Anna Magnani stars as a grieving and overwrought Italian widow in this movie based on the Tennessee Williams play. Magnani is truly great in the role, and she is only 1 of 4 foreign actresses to have ever won an Academy Award for a performance. I do give her credit there, but still, after an hour of almost nothing but her emoting and carrying on about the loss of her husband, it really gets to be almost too much of a good thing. Finally, when I was about to give up on the film, Burt Lancaster comes into the picture and things do pick up from there.

It’s entertaining to see Lancaster play a goofy, stumbling, truck driver who’s as lonely as Magnani and watch his bumbling attempts to bring her out of her shell. Eventually, he succeeds but not after she loses her Sicilian temper at him a couple of times and smacks him around like a nerfball despite the fact that all he did was stumble half-drunk and half-naked into her teenage daughter’s bedroom in the middle of the night looking for Magnani and tries to snuggle up to her daughter by mistake in the dark. Oops. Despite this little misadventure and the beating he receives from Magnani, Lancaster is only briefly deterred by this. By sheer dogged persistance he manages to get back in Magnani’s good graces by the end of the movie, and everything ends more or less on a happy note. Well, I guess that’s Sicilian courtship for you.

The movie does have its moments, and I do give Hal Kantor credit for making a valiant attempt to adapt this Tennessee Williams play to the silver screen. But overall, it just doesn’t make for a particularly strong movie, and I’m sure it was probably better as a play. It drags too often in places, and some of the scenes are really a little silly or overly melodramatic. Maybe I’m a cultural barbarian, but I thought it was more interesting watching Burt Lancaster playing a bumbling simpleton (which he does well) than Magnani’s award-winning performance, which is just too maudlin. Okay, she’s lost her husband, but on that account, she gets abusive or at least hyper-neurotic with her friends, her priest, her daughter, her daughter’s boyfriend, and just about everybody else in her life, not to mention Lancaster, who really does seem to care for her, and who comes off as a basically decent, well-meaning, and fun-loving guy even though he is pretty goofy and wacked-out himself. And as I said, it’s sort of entertaining watching Lancaster, who usually portrays more studly, leading-man roles, playing an inept, lonely, Sicilian banana-truck driver who spends much of his time stumbling half-drunk through people’s backyards and bedrooms and getting their dogs (or Magnani herself) sicced on him. (I guess all those bananas aren’t much comfort on those balmy and moonlit Florida nights). But I preferred his character to the high-strung, overwrought Magnani, who’s wrapped tighter than a pig in a blanket.

The movie was filmed in old Florida Keys, so I give it points for overall ambience, but all in all I can’t give it more than 2 or 3 stars–unless the move counts as a primer on Sicilian dating and courtship rituals.
Rating: 3 / 5

I wonder how Magnani won the Oscar when so much of her dialogue has been redubbed? Half the time it’s her real voice, the rest of the time I guess she spoke so harshly test audiences couldn’t understand her, probably Marni Nixon took over. Tennessee Williams wanted to tell the story of how love, once betrayed, can bloom again like a phoennix shot down in flames, if the right man comes along with his hair smelling like roses. I agree with this so watching this movie was like preaching to the converted. Magnani is out of this world, though she looks appalled throughout, as though this was her first glimpse of America and she didn’t like what she was seeing, and Burt Lancaster, well, he certainly showed none of the finesse of THE LEOPARD in this role. And yet they say Visconti picked him to be THE LEOPARD based on a hasty screening of this film. He must have seen something in Alvaro’s goofiness and sunniness that he thought might be interesting if completely turned around, like the negative to a photograph.

However film fans feast your eyes on the young sailor with whom Marisa Pavan is in love. “Jack Hunter” indeed–notice how Williams inserted the sly sexual pun right in the very heart of his name. Anyhow, Jack is played by the angelic one and only Ben Cooper–be still my heart! Cooper played lots of roles in the 1950s, mostly cowboys and renegades, soldiers, this and that, riffraff parts, sort of a sub-Sterling Hayden kind of guy, but young. Indeed he played “Turkey” alongside Sterling Hayden in the unbelievably Freudian Western JOHNNY GUITAR for Nicholas Ray. Imagine being nicknamed “Turkey,” it could only happen in a Nick Ray film. As Jack Hunter, he wears his heart on his sleeve and is the only actor in the film capable of sharing the screen with Magnani without getting his ass kicked. He is totally in possession of the role, that of a red blooded American man who promises not to try to have sex with Marisa Pavan on Magnani’s say-so. And yet we still respect him, because he is Ben Cooper. Cooper makes the most of this plum part, probably his best role until his masterwork as the country bumpkin in CHARTROOSE CABOOSE, the country musical with Molly Bee, Edgar Buchanan and Slim Pickens. In that film Ben Cooper and Molly Bee make country music as exciting as tango. He is red hot and The ROSE TATTOO is as good a place as any to make his acquaintance. Ben Cooper, are you still among the living? We have lost so many of the live wires that once made going to the movies fun.
Rating: 4 / 5