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'The Rose Tattoo': Tennessee Williams's Love Play to the World

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The Rose Tattoo: Tennessee Williams’s ‘Love Play to the World’ on film
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The Rose Tattoo: Tennessee Williams’s ‘Love Play to the World’ on Film

Mary F. Brewer

Tennessee Williams’s The Rose Tattoo premiered on December 29, 1950, in Chicago, and

opened on Broadway on February 3, 1951. The Broadway production, directed by Daniel

Mann, enjoyed a respectable run of 308 performances and won the 1951 Tony Award for

Best Play. Both lead actors, Maureen Stapleton and Eli Wallach, were awarded the Tony for

their performances as Serafina Delle Rose and Alvaro Mangiacavallo. The film producer Hal

Wallis, who was in the audience on opening night in Chicago, stated in his autobiography

that he knew at once that he had to buy it, feeling certain that The Rose Tattoo would be a

“great success,” because “[a]udiences would identify with its earthiness, its sexuality, its

deeply felt emotions and naturalistic dialogue” (127).

The playwright, however, felt less enthusiastic about the production. The Rose Tattoo

was not a financial success on Broadway, and Williams regarded it as one of his failures as a

commercial playwright (Paller 109). In a 1955 interview published in Theatre Arts, he

attributes its relative lack of success to Mann’s direction, believing that “if [Elia] Kazan had

staged The Rose Tattoo, it would have been the smash hit it just missed being” (qtd. in

Waters 36). Kazan had directed the highly successful production of Williams’s A Streetcar

Named Desire, as well as the popular film version for Warner Brothers, in 1951. In a letter to

his agent, Audrey Wood, in 1953, Williams admits writing Rose Tattoo with Kazan in mind,

and he expresses his fear about the possibility of Mann, with whom he lacked “any” rapport,

adapting the play to film (498). When Kazan was approached to direct, he rejected the offer.

Consequently, despite Williams’s reservations, Mann, noted for his work on stage and

literary adaptations, was brought in as director. After the Theatre Arts interview was

published, however, Williams attempted to distance himself from his earlier statement: in a
letter to the editor, he insists that it was “unfair and unkind” to suggest that he blamed the

play’s relative lack of success on its direction, and he stated that “Mann did a beautiful job on

the stage version . . . and a still more beautiful job on the film” (590). Given that Williams’s

public statements and private correspondence offer conflicting views, it seems safe to assume

that the playwright’s attitude toward Mann’s involvement was at least ambivalent.

Despite their undisputed superb performances, neither Stapleton nor Wallach appears

in the film. The renowned Italian actress Anna Magnani plays Serafina on screen, while Burt

Lancaster is cast as Alvaro. Magnani had been Williams’s first choice to play Serafina on

stage; indeed, he wrote the part for her, but scheduling conflicts combined with her limited

English at the time made it impossible. Lancaster replaced Wallach because the producers felt

they needed a high-profile American actor to secure the US box office (Yacowar 25). The

film, released by Paramount in 1955, like the play received mixed critical reviews, and yet it

was nominated for several Oscars, including Best Picture, and earned awards for Art

Direction and Cinematography. 1 The film also won the New York Critics Circle Award for

Best Film of 1955. Helped by awards publicity, the strength of Magnani’s performance,

Lancaster’s popular allure, and Williams’s growing eminence as a playwright, the film was a

commercial hit. Variety listed it as the sixteenth highest grossing film of 1956, with box-

office earnings of $4,200,000 (“Top Film Grossers” 1).

The Rose Tattoo tells the story of a Sicilian-American woman, Serafina Delle Rose,

the widow of Rosario Delle Rose, who after his death works as a seamstress in order to

support herself and her teenaged daughter, Rosa. Grief over the loss of Rosario, whom

Serafina idolized, precipitates her mental and physical decline. The plot follows Serafina’s

awakening to the truth about her marriage; far from the ideal man she imagined, Rosario was

in fact an adulterer. The “sexuality” that Wallis presumes would attract cinema viewers

refers to Serafina’s passionate nature and the keen pleasure she takes from her physical
relationship with Rosario—a passion that is reawakened when she later meets another

Sicilian immigrant, Alvaro Mangiacavallo.

Williams allows the widow a happy ending, for her eventual acceptance of Alvaro

marks her transition to a more realistic view of men and love, and therefore the possibility of

a more genuine union. For this reason, Ben Brantley classifies The Rose Tattoo as “singular

in the Williams Canon: While its theme of the self-deluding woman versus the man who is Id

incarnate abounds in the writer’s work, the clash typically ends in disaster.” But here,

Williams suspends his “romantic fatalism, allowing “passion to redeem rather than destroy,”

making The Rose Tattoo a “flip side of Streetcar” (C11).

