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14 out of 14 people found the following comment useful :-
Anna Magnani "owns" the movie, 2 October 2000
8/10
Author: Robert D. Ruplenas

We can always count on Tennessee Williams to give us an engrossing tale of love, lust, loss, betrayal, sexual frustration, and jealousy. Anna Magnani's corrosive performance absolutely dominates this film, which works well in black & white (the overheated emotions seem to leap out of the b&w more starkly than they would out of color); you can't take your eyes off her - it's like watching a train wreck. She makes this insecure, emotionally frightened, self-deluded, yet domineering woman a sympathetic figure in the end. Burt Lancaster is a bit over the top, but the role calls for it. A fascinating aspect is the parallel development of the daughter's budding sexuality with the release of her mother's long-suppressed yearnings. Those fascinated by Magnani here should catch her working with Anthony Quinn in "The Secret of Santa Vittoria", made just four years before her death. Once again, thank you American Movie Classics for bringing us this fine film.

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9 out of 9 people found the following comment useful :-
The Great Anna Magnani, 9 June 2005
10/10
Author: drednm

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.

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9 out of 9 people found the following comment useful :-
A memorable performance by Magnani., 15 July 1999
9/10
Author: Hermit C-2 from Marietta, GA, USA

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.

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9 out of 10 people found the following comment useful :-
worth watching for the outstanding acting of Magnani, 26 April 2005
6/10
Author: wonderlandAlice from United States

I recommend this film solely to witness Magnani's performance, which was an utterly beautiful piece of acting, indeed. Although I did not feel pulled into the plot very much, I did sympathize with Magnani's character because she played her part with such heart. I must admit that I was disappointed by Lancaster's overacting, and the minor actors also were not at all impressive. Also, I do not feel inspired to read the play itself because I don't think that reading it could compare to watching Magnani's riveting performance through which Magnani's soul itself seems to bleed.

Although I cannot think of another film with such an engaging actress, the beginning tone and ambiance of this film reminded me of other Tennessee Williams works. The atmosphere is open, naked, and almost frightening; Williams's plays always introduce characters that are very human--weak, lonely, unsettled--and deeply passionate. He doesn't take care to hide the frightening and desperate side of people even though we may not want to see that. He makes no exception in this piece, and this sense of humanity is most effectively portrayed through Magnani.

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7 out of 7 people found the following comment useful :-
Serafina!, 25 September 2004
7/10
Author: jotix100 from New York

Tennessee Williams was a good friend of Anna Magnani, the great Italian screen star. It was with her in mind he wrote "The Rose Tattoo", but she never played it in the theater because she didn't feel too comfortable, at the time, in doing the play in English.

Anna Magnani was born to play Serafina; she smolders the screen every time we see her. She is the sole reason for watching the film. Daniel Mann miscalculated in the adaptation, by Hal Kanter, of the play he had directed on Broadway, and it shows. The basic failure is that he made the character of Alvaro Mangiacavallo into a buffoon. Burt Lancaster seems to have been directed to go for laughs rather than being the sensual man he is in the play. He must awaken Serafina from the self imposed mourning she is experiencing at the time they meet.

"The Rose Tattoo" has a Greek tragedy feeling. Watch Serafina at the beginning of the film shopping at the grocery store among the neighborhood women. Later, the same thing happens. At the most dramatic moments, the chorus comes to surround Serafina; it's a ploy to make her react to them and vent her anger at the ignorant women who are her neighbors and clients, but not her real friends.

Serafina is a dignified woman who is still living back in Sicily, even though she is now in New Orleans. Her daughter rebels against her mother, who can't understand the American ways. When her husband Rosario dies, her whole world falls apart. Rosario has been the only man in her life and she wants to stay at home and not face reality, until the appearance of Alvaro, who manages to win her over with his simple ways.

Anna Magnani gives a performance that is larger than life.

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8 out of 9 people found the following comment useful :-
A Flawless Diamond Performance in a Gold-Plated Setting, 15 May 2005
8/10
Author: dglink from Alexandria, VA

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. .

