Word: serafina
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
...stage at one time or another). One of these immigrants (Maureen Stapleton) is a young widow, pathologically devoted to the memory of her husband. The story revolves around her emergence from a sterile world of false idealism into Williams' "real" world of animal love and passionate emotion. When Serafina Delle Rose's belief in the perfection of her husband is shattered, it is not a tragedy but a victory; it is only then that she can again see her vision of the rose tattoo, Williams' symbol of life and of love...
...Rose Tattoo is about Serafina Delle Rose, whose husband-a lusty man with a rose tattooed on his chest-is killed smuggling narcotics on a banana truck. After his death, Serafina wildly exalts him into a legend, lives devotedly with his ashes, cuts off all outside life. Then, slowly and agonizingly, she is forced to recognize that her husband was unfaithful to her. Through another banana-truck driver, "with my husband's body and the face of a clown," she is brought back to life, and set free to love...
Moreover, the play's tone, if affirmative at the end, is badly mixed before that. After building up a good deal of emotional intensity, Williams snaps the whole mood by turning Serafina's first meeting with the truck driver into low comedy...
...best of The Rose Tattoo is effective theater. David Diamond's incidental music is pleasant, and Boris Aronson's set appealing. Maureen Stapleton gives Serafina a crude, harsh vitality. But too often the play itself is lush, garish, operatic, decadently primitive, a salt breeze in a swamp, a Banana Truck Named Desire...