Williams began writing his “love play to the world”, as he referred to The Rose Tattoo

in his Memoirs (162), roughly three years after meeting Frank Merlo, his first-generation

Sicilian lover, to whom the play is dedicated. He clai`med that his inspirations came from

Merlo’s world of Sicilian immigrants in New Orleans, as well as the “vital humanity and love

of life expressed by Italian people” (qtd. in Donahue 51) that he encountered through his

travels in Italy, but he sets his story in the more familiar territory of the Deep South,

specifically a village on the Gulf Coast somewhere between New Orleans and Mobile,

Alabama. In contrast to Williams’s other Southern plays, Jacob Adler argues that The Rose

Tattoo’s Sicilian characters seem, on the surface, inconsistent with this setting, and yet,

beneath “a tremendously foreign exterior, Serafina . . . has characteristics quite familiar to the

South [or at least Williams’s version of it]: religion and superstition, honor and courage and

awe of rank . . . and, when reality becomes unbearable, a tendency to violence or to an almost

psychotic withdrawal” (365). Charles S. Watson also perceives the duality of spirituality and

corruption in Serafina’s Sicilian immigrant culture to be in keeping with the playwright’s

view of the South (175). 2

 Williams, with input from Hal Kanter, wrote the screenplay, which borrows many of

the stage play’s key tropes, but presents them with very distinct emphases. There are enough

radical departures from the source text to render the film largely an independent work in

narrative, visual, and generic terms. Judging from contemporary reviews of the stage

production, The Rose Tattoo had the power both to shock and offend. To offer but one

example from a review in the New York Daily Mirror, Robert Coleman condemns the play as

“a study of sex-mad Sicilians” and concludes with this assessment:

In the last act . . . a lecher drops an unmentionable article on the stage. And

there are episodes that can be construed as sacrilegious. Personally, we were

revolted. We do not think these dubious elements add anything to a confused

play. Rather, we believe they are going to antagonize decent playgoers (35–

36). 3

Mann’s adaptation, however, studiously avoids antagonizing anyone. Williams’s concerns

that Mann would not be able to engender “the poetry and wildness” at the heart of his play

were not unfounded (“Letter to Audrey Wood” 499).

This essay offers a focused consideration of the motivations for Mann’s adaptation

and foregrounds the ways that the film Hollywood-izes the characters and themes of

Williams’s Rose Tattoo in order to appeal more to a 1950s mass cinema audience. I explore

how revisions to the play’s sexual and religious narratives, character, imagery, and

symbolism often create problems of meaning, introducing new inconsistencies and

contradictions that are not present in the play. I hope to demonstrate why the screen version

of The Rose Tattoo ultimately proves a less than satisfactory work, both aesthetically and in

terms of its narrative content.

In what may be the film’s finest review, The New York Times’ Bosley Crowther wrote

that “Miss Magnani sweeps most everything before her. And what she misses Mr. Lancaster
picks up.” Magnani’s performance is impressive, and it earned her the Academy Award for

Best Actress in 1956. Crowther’s assessment of Lancaster is more surprising, however, as he

appears woefully miscast. His comedic skills are used to good effect in a number of scenes,

particularly in his encounter with the goat in Serafina’s yard. However, his looks are in stark

contrast to those actors who comprise his Sicilian film family. In contrast to Wallach, whose

facility with an Italian-American accent may be heard in the 1953 radio adaptation available

as a sound archive, Lancaster’s speech patterns prove unconvincing as those of a first-

generation Sicilian immigrant—even though most of the Italian that peppers the play’s

dialogue is excluded from the film script, and especially when Lancaster’s performance is set

against Magnani’s. 4

Casting Magnani as Serafina was potentially an inspired choice. The Times’ (London)

reviewer wrote:

The talents of Anna Magnani and Tennessee Williams are allied. Both are at

home in extremes of emotional temperature. Both have a natural feeling for

the colourful, the uninhibited, the unashamed, the one expressing herself

through a selfless extravagance of voice and gesture, a devoted flinging of her

entire tempestuous personality into the part, the other by a choice of themes

and a use of dialogue which aim at breaking down the safe dramatic

conventions (“Gaumont Cinema” n. pag.).

Moreover, the publicity surrounding Magnani’s personal life tallied closely with the

unconventional behavior of Williams’s protagonist, at least as conceived for the stage. In his

Memoirs, Williams describes Magnani as an eccentric character: “She was as unconventional

a woman as I have known in or out of my professional world, and if you understand me at all,

you must know that in this statement I am making my personal estimate of her honesty,
which I feel was complete. She never exhibited any lack of self-assurance, any timidity in her

relations with that society outside of whose conventions she quite publicly existed” (162).

Magnani openly lived her life in a way that violated feminine sexual mores, especially

as practiced in 1950s America. In an American context, “La Lupa,” as she was known in

Italy, could be viewed as a radical protofeminist figure, but, as I discuss below, the film does

not successfully integrate Magnani’s public image as female transgressor. Although

Paramount marketed The Rose Tattoo as “the boldest story of love you’ve ever been

permitted to see” (Geraghty 86), the way in which the screenplay refashions the stage play’s

sexual narrative makes Magnani a problematic fit with Williams’s original, sexually

adventurous, character. Given that Williams enjoyed a good deal of latitude in crafting the

script, he shares accountability for this misfit with Mann as director: as Williams admitted,

“Danny was willing to take a chance on the script submitted” (“Letter To the Editor” 590).

Of course, Magnani was renowned also for her tremendous acting skills, being

celebrated primarily for her work in a number of neorealist films, such as Roberto

Rossellini’s Rome, Open City (Minerva Film 1945). The postwar school of Italian neorealism

was characterized by an explicit oppositional politics, especially a concern for the social

problems of working-class and poor Italians. Classic neorealism of the 1940s aimed to show

unvarnished social reality, and directors sought to embody this idea of authenticity via, for

example, un-staged location shooting, improvisation, and mixed casts of professional and

amateur performers.