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10 out of 13 people found the following comment useful :-
An uneven film, with one great performance, 17 March 2002
Author: burgbob975 (burgbob975@aol.com) from Richmond, California

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.)

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4 out of 4 people found the following comment useful :-
Serafina Magnifina, 1 March 2007
7/10
Author: bkoganbing from Buffalo, New York

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.

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8 out of 12 people found the following comment useful :-
Wonderful Acting!, 27 September 2004
10/10
Author: whpratt1 from United States

It has been years since I viewed this great B&W film with great stars like Anna Magnani,(Serafine Delle Rose)," Wild Is The Wind",'57, who played the role of an Italian woman who was deeply in love with her husband and thought he was a GOD! She had a daughter who she loved and over protected until she meets a handsome young Sailor. As the story progresses, Burt Lancaster,(Alvaro Mangiacovallo),"Atlantic City",'80 gets involved with Serafine and the film becomes a real Spin Zone. There is lots of drama, suspense, romance, and lots of comical scenes with wild fighting and screaming. Anna Magnani made this her first American film and won many awards for her great acting skills. A young Burt Lancaster gave an outstanding supporting role which launched his great acting career!

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4 out of 5 people found the following comment useful :-
Magnani makes an indelible mark in cinema, 9 March 2004
7/10
Author: rosscinema (rosscinema@cox.net) from Oceanside, Ca.

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

Though this film and it's story seems to be having a hard time holding up through the course of time it does possess one terrific performance that even today film buffs talk about. Story is about an Italian woman in Louisiana named Serafina Delle Rose (Anna Magnani) who becomes a widow when her husband is killed trying to smuggle goods in a truck. The rumors start to spread in her neighborhood that her husband had a mistress but she ignores the talk and withdraws into her home rarely going outdoors. She keeps a close watch on her teenage daughter Rosa (Marisa Pavan) but she falls in love with a sailor named Jack Hunter (Ben Cooper) so Serafina makes him promise not to touch her "Innocence".

*****SPOILER ALERT*****

One day Serafina meets Alvaro Mangiacavallo (Burt Lancaster) who's a truck driver and very open about looking for a nice woman to be with. They talk and seem to get along but he's not very sophisticated and when she finds out that he had a rose tattoo put on his chest like her late husband she wants to kick him out. But instead she makes him take her to where her husband's mistress works so she can confront her. Serafina discovers that she also has a rose tattoo on her and this makes her come to grips about her husbands infidelity.

This film was directed by Daniel Mann from Tennessee Williams play and Williams wrote the story with Magnani in mind for the play but she declined because of her lack of English. Mann had directed the play and when it was certain to be made into a film everyone managed to convince Magnani to take the role. She had learned some English during this time and had a coach on the set of this film to help her. This is another steamy Williams story and like most of his stories it's a drama set in a hot part of the country. It wouldn't be a Tennessee Williams story without the actors sweating bullets as they pour their heart out. Lancaster has been criticized for his performance and it's a role that seemed perfect for someone else. One of his greatest attributes as an actor was how powerful he could come across without being overly animated. Here his character Alvaro is a complete slob and a clumsy one at that. I was never convinced that Magnani's character would ever find him to be more than a friend, if that. But easily this is a film where you just sit back and marvel at the performance of Magnani. She had become a big theater actress in Italy but was relatively unknown here in America. She's perfect for her role and I cannot think of another actress that could have done a better job. Magnani could expose every thought and emotion on screen and make every viewer know what she's feeling at every moment. She was over the top but gloriously so. This is a case where a film and a performance needed an actress to go to another level to make the role her own. She not only does this but she took total command of her role in a way that very few actors have ever done. Magnani won the Academy Award for her performance and her win has stood the test of time. One of the overlooked things in this film is the performance of Pavan. This was one of the few good roles she had in her career but she was well cast as Magnani's daughter. More than once she got the better of the scenes when her character Rosa had to stand up to her mother. Good adaptation from Williams story make this an interesting film to watch and Magnani is a marvel to watch.

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