is a little different look at the dysfunctional family. Although the geography of the play is still the American South this play is not peopled with Williams' usually WASPy characters but rather a little conclave of immigrant Italians who have somehow made a beachhead in the Gulf Coast area. The central character is a previously abandoned but now widowed Italian seamstress trying to survive, mainly through her hopes for her daughter, on her wits, her memories of youth, her integrity and her fierce instinct to survive in alien territory. A philandering husband, the obsessive subject of her adoration, a daughter trying to learn to fly on her own in the love game, and an incidental encounter with a fellow, younger Italian truck driver come together to give her the sign she needs to start over. Maybe. This play, more than most of Williams' efforts, depends on the strength of the dialogue and not the plotline. That is what gives its dramatic edge as Williams explores yet another tangled up dream gone awry story.

In the movie version, the role of the young Italian truck driver as played by Burt Lancaster and the seamstress as played by the fabulous Anna Magnani is more central to the unfolding story from the beginning. The dramatic tensions between this pair and the `waiting for a sign' by the seamstress are still fairly similar. It is however Lancaster's enhanced role that really makes this a visual treat and gives one hope that this new family `aborning' can survive.

Comment: Burt Lancaster is one of my all-time favorite actors. But it is painful to watch him in this movie. His terrible accent jumps between Sicily and the Bronx. He is "Elmer Gantry" without the proper role or dialogue to match his performance or ability. He is terribly miscast and unconvincing as Alvaro to Anna Magnani's Serafina.

It is no coincidence that for a movie that won three Oscars and received an additional five nominations Lancaster received no recogniton whatsoever from the Academy. He is as convincing an Italian as Donald Trump would be if he tried to act like a modest man.

Magnani won the academy award as Best Actress for her performance in a very bad year for movies (1955). In "The Rose Tattoo" she merely bounces from one emotional outburst to the next, screaming and yelling in each scene. She brings no nuance or subtlety to the character. Marisa Pavan, who plays her daughter, does. Her character's struggle to find love while dealing with an irrational, raging mother brings out a genuine sweetness in her performance.

Magnani's performance with Marlon Brando in "The Fugitive Kind" (1959) is far superior to this one. In that movie, as the long suffering wife, she is sublime and sensual. Her character's strong emotional longings are barely concealed beneath the surface until Brando walks into her life and ignites them.

Either the writing, direction, or both in "The Rose Tatoo" prevent Magnani from exhibiting the dynamic acting ability displayed in the later movie. But Burt, it hurt to watch you in a role you never should have taken, no matter how bad the dialogue.