Drawing upon Richard Dyer’s foundational research in Stars (1979) and Heavenly

Bodies (1986), L. Bailey McDaniel explores how intertextuality is key to understanding the

range of meanings that may attach to Magnani’s performance in The Rose Tattoo. She

outlines how a 1950s American spectator might have created associations between Magnani

as star performer, neorealist values, and Serafina: Magnani comes marked as “a verbal and
ideologically astute, rogue agent;” her textual celebrity encompasses above all “authenticity,”

“reality,” and “non-glamour” (281).” Her alignment with the neorealist brand of authenticity

means that the viewer must contend with interpretive uncertainties in the film, for instance,

how to read its setting in a lower-class, Sicilian immigrant community—and the power of the

Catholic Church within this community.

Leland Starnes posits that “by staging his dramas in a realm just so much apart from

‘average’ American life as the Deep South and by having his characters speak in the

distinctive language of that realm apart, Williams succeeds in distancing his plays from the

purely realistic mode to a degree sufficient to justify and disguise a certain characteristic

exaggeration and distortion of reality” (94). These distortions, he contends, are “for the

purposes of vivid theatrical examination of her [Serafina’s] being” (98). This is not to say that

Williams is an apolitical writer, but his drama does not offer a left-leaning critique of

realpolitik; rather, as Paul Hurley’s early study of social values in Williams’s Cat on a Hot

Tin Roof (1955) reveals, Williams was interested in the “relationship between the individual

and the group, the person and his [sic] society,” as well as “the ability of the individual to Comment [JAD1]: Robert – kill the sic
here and elsewhere?

defend his [sic] personal values in the face of a society which demands adherence to group Older, gendered language sounds odd to
our ears – but should we save “sic” for
obvious ERRORS or also use for political
values” (126). Magnani’s presence, though, creates alternative ideological expectations incorrectness?

rooted in the social concerns of immigrant communities and the social reform of economic

and religious structures, and although this implied narrative is complemented by the look of

the film, its plot lines develop in incompatible directions.

Although Williams wrote the role of Serafina with Magnani in mind, paradoxically,

her close association with the neorealist school aligns oddly with the epic quality that

Williams sought to invest in the character. In his preface to the play, Williams speaks of

being haunted by a “truly awful sense of impermanence” and a “[h]orror of insincerity, of not

meaning” (“Timeless World” 261). For Williams, the power of drama resides in its ability to
show a world where characters act as if they are not subject to the “the corrupting rush of

time;” dramatic characters could perform, with sublime dignity, the “great magic trick of

human existence” by snatching “the eternal out of the desperately fleeting” (“Timeless

World” 262). More often than not, Magnani’s Serafina appears immured in the mundane. No

cosmic overtones or sublime ideas are evoked when she brandishes the watch that she has

bought for Rosa. On film, the symbol is reduced to a concrete time-keeping device that

Serafina forgets to pass on because of her emotionally overwrought state of mind.

Rather than write plays revolving around quotidian anxieties, as Henry I. Schvey

recognizes, Williams’s “poetics of tragedy” sought to imitate the elemental power of classical

tragedy (74–75). Williams did not consider modern realism suited to communicating either

the quintessence of human life or what made it of consequence. Compared to modern tragedy

as conceived by Williams, “the characters and occurrences” typical of neorealist drama

“become equally pointless, equally trivial, as corresponding meetings and happenings in life”

(“Timeless World” 260). The Rose Tattoo on film is similarly impoverished not only because

Magnani imports a sense of the authentic associated with modern realism, but also because

the film suffers from wider generic problems.

Maurice Yarcowa points out that Mann was noted for his skill as a director of

domestic realist dramas (3), as illustrated by films such as Come Back Little Sheba

(Paramount, 1952) and About Mrs. Leslie (Paramount, 1954). The encounter between

Serafina and Estelle, Rosario’s mistress, at the Mardi Gras Club shows how elements of The

Rose Tattoo resemble the distinctly realist look and feel of Mann’s other films. When we

watch Serafina verbally and physically abuse Estelle, the gritty tenor of this scene stands in

stark contrast to Williams’s intensely vivid but decidedly non-realist play. Christine Geraghty

observes that the location filming of Serafina’s house and its surroundings had the aim of
creating “an authentically realistic look” rather than confirming the work’s status as a filmed

play (87). This realistic look was amplified by the choice to film in black and white.

The film was shot in the Florida Keys using VistaVision, a technique developed by

Paramount in 1954 that offered a much higher-resolution wide-screen image. The resultant

visual quality is largely dependent on the film being processed using Technicolor. The Rose

Tattoo is one of the few VistaVision productions to be filmed in black and white; hence,

stylistically, it does not benefit fully from this pioneering process. There are moments when

the deeper lines and shadows created by black-and-white film meaningfully amplify the

mood of a scene; when the priest and the women approach Serafina with the news of

Rosario’s death, the more dramatic tones used to frame her convey the depth of her emotional

devastation with heightened intensity. Overall, though, the lack of color impoverishes Mann’s

Rose Tattoo.

Black-and-white film works against the way in which Williams adds depth in the

play—that is, by using vibrant color to stress connections between character, theme, imagery,

and environment. Williams’s “Production Notes” describe the interior of Serafina’s house “as

colorful as a booth at a carnival”:

There are many religious articles and pictures of ruby and gilt, the brass cage

of a gaudy parrot, . . . rose-patterned wallpaper and a rose-colored carpet;

everything is exclamatory in its brightness like the projection of a woman’s

heart passionately in love (269–70).

The film captures the cluttered atmospheres of the stage set, but without color, Serafina’s

surroundings are denuded of their extravagant sensuousness. The striking effect of the color

rose—which works so well in the stage version to convey Serafina’s excessive love through

the symbol of the stained pink slip, or Estelle’s illicit passion as illustrated by the rose silk

shirt—is significantly abridged in the film.

