The Rose Tattoo

Tennessee Williams is much like a schoolboy who pulls the wings off flies to watch them squirm, but in place of flies, the playwright looks at people trapped in their own moral degeneracy. This process is hardly a pleasant one, yet in The Rose Tattoo, Williams very skillfully adapts it to the purposes of comedy. It is not a kind of humor, though, that will give an audience a feeling of lighthearted pleasure--it is sweaty and intense and at times almost brutal.

Most of the intensity of the film, which is based closely on the 1951 Broadway play, is provided by a transplanted Sicilian woman, Serafina Delle Rose. After the death of her smuggler husband, she locks herself up in her Gulf Coast shack and spends three years worshipping his memory and his ashes, which she keeps in an urn in the living room. But three years is a long wait for a woman of Sicilian temperament, and the end of her seclusion is in sight when she finds out that her lamented spouse had been keeping other company. So when a bachelor with the body of her husband but "the face of a clown" walks into Serafina's house, the result is inevitable.

The role of Serafina is a juicy acting plum, and Anna Magnani swallows it whole; skin, pit and all. She is little short of overpowering when she goes into one of her frequent states of towering rage, and when she sulks she seems like a fury with nobody but herself to haunt. Best of all are the comic scenes, which she plays with the broad and leering satisfaction of a peasant. Burt Lancaster tries hard as the bachelor-clown, but even in his most successful moments he appears almost pathetically outclassed.

In the last analysis, even Williams has to bow before the actress' talents. His screenplay is a clever job, and his curious probing into degeneracy is often quite interesting. But few will stop to be impressed with his work on the film. The Rose Tattoo is clearly Anna Magnani's picture.