Actuakers One of my all time favorites.

Stevecorp Don't listen to the negative reviews

Curapedi I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

Erica Derrick By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

Bill Slocum Think of a character equal parts Meryl Streep and Irene Pappas, only Sicilian and rather mad with grief, and you end up with Anna Magnani playing the wonderfully unhinged Serafina Delle Rosa in "The Rose Tattoo."How crazy is Serafina? So much so you can't take her as a dramatic character because her most dramatic scenes play like comedy, yet you can't laugh too much because you feel such sympathy for her. Tennessee Williams' play becomes a rather endearing character piece with Magnani and director Daniel Mann working odd angles for maximum audience reaction.Magnani plays Serafina as if she was a character not in a movie but in a song, namely Depeche Mode's "Personal Jesus." For her, every opportunity to fondle her husband's torso is a chance to "reach out, touch faith." She believes so absolutely in his majesty that it's a bit of a blow, to put it lightly, when she discovers he's actually a louse. Can she break out of her spell and find new love, even if it's a clown wrapped in the body of Burt Lancaster?Lancaster's performance here is both the film's weakest link and testament to the actor's willingness to serve a role at whatever cost. His character, Alvaro, thinks Magnani the perfect find, however dark the bags under her eyes and big her caboose. Whenever he laughs, you groan a bit because it's not convincing, yet you root for him all the same, both because it's Lancaster in a difficult role, and because he represents Serafina's one shot at happiness.Magnani won the Oscar for best actress for her performance here. It's deserved for the way she works past any expectations of Hollywood beauty to present us with a character who wins us over despite the fact she's rather ridiculous. Others talk about her straight dramatic moments as witness of her artistry, but her two best moments for me are both comic.In one, she corners a priest to make him confess to her what her husband confessed as part of a Holy Sacrament, something that would play heavy except for the way Magnani cleverly overplays her scene, not so much as you notice because of how emotional her character is, except when you see it a second time and see more clearly her absurd husband-worship overtaking her.In the other, she corrals the boyfriend of her daughter (delectable Marisa Pavin) and makes him promise as a fellow Catholic to respect her daughter's virginity, while the daughter watches with obvious anger at her mother's power play. Yet when the boy agrees, the domineering Serafina becomes pleasantly affectionate, winning us over and reminding us of the price she paid for another man's lack of sexual restraint.For most of the movie, Serafina is at her wits' end, and Magnini draws a fine line between protagonist and monster, again in a way that shreds the Hollywood image of the period. It's a rather overdrawn film, with lots of goofy scenes and Lancaster struggling to keep up his end of the proceedings, but when you give "The Rose Tattoo" a chance, you wind up enjoying it more than you may expect. Tennessee Williams wrote soapy stories, but he knew how to make them work, too.

Dave from Ottawa Anna Magnani was a revelation in this, her American debut film, as an earthy, tempestuous and full-blooded woman whose grief over the death of her husband is complicated by the discovery of his infidelity and the attentions of an unwelcome new suitor who holds out the offer of passion now gone from her life. Few actresses had ever made such a fiery arrival on American screens and her performance won her an Oscar as Best Actress. Subsequent screen appearances clearly showed that her acting range did not extend far beyond what she showed here, leading her to be somewhat typecast as a hyper-emotional Italian, but even if her legacy had only been this film, it would be memorable. Burt Lancaster is rather oddly cast as a slightly simple truck driver who has a crush on Magnani's character. Burt's physicality works here, but his obviously greater depth and awareness at times run counter to the live-in-the- moment needs of his not very bright character, and the resulting performance is never completely convincing. Marisa Pavan, the twin sister of better known Italian star Pier Angeli, got a nomination as best supporting actress as the fragile daughter struggling to hold her own grief in check, while searching for her place in a recognizably Tennessee Williams world of sultry Southern backwardness and soap opera passions. Excellent black and white cinematography by James Wong Howe won the film another Oscar and evocative production design created a believable Southern town square around which this otherwise rather stagy adaptation plays out. Like all Tennessee Williams dramas, this one can get somewhat overwrought at times, but Magnani and Pavan make it watchable - if ultimately dismissible - entertainment.

bkoganbing 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.

Fred If you're willing to be surprised, you may find this quite enjoyable. Any film buff going out of the way to see this (and ONLY film buffs go out of the way to see anything made more than a generation ago) will probably expect it to be a tragedy. The same film buffs, encountering this comedy, will be shocked at the serious turns it takes. This a comedy written by Tennessee Williams, a writer of tragedies. We are used to his tragic settings and, to see these turned upside-down is, if you will, dizzying. One scene could have been in any of his tragedies unaltered; a scene in which two gossiping gals, off to a convention, traipse around Serafina's house while waiting for her to make the dresses they've commissioned. They taunt her with innuendo about her late husband; they shout at the window at conventioneers in a car; they rub their luck in Serafina's face. It's grotesquely realistic. The rest of the movie is alternately brutal and giddy. Shakespeare's comedies are not laugh-fests, and O'Neill's are comedies because nobody's weeping at the end. Writers of tragedy practically celebrate catastrophe, and when they write comedies, cheerfulness is worn like a mask. Drama is second-nature to Williams. This comedy, containing every theme of his tragedies, is, of course, reliant on the Greek formula for comedy. I loved this big surprise of a motion-picture.