 Theatre and film are frequently distinguished by virtue of the former being a medium

in which language predominates, the latter a medium that privileges image. In Williams’s

Rose Tattoo, however, image vies with language, and sometimes outstrips it, as the primary

mode of communicating meaning to the spectator. Williams maintained that “We all have in

our conscious and unconscious minds a great vocabulary of images, and . . . all human

communication is based on these images as are our dreams.” He considered symbols, “when

used respectfully,” to be “the purest language of plays,” able to replace “tedious exposition”

with “an object or a gesture on the lighted stage” (qtd. in Jackson 26).

Tracy Letts, speaking about adapting his play August: Osage County to film

(Smokehouse Pictures 2013), describes the biggest difficulty as “condensing the material” so

that the story could be told with “a picture instead of words” (qtd. in Marrin). In contrast,

because The Rose Tattoo already relies on images to impart mood, characters’ states of mind,

etc., it requires a less fundamental reworking for film than most stage plays. It seems odd,

then, that the film substantially reduces instances of the play’s most significant symbols— the

rose, and the goat, as well as the Catholic iconography, all of which saturate Williams’s stage

set.

The rose is the key symbol of Serafina’s hybrid sexual and religious passions. The

paranormal imprint of the rose on Serafina’s chest, which matches the tattoos worn by

Rosario, Estelle, and Alvaro, represents on one level debased lust. At the same time, the rose

symbolizes her spiritual love, her feelings both for Rosario and toward the divine. Jack

Barbera explains the significance of the rose as a sign of the Catholic Madonna: “Mary is the

Mystical Rose,” and as such is celebrated in rose windows throughout cathedrals in Europe

(148). Where the rose does appear as part of the film set—on the wallpaper and on Serafina’s

bathrobe—it does so in diminished form due to the grainy appearance of the film. Just as the
goat, symbol of earthy passion, is emasculated and turned into an object of humor, the rose

loses many of the myriad religious and sexual connotations it bears on stage.

The streamlined symbolism, in conjunction with the use of black-and-white film,

substantially diminishes Serafina’s character, offering a muted version of Williams’s

obsessively passionate creation. In his stage directions, Williams offers the same precise,

vivid color descriptions of costume as he does for the set. In Act 1, scene 1, the audience sees

Serafina for the first time, seated in the parlor awaiting her husband Rosario’s return. She is

said to resemble “a plump little Italian opera singer in the role of Madame Butterfly.” She is

“sheathed in pale rose silk,” wears “dainty slippers with glittering buckles and French heels,”

and holds a yellow fan with a painted rose that matches the rose pinned in her black

pompadour (Williams, RT 274).

In contrast, the first glimpse of Serafina on film shows her in the mundane

surroundings of a small grocery store, wearing close-fitting but ordinary street dress. Here,

she is not concerned about meeting her husband’s conjugal needs, but rather with acquiring

the best eggs to cook for his breakfast, just like the other village housewives by whom she is

surrounded. Compared to her lush, sensual appearance on stage, Mann’s Serafina is deprived

of much of her sexual power. The absence of the rose—as signifier of carnal appetite—is

another indicator of how the film downplays her active sexuality, although the opening scene

gestures toward her procreative faculties when Magnani pats her stomach after refusing to

discuss with the priest the secret of her pregnancy.

Magnani’s unspectacular appearance limits the emotional range of Serafina’s

character and undercuts the extremity of her descent into depression over the loss of Rosario.

At the beginning of Act 2, scene 1, she stands on her porch, “barefooted, wearing a rayon

slip”: “Great shadows have appeared beneath her eyes; her face and throat gleam with

sweat. There are dark stains of wine on the rayon slip” (Williams, RT 337). Father De Leo
compares her slovenly state to her once almost ethereal beauty: “I remember you dressed in

pale blue silk at Mass one Easter morning, yes, like a lady wearing a—piece of the—

weather” (Williams, RT 341).

The film offers no glimpse of Serafina’s dazzling yet gentle style of femininity. The

old adage about the body being the shell of the soul and the dress the husk of the shell, but

the husk often revealing the nature of that soul aptly summarizes how costume signifies in

Williams’s Rose Tattoo. For the spectator is meant to understand that Serafina embodies a

tempestuous mix of strength, aggressiveness, immodesty, passion, and more stereotypical

feminine manners of gentleness, tenderness, dependence, and submissiveness, the latter set of

qualities symbolized by her well-groomed feminine appearance. Consequently, the film

viewer enjoys a limited sense of character progression compared to the theatre spectator, for

whom Serafina’s animalistic appearance represents an extreme psychological deterioration,

represented by her altered performance of femininity. In addition, a more one-dimensional

portrait of Serafina removes the basis of much of the play’s humor. As Roberta F. Weldon

discusses, humor in the play “arises from the incompatibility of Serafina’s two natures: ‘una

bestia, una bestia feroce!’ and a high-minded woman trying to live up to her own ideals” (73).

Williams immediately locates Serafina as central to the story, and Mann’s

camerawork privileges Magnani’s performance throughout most of the film—with the

notable exception of the opening scene. In place of Williams’s first scene, Mann substitutes

an external scene that focuses on Rosario’s mistress Estelle Hohengarten. As the film opens,

the camera pulls back from a close-up of a tattoo parlour. Two boys peer through its doors,

and as Estelle exits, they ask her about the tattoo she got and where she had it put, to which

she rather brazenly responds: “right over my heart.” Otherwise, she too is presented in a

sexually muted form compared to her appearance in the stage version.

