Southern Gothic all'italiano, Part 2

I mentioned not too far back that I had watched a pair of movies not realizing that they were both based on works by Tennessee Williams, and that they both involve major characters of Italian extraction. The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone is actually set in Italy, while the other film deals with Italian immigrants to the US south. That movie is The Rose Tattoo.

Anna Magnani plays Serafina Delle Rose, an Italian immigrant married to fellow Italian immigrant Rosario, with a teenaged daughter Rosa (Marisa Pavan). What Serafina doesn't know is that her husband is stepping out on her with another woman, who gets the titular tattoo to match one that Rosario has. But that's not going to matter shortly, as Rosario gets killed trying to evade the cops since he's smuggling contraband. Serafina is left to try to make a livnig as a seamstress doing alterations and contract work for her fellow immigrants.

Fast forward a couple of years, and Rosa is about to graduate high school. Being in a coastal town, she's also met some of the men from the nearby naval base who head into town in the evenings. She's even fallen in love with one of them, Seaman Jack (Ben Cooper), something which horrifies Mamma because she knows what men can be like. Jack, for his part, does eventually truly love Rosa, although he is of course a seaman and, one presumes somewhat older than Rosa.

I mentioned that Serafina knows what men are like, but it's only now that she learns that Rosario was just like that himself, which enrages her and sends her to the parish church to try to find out from the priest if it was true, not that he should violate the sanctity of the confessional. Anyhow, it's there that Serafina runs into a fellow trucker, Alvaro (Burt Lancaster). Alvaro helps bring Serafina out of the shell that she had been in since the death of her husband, but at the same time it's a volatile relationship that befits the other romantic entanglements Tennessee Williams wrote about, replete with histrionics, especially when Alvaro decides to get a duplicate of that tattoo not knowing the significance it has for Serafina.

I'm not the biggest fan of the works of Tennessee Williams, so as you might guess I had quite a bit of difficulty with the characters here. None of them is particularly likable, and the amount of histrionics that they go through is taxing for an outside observer after a while. It doesn't help that Burt Lancaster's accent comes and goes (Magnani's, of course, is authentic). So overall The Rose Tattoo wasn't my cup of tea. But I can see why people who like Tennessee Williams and other Southern Gothic literature would love this stuff.