"World's Greatest Actress"

The 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 his body ("like a young bull"). "I was the peasant," she cries, "but I gave my hosband glory." One day reality in the improbable form of Alvaro Mangiacavallo (Burt Lancaster), "a bachelor wit' three dependents," breaks into Serafina's dank little dreamworld. Like the smuggler, he drives a truck, and has a rose tattooed on his brawny chest, which reminds Serafina almost unbearably of her husband's. Hard facts as well as a new set of hard muscles break the husband's deadlock on her affections--it turns out he had been keeping a girl (Virginia Grey) on the side.

Like all but the greatest grotesques, The Rose Tattoo sets out so furiously to heighten the flavors of reality that the meat of the thing is soon lost in its seasoning; and only a moviegoer who can take his peperone straight will be able to judge if the picture is really hot stuff.

Burt Lancaster, however, makes a brave try at a part somewhat beyond the means of his talent, and manages at least to convince the spectator that half an oaf is better than none. As for Anna, nothing like her kind of corset farce has come out of Hollywood since the late Marie Dressier delicately tucked a pint of hooch in her grandmotherly bosom. One moment Actress Magnani comes lurching on-camera as shapeless as a burlap bag full of cantaloupes; the next she is sleazing through the dusk in black lace with the toothsome glitter of a backstreet-walker in Naples. And she battles her way into a girdle of yesteryear with all the fury and desperation of the Royal Welch Fusiliers at Bunker Hill, somehow imparting to her defeat some of the sorrowful majesty of a historical debacle.

U.S. dramatists might take instruction from the plight of Playwright Williams, the tiger of Broadway. Magnani, as a result of this picture, will probably become a very hot item in U.S. show business, and she is the sort of lady who, if not closely watched, comes back from the ride with the tiger inside.

A guest at a chichi Hollywood hotel stood blinking one recent day at a scratchy note that had just been shoved underneath the door of his suite. "Please don't use the bathroom in the mornings." it read. "You are disturbing the world's greatest actress." He asked the manager what the message meant. It meant, he was informed, that Italy's Anna Magnani had come to Hollywood.

The most explosive emotional actress of her generation had. in fact, erupted over filmland and was filling the vicinity with temperamental lava, flaming ash and general consternation. Soon after her arrival in the U.S., Magnani banished the TV set from her hotel room and ordered a grand piano, on which she battered tempestuously when the mood was on her. Bored with the chef's chef-d'oeuvres. she was seen marching up to her suite with $50 worth of groceries in tow. She gave interviews from her bed, her hair like a black dustmop, her bag-rimmed eyes like the burning tips of cigars. Sometimes she actually lit up a small cigar and slunk about the room, her Magnanimous bosom heaving like a passionate surf as she flung out a flood of Italian. When informed that her first U.S. picture would be shown on widescreen, Magnani publicly sneered: "Poof! Widescreen!" When TV came with opulent offers, she recoiled: "Weel I have to hold a bowl of cereal een my hand?"

Anna Magnani had sharpened her passions on a flinty fate. She was born about 47 years ago and brought up on the wrong side of the Tiber. Her mother was a working girl and her father did a fade when Anna was a month old. At 17, she won admission to a dramatic school, and soon joined a rundown roadshow as a singer of stornelli, the street songs of a country where the streets are seldom cleaned.

The movies caught her up in the mid-'30s. and in the next ten years she made about a dozen pictures--all of them bad most of them popular, some of them good experience. By 1944, when Roberto Rossellini offered her the lead in Open City Magnam had developed a style that was to set the acting fashion in Italy from that day to this. She called it realismo and overnight the narrow highways and byways of Italy were crowded with "Ma-gnamni," who frumped their hair down over their eyes, ripped a few strategic seams m their cheap cotton prints and generally made a sensual virtue of postwar economic necessity.

Magnani, however, was much more than a manner. What she seemed she was: an earthy, emotional Eve with lusty appetites. Her private life was a steaming contusion. In 1935 she married Goffredo Aiessandnm, a movie director. One day she trailed him to a rendezvous with another woman, hinted her displeasure by ramming her car into his. They were separated. Anna loves her son Luca now 13 and stricken with polio, with a fierce protective passion that motivates much of her acting. She is grimly determined to leave him rich when she dies, and she probably will: under the soft schedule of Italian taxes, her take-home pay over the last ten years has been tremendous For several years in the '40s Anna kept company with Director Roberto Rosselmi, and the incidental breakage was impressive. Crockery flew and so did curses frequently in public. Once, when Roberto displeased her. Anna cleared a restaurant table with one queenly swipe of her forearm. When he left her for Ingrid Bergman, Magnani sulked in her flat. "I am a desperate woman," she announced. "When 1 suffer, I must suffer until my heart breaks." Nevertheless, Anna quickly sublimated sorrow into art. What another actress must grasp with her intelligence Magnani has in her blood. "Myself," she says, "I have so much boiling inside I had to become an actress. If I had not L think I could have become a great criminal."

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