 The first time the audience sees Estelle, Williams garbs her in a dress of Egyptian

design, and her moral laxity is signalled by her bleached blonde hair, described as having “an

unnatural gloss in the clear, greenish dusk” (Williams, RT 281).In the film, she wears a staid

turtleneck sweater paired with a plain long skirt, and her appearance is remarkable mainly for

its ordinariness, lacking any exotic qualities that could make her convincing as a “man-trap”

for Serafina’s husband. Esther M. Jackson locates The Rose Tattoo’s appeal “in the romantic

quality with which the playwright invested the setting” (200). Elements of domestic realism

introduced by Mann no more accord with the romanticized aims of Williams’s drama than do

the generic principles of neorealism.

The theatrical framework of Williams’s Rose Tattoo borrows from a range of genres

and styles. Williams notes in his Memoirs how Irene Selznick rejected The Rose Tattoo

because she thought “that it was material for an opera, not for a play” (161). Selznick

recognised how the heightened physical, emotional, and material excess displayed on stage

gestures toward grand operatic style. However, Serafina’s inordinate, flawed obsession with

Rosario, along with the chorus of village women that frames the play, borrows from Greek

tragedy. Alvaro’s clownishness and unpolished courtship add elements of bawdy comedy,

whereas the dialogue, particularly the religious language, is marked by Williams’s unique

form of poetic naturalism. The film lacks this generic complexity, offering instead a tangled

blend of domestic realism punctuated with melodramatic clashes and ludicrous farce. It tends

toward the oversimplification of the drama’s mixed-genre formula in an attempt to produce a

more even storyline that would be accessible to viewers of mainstream films; and, yet,

contemporary reviews call attention to the film’s numerous perplexities.

A review in the 1956 Monthly Film Bulletin complains that the film does not “add up

to a satisfactory whole because the basis of the play seems false. At first one imagines that

Williams intends a sardonic comment on the illusions of sexual passion as an exclusive

motive for living, and to reveal Serafina’s ‘religion’ as a deception. Then, apparently, he

shares precisely this illusion” (G.L. 30). While the reviewer faults the play for the same

reasons, these contradictions stem largely from Mann’s direction and James Wong Howe’s

cinematography, which I discuss later in more detail. With reference to Mann’s “striving after

realism,” Edward Goring concludes that the film “boomerangs with strangely unrealistic

effect.” He dismisses it as lightweight fare: “A soul it seems is being bared before your eyes;

then you notice that there is really very little to see. By the end of this film I had almost

forgotten what he was trying to find” (n.pag.).

Goring measures the effectiveness of Mann’s film against the success of the film

version of Streetcar, which he styles as “the bell” rung by Williams “as he clanged his way

through convention” (n. pag.). For Goring, The Rose Tattoo’s main shortfall seems to be its

failure to portray honestly the psycho-sexual subject matter of Williams’s play. R. Barton

Palmer considers screen versions of Williams’s plays in the late 1940s and ’50s as among the

first in “the development of an ‘adult’ form of cinematic entertainment” in America (209–

10). He elucidates how Williams films differed from standard 1950s Hollywood material by

being “unabashedly literary and unconcerned with glamour, glitz and action and no longer Comment [JAD2]: British spelling ok?

carried along by a simplistic and easily readable narrative; they were also striking in being Comment [MB3]: British spelling is
used in the original source.

less afraid of offending traditional pieties, even as they were not interested in the kind of

obvious sexiness (oriented particularly around the arousing display of the female form) that

Hollywood had been selling for years (123–24).

While Magnani’s unembellished appearance departs from Hollywood’s usual over-

sexualized representations of women, The Rose Tattoo stands out among the many screen

adaptations of Williams’s work in the 1950s and ’60s mainly by virtue of not breaching

social decorum. For example, in comparison to Cat on A Hot Tin Roof (MGM 1958) or

Suddenly Last Summer (Columbia Pictures 1959), prime examples of Williams’s adult genre
films, The Rose Tattoo proves disappointingly tame. Williams was aware of the film’s

deficiencies: in a letter to Audrey Wood in 1956, he observes with some chagrin that “‘Rose

Tattoo’ was nominated for almost every reward but for script.”

I don’t want that repeated. Craven submission to censorship . . . a deep-rooted

fear of risking off-beat distinction, playing it dully safe, all conspired to turn a

very hastily written but highly original and moving script into the closest

possible approximation of a regular Hollywood property, raised above its level

by one artist, Magnani. . . . When people mention the picture, nobody praises

the film itself.” (606)

The letter reveals how Williams faced pressure to depart from the original text. Shifts

in social mores in 1950s America meant that the Motion Picture Production Code (Hays

Code) was much looser than it had been in the preceding decade, but it was still a force that

Hollywood could not ignore. Palmer and William Robert Bray record that the Production

Code Administration (PCA), which enforced the Hays Code, considered The Rose Tattoo

basically unacceptable because it seemed “absorbed from beginning to end with questions of

love and gross sex”; added to this, the PCA objected to its representation of religion “in a

rather ridiculous light” (109–10). According to the New York Times, Wallis asked Williams

to “temper the play’s sexual aspects and make a clear distinction between Roman Catholic

beliefs and Serafina’s superstitions.” (TCM).

