The Rose Tattoo

Director: Daniel Mann, Daniel Mann, Daniel Mann

1955 / 117min / 35mm

Tennessee Williams wrote the part of Serafina Delle Rose in his 1951 stage play The Rose Tattoo thinking specifically of force-of-nature Anna Magnani, and for Mann’s film adaptation, La Magnani made her Hollywood debut to play the hot-headed Sicilian transplant to the American South, her mourning for her philandering husband’s death interrupted when man-child truck driver Burt Lancaster comes a courtin’. Joining the carnivalesque proceedings is Van Fleet as the tart-tongued, high-handed sex worker Bessie, who mercilessly goads the grieving Serafina.

35mm print courtesy of the Packard Humanities Institute Collection at the UCLA Film & Television Archive.