The Rose Tattoo (Hal Wallis; Paramount), like the Tennessee Williams play from which it is adapted, is less a show, in a dramatic sense, than a sideshow—a gatherum of Pitchman Williams' less peculiar freaks. The principal exhibit is Serafina Delle Rose (Anna Magnani), a hearty peasant wench transplanted from Sicily to the Gulf Coast. Since the death of her husband, a small-time smuggler, she has turned into a sort of moral worm crawling in and out of his memory. She keeps his ashes in a gimcrack vase in their shanty parlor, and has long, sweaty daydreams about his body ("like a young bull"). "I was the peasant," she cries, "but I gave my hosband glory." One day reality in the improbable form of Alvaro Mangiacavallo (Burt Lancaster), "a bachelor wit' three dependents," breaks into Serafina's dank little dreamworld. Like the smuggler, he drives a truck, and has a rose tattooed on his brawny chest, which reminds Serafina almost unbearably of her husband's. Hard facts as well as a new set of hard muscles break the husband's deadlock on her affections—it turns out he had been keeping a girl (Virginia Grey) on the side.
Like all but the greatest grotesques, The Rose Tattoo sets out so furiously to heighten the flavors of reality that the meat of the thing is soon lost in its seasoning; and only a moviegoer who can take his peperone straight will be able to judge if the picture is really hot stuff.
Burt Lancaster, however, makes a brave try at a part somewhat beyond the means of his talent, and manages at least to convince the spectator that half an oaf is better than none. As for Anna, nothing like her kind of corset farce has come out of Hollywood since the late Marie Dressier delicately tucked a pint of hooch in her grandmotherly bosom. One moment Actress Magnani comes lurching on-camera as shapeless as a burlap bag full of cantaloupes; the next she is sleazing through the dusk in black lace with the toothsome glitter of a backstreet-walker in Naples. And she battles her way into a girdle of yesteryear with all the fury and desperation of the Royal Welch Fusiliers at Bunker Hill, somehow imparting to her defeat some of the sorrowful majesty of a historical debacle.
U.S. dramatists might take instruction from the plight of Playwright Williams, the tiger of Broadway. Magnani, as a result of this picture, will probably become a very hot item in U.S. show business, and she is the sort of lady who, if not closely watched, comes back from the ride with the tiger inside.
A guest at a chichi Hollywood hotel stood blinking one recent day at a scratchy note that had just been shoved underneath the door of his suite. "Please don't use the bathroom in the mornings." it read. "You are disturbing the world's greatest actress." He asked the manager what the message meant. It meant, he was informed, that Italy's Anna Magnani had come to Hollywood.