Mann attempts to exploit the censor’s relative tolerance in 1955, but with limited

success. The invented bedroom scene between Rosario and Serafina illustrates how the film

often miscarries in its attempt to translate how, for Serafina, love is inseparable from sexual

pleasure. Fully clothed, Serafina sits on the bed and clasps Rosario’s body, apparently naked

beneath the sheets. Palmer and Bray point out the radical aspects of this scene in terms of

displaying “a woman in barely restrained heat” for “a thoroughly objectified male body”
(120), and yet the scene lacks an erotic quality. Rosario appears sullen and unresponsive to

his wife, demonstrating neither physical nor emotive signs of arousal. There is certainly

nothing in this scene that might “stimulate the lower and baser element” and thereby offend

the censors (Leff and Simmons 284–85), but the result of this compliance is the creation of

doubt in the viewer’s mind about a central premise of Serafina’s character—the validity of

her claim to a “glorious” relationship with Rosario, especially as his mistress is positioned in

the next room waiting to ask the unwitting Serafina to make a silk shirt for him.

Rosario’s appearance, itself, further works against the erotic overtones of the play, as

explained by Williams in a 1951 interview in Vogue:

The Rose Tattoo is the Dionysian element in human life, its mystery, its

beauty, its significance . . . . It may seem curious that I have chosen a woman

to be the main protagonist of a play on such a theme. But in the blind and

frenzied efforts of the widow, Serafina, to comprehend the mysteries of her

dead husband, we sense and learn more about him that would have been

possible through direct observation of the living man, the Dionysus himself.

Dionysus, being mystery, is never seen clearly (Arnott 34).

Thus, by stripping The Rose Tattoo of its erotic mystery, the film avoids directly challenging

the Code’s main requirement to promote traditional values, but at the same time recasts

Serafina’s lust for her husband as the kind of safe sex that may be contained within the state

of marriage.

Serafina’s momentous decision to have sex with Alvaro in response to her husband’s

infidelity would have directly contravened the Code’s general principle against a picture

lowering the “moral standards of those who see it” by presenting “wrong-doing, evil, or sin”

in a sympathetic manner (Leff and Simmons 284). In Act 3, Alvaro’s animalistic grin and

Serafina’s erratic breathing and tremulous voice clearly preface their lovemaking. Serafina’s
line: “Now we can go on with our—conversation” (read sex) reinforces what she is about to

do (Williams, RT 101). The screenplay relocates the dialogue about their “conversation,”

making it the last line of the film, by which point it no longer carries the same double

meaning as Williams’s line in the play, because the film allows for the possibility that the

couple will go on to legitimize their relationship before consummation, underscored by the

chorus of pious village women who publicly celebrate Serafina and Alvaro’s reconciliation.

The line is also flattened because, unlike in the play, it is not prefaced by a series of

key passages that overtly point to the carnal attraction between the pair. In Act 2, scene 1,

Alvaro openly confesses his sexual yearnings and frustrations, which he accentuates by

touching his genitalia. In the film, his hand touches only the side of his thigh, and the gesture

is further rendered sexually innocuous when Serafina’s reaction is changed from one of

embarrassment to amusement, as she calmly goes on with her sewing (Williams, RT 367).

Also, the film omits Alvaro’s references to masturbation in Act 3, scene 1—“I live with my

hands in my pockets!” he tells Serafina (Williams, RT 385). Finally, all reference to the

condom he carries, and the nonprocreative sex it implies (a sin according to Catholic

doctrine), is cut from the film. The viewer sees no “small cellophane-wrapped disk” fall from

Alvaro’s pocket; instead, Alvaro’s “poetry,” to which Serafina reacts angrily, is transformed

into a clumsy kiss, during which her hair comb is knocked to the ground. By these omissions,

the film precludes the emotional climax of the play, which ends with Serafina joyously

announcing to Assunta that she feels on her breast “the burning again of the rose.” The

burning sensation denotes Serafina’s reawakening to the world through sexual communion

with Alvaro, which is symbolized by her new pregnancy: “two lives again, two!” (Williams,

RT 414), she triumphantly declares.

Sylvia E. Bowman comments on the way that Serafina considers physical love to be

more spiritual than religion (77). That the film treats sexuality with far less reverence as well
as candor than the play is illustrated most clearly in the farcical scene Mann creates when

Alvaro returns to Serafina’s house. We watch as he makes his way through the backyards of

Serafina’s neighbours, where he falls over fences, stumbles into chicken coops, accompanied

by the sounds of barking dogs, and even has to dodge bullets fired at him by an irate

neighbor. Whereas the critic Brooks Atkinson praised Wallach for his “light, buoyant style,”

which honored Alvaro’s “humorous, naïve, frustrated” character, Lancaster’s role was

assessed by Variety’s reviewer as “bordering on the absurd” (“Review”). When he finally

arrives at Serafina’s house, he is too drunk to perform sexually, and the film stresses how he

passes out, alone, in the sewing room, while Serafina retreats to her bedroom. The film also

tames Rosa’s sexual nature. Although she displays her desire for Jack Hunter, it remains

contained—like her mother’s—within the approved state of marriage. In Williams’s play,

Rosa runs off to New Orleans to spend the night with her sailor, but in the film, she goes to

be married.

By sanitizing the play’s sexual themes, the film establishes a connection between

sexual transgression and punishment—an idea that is absent from the play. In one invented

scene, we witness a police chase that results in the adulterous Rosario’s death when his truck,

which he uses to smuggle drugs, comes off the road and explodes. Mann also repeats the

usual melodramatic treatment of the “fallen woman,” whose forbidden desire must be seen to

be expressly punished. In the play, we mainly get the sense that Estelle suffers an emotional

loss, and the only social consequence she experiences occurs when she dares to intrude upon

Serafina’s grief. Her attempt to view Rosario’s body is repelled by the priest and the village

women, who physically stop her from entering Serafina’s house. However, the screenplay

adds another scene of physical violence, in which Estelle is publicly exposed and punished

for her adultery.

 On stage, Serafina learns the truth about Rosario’s unfaithfulness in a telephone call.

In the film, this revelation occurs outside of the home. Alvaro accompanies Serafina to the

dingy gambling and strip joint where Estelle works in order to confront her about rumors of

the affair. Their encounter ends with a clichéd “cat fight,” provoked by Estelle ripping open

her blouse to display the rose tattoo on her chest that matches Rosario’s. This disclosure

provokes Serafina’s frenzied attack, during which she slaps Estelle and beats her with a

handbag. None of the club’s male patrons come to Estelle’s defence; instead they prevent her

from effectively resisting Serafina’s assault by holding her back. This scene illustrates how,

as Palmer suggests, The Rose Tattoo “simplifies the intellectual scheme of Williams’s play by

melodramatizing all the dramatic encounters in the Hollywood fashion” (224), and it

illustrates, too, the truth of Williams’s misgivings about how playing it safe resulted in a

mediocre film.

Just as the film waters down the transgressive force of the play’s narrative of desire, it

shies away from representing the more challenging aspects of Williams’s treatment of God

and religion. The script retains Williams’s code word for sexual euphoria, “Glory,” which

Serafina uses to compare the unique physical qualities of her marriage to the conventional,

passionless relationships endured by the other village women; there is one instance when the

religious sense of the term is heightened by moving the scene in which Serafina describes the

glory of her marriage from her front yard to the interior of the village church. Relocating the

scene enables Mann to reveal Serafina’s steady drift away from the Church and to subtly

convey the peculiar aspects of her faith.

In the New Testament, glory or gloria refers to the splendor of God; therefore, when

Serafina speaks the word in a house of God before the priest, no less than ten times, this

signifies her idolatrous worship of Rosario, as well as the blasphemous way that she mixes

manifestations of the holy and the profane. In addition to having Rosario cremated, we learn
that Serafina has violated other Catholic standards by refraining from attending Mass, and the

film retains her plea to Father De Leo that he violate the confessional by telling her whether

Rosario admitted sins of a sexual nature. In general, though, The Rose Tattoo on film is a far

more conventional and decorous work concerning religion than Williams’s play.

In the play, after Serafina learns of Rosario’s betrayal, she angrily rejects her Catholic

faith. “Moving with great violence, gasping and panting” (Williams, RT 395), she “rushes up

to the Madonna and addresses her passionately with explosive gestures, leaning over so that

her face is level with the statue’s”:

You hold in the cup of your hand this little house and you smash it! . . .

because you have hate Serafina?—Serafina that loved you!—No, no, no, you

don’t speak! I don’t believe in you, Lady! You’re just a poor little doll with

the paint peeling off, and now I blow out the light and I forget you the way

you forget Serafina! [She blows out the vigil light.] (Williams, RT 395–96)

Rose De Angelis describes Serafina as a Christian-pagan. Citing sociological studies

of the particular type of Catholicism practiced in Sicily, De Angelis explains Serafina’s faith

as a folk religion that blends “Christian and pre-Christian elements of animism, polytheism

and sorcery along with the sacraments described by the Church” (n. pag.). The logic of Comment [JAD4]: we can replace this
with a page number from the print edition

Serafina’s faith requires that one negotiate with God for certain bounties via a host of

intermediaries, principally here the Virgin Mary, in exchange for practices and tokens of

veneration; this, De Angelis argues, accounts for her outburst of anger toward the Madonna

when her prayers go unanswered (n. pag.).

Williams’s play clearly allows for a reading of Catholicism as a form of primitivism,

as indicated also through the dramatic effects that surround Serafina’s rejection of the

Madonna, and concomitantly of God.

 She gasps a little and backs away from the shrine, her eyes rolling

apprehensively this way and that. The parrot squawks at her. The goat bleats.

The night is full of sinister noises, harsh bird cries, the sudden flapping of

wings in the cane-brake, a distant shriek of Negro [sic] laughter . . . . Serafina

catches her breath and moves as though for protection behind the dummy of

the bride (Williams, RT 396).

Here, nature seems invested with malevolent power, and her response to the cacophony of

sound reveals Serafina’s belief in the power of the supernatural. These uncanny sound effects

also function to render the tenets of Serafina’s Catholic faith indistinguishable from a highly

imaginative superstition in dark, otherworldly powers. Such a view of Catholicism was

anathema in terms of the Production Code, which was after all largely the product of the

Catholic Church. The Code itself had been written in 1930 by a Catholic priest, Father Daniel

Lord, and the PCA was run by a lay Catholic, Joseph I. Breen (Black, Hollywood Censored

1–2). The PCA worked in tandem with the Legion of Decency, a Catholic pressure group that

would mount furious propaganda campaigns against any studio or cinema that dared to screen

what it deemed immoral fare.

According to Gregory D. Black, adaptations of Williams’s plays ranked among the

most controversial material considered by the PCA, and served to illuminate the deepest

divisions among the PCA, the Legion, and the wider Catholic community about what

constituted suitable entertainment for adults in 1950s America (Catholic Crusade 105–6).

The particular difficulties posed by The Rose Tattoo result from the way in which religion

intersects with sexuality, something that was brilliantly captured in Nicholas Hytner’s 2007

production of The Rose Tattoo at the National Theatre, London. Michael Billington’s review

praised Zoe Wanamaker for giving “us a woman in whom passion is always at war with
Catholicism and observation of the social niceties,” emphasised throughout by a stage design

that prominently displayed a large statue of the Virgin Mary.

Considering Serafina’s irreverent war with Catholicism, the only way the filmmakers

in the 1950s could negotiate the demands of the PCA that “ceremonies of any definite

religion should be carefully and respectfully handled” (Leff and Simmons 285) was to

remove many of its religious elements and/or to substantially refashion Serafina’s

relationship to her Catholic faith. Accordingly, the film offers a streamlined narrative of

religion, beginning with the reduction of religious articles. The Madonna’s shrine is

foregrounded in the play; for example, Act 1, scene 6 opens with a spotlight on the shrine: the

audience sees the “starry blue robe of Our Lady above the flickering candle of the ruby glass

cup (Williams, RT 317).Where it appears in the film, this central religious image is

downplayed—the shrine consists of a small, plain, unlit statue in an alcove placed to the side

of Serafina’s living room, while the array of ruby and gilt religious pictures and icons

mentioned in Williams’s production notes are absent.

In keeping with the producer’s demands, the film also downplays Serafina’s

superstitions. Although she mentions the Strega, the witch figure does not feature

prominently in the film. However, the rationale for lessening this character’s importance may

also be due to the fact that in the play she is the principal voice of a crude and racist

stereotype of Italian Americans, and it is to the film’s credit that it does not reproduce the

Strega’s depiction of Italian-Americans as “wops.” Actions that underscore the quasi-

Christian nature of Serafina’s faith are left out of the screenplay as well. When Jack swears to

respect Rosa’s innocence he does so upon the “Blessed Blood of . . . Jesus” (Williams, RT

334)—but this reference, with its connotation of pagan blood oaths, is omitted from the film.

Similarly, events that might call into question Catholic religious truths are cut. In Act 2, scene

1, Serafina calls upon the Madonna, but ironically a travelling salesman responds:
 Oh, Lady, Lady, Lady, give me a sign!

[As if in mocking answer, a novelty salesman appears and approaches the

porch . . . His entrance is accompanied by a brief, satiric strain of music.]

(Williams, RT 347)

Most important, though, is the omission of Serafina’s outburst against the Madonna,

and how this precipitates the consummation of her relationship with Alvaro that follows

immediately upon her rejection of the Church. When Serafina extinguishes the vigil light it

signifies that she will no longer be guided by the Church’s moral compass; henceforth, she

will be guided solely by the desire to please herself. In the film, Serafina never decisively

throws off the constraints of a repressive Catholic morality. By not allowing her to rail

against God, the Church or its saints, the screenplay eviscerates Williams’ hotheaded,

impious rebel.

Given the intersection of the religious and the sexual narrative strands, adulterating

the story in this way alters how the viewer reads the film’s ending. At the end of the play,

Serafina has been liberated from the mental shackles of a primitive religious doctrine and

empowered by surmounting her grief through the successful pursuit of Alvaro; thus, she can

celebrate the conception of a child who religious and social convention would consider

illegitimate. The film is more ambiguous about whether Serafina’s end will be a happy one.

Mann’s representation of Serafina is more in line with 1950s Hollywood family melodrama,

specifically those belonging to what Thomas Schatz terms the “widow-lover” category,

typified by Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows (Universal Pictures 1955). As defined by

Schatz, widow-lover melodramas end with the central female character merely exchanging

one trap for another. The Rose Tattoo allows the possibility that Serafina’s life will remain

determined by Alvaro. Despite his buffoonery, his propensity to tears, and his intention to

trade his “love and affection” for a woman’s “well-furnished house” and profitable little
business” earnings (Williams RT 365), Alvaro retains the privileges attendant on masculinity

in the society of Sicilian-Americans. Consequently, his union with Serafina could result in

her individual destiny being determined “by the values of her new lover,” another scenario

common to Hollywood melodrama (Schatz 232–33). Conversely, the play does not allow for

the possibility that Serafina is merely replacing one situation of domestic entrapment for

another one; instead, she successfully defies both Church and patriarchy

Time has not been kind to Williams and Mann’s film. The subject matter, though

radical in its day, appears dated now. The screenplay’s watered-down version of Serafina’s

story would likely hold little appeal for most contemporary viewers. The sum total of changes

contained in the screenplay, combined with Mann’s cinematic techniques, makes The Rose

Tattoo a difficult film to watch today. It lacks the operatic intensity of emotion that lends the

play so much of its dynamism, and it fails to justly represent either Serafina’s bacchanalian

delight in sexual pleasure or the paganism and superstition of Sicilian Catholicism that

inform her emotional landscape. By ineffectually addressing the key elements that might

predominate in a stage production, Williams’s “love play to the world” on film offers a rather

banal glimpse into the melodramatic and stereotyped domestic life of an Italian immigrant

woman in the Deep South.

Works Cited

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---. “The Timeless World of a Play.” The Theatre of Tennessee Williams. Vol. 2. New York:

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1
The Rose Tattoo was globally distributed by Paramount, with various release dates between
1956 and 1958. Since 2004, it has been available on DVD and may also be viewed via
streaming on a range of devices.
 2
See also King’s “Tennessee Williams: A Southern Writer” for a discussion of the
connection between character, plot and setting.
3
Published February 5, 1951
4
Wallach and Stapleton reprised their roles for a one-hour radio adaptation broadcast on
NBC’s “Best Plays.” This recording is available via
https://archive.org/details/BestPlays1952-1953.

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