--- title: "The Rose Tattoo" year: 1955 kind: "film" canonical: "https://film.one/film/the-rose-tattoo" fi1m_score: 76 critics_reviews: 2 published: "2026-09-20T02:59:09.937607+00:00" updated: "2026-09-20T02:59:54.892753+00:00" region: "US" licence: "© Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL." --- # The Rose Tattoo (1955) Directed by Daniel Mann · 1h 57m · MPA NR · Drama, Romance **Fi1m score: 76** · Critics: 2 of 6 reviews so far *In a sentence:* Three years in the same slip, an urn on the shelf, and Burt Lancaster crying on the doorstep > Anna Magnani’s widow, three years into her grief and still in her slip, is the whole reason to see this. Daniel Mann’s film of the Tennessee Williams play mostly points the camera at her and gets out of the way, which is the right call. ## Synopsis A Sicilian community on the Gulf Coast. Serafina Delle Rose (Anna Magnani), a seamstress, adores her husband Rosario, a truck driver with a rose tattooed on his chest. When he is killed, she keeps his ashes in an urn against the wishes of Father De Leo (Sandro Giglio), stops dressing, and shuts herself and her daughter Rosa (Marisa Pavan) in the house for three years. Now Rosa is finishing high school and has met a sailor, Jack Hunter (Ben Cooper), and Serafina locks up her clothes to keep her in. Two customers, Flora (Florence Sundstrom) and Bessie (Jo Van Fleet), tell her Rosario had a mistress, Estelle Hohengarten (Virginia Grey). Serafina refuses to hear it. Then a truck driver, Alvaro Mangiacavallo (Burt Lancaster), arrives in tears at her door. ## Review Tennessee Williams wrote *The Rose Tattoo* for Anna Magnani, and the film Daniel Mann made from it in 1955 is, before anything else, the record of her playing the part. Magnani is on screen for most of the 117 minutes and there is not a dull one among them. Around her, Mann has staged Williams’s play in a small house with a camera in the corner, and it shows. It is worth your evening if a woman shouting at a priest in her underwear sounds like your kind of evening. It was ours. Serafina Delle Rose is a seamstress in a Sicilian community on the Gulf Coast, and when her husband dies she stops. She keeps his ashes on a shelf against the wishes of Father De Leo (Sandro Giglio), wears the same stained slip for three years, and fights her daughter Rosa (Marisa Pavan) for wanting to leave the house. Magnani plays all of this at full pitch and never seems to be reaching for it. Watch her hear the gossip about her husband from Flora (Florence Sundstrom) and Bessie (Jo Van Fleet), two customers who have come to collect a blouse: she goes still, then throws them out, then goes to the urn and speaks to it. We were braced for a display and were moved instead, because she is not grieving a saint. She is grieving a marriage she will not let anyone else describe. Burt Lancaster arrives about halfway through as Alvaro Mangiacavallo, a truck driver with, as the play has it, the body of her husband and the face of a clown. On paper he is badly miscast, an American athlete doing an Italian accent opposite the real thing. In practice he knows it, and plays Alvaro as a large, hopeless child, weeping on her doorstep after a row with a salesman, breaking things, showing off his arms. Their first long scene together, the two of them crying in her front room among the dressmaker’s dummies, made us laugh out loud, and then, somewhere in the middle of it, stop laughing. Lancaster gives her something to push against and does not try to win the scene. That is all the part needs. James Wong Howe shoots it in black and white and mostly indoors, in the low, cluttered front room where Serafina works, dummies in half-finished dresses standing about like guests. He lights Magnani’s face hard from one side so that every change registers, and lets the outside, the road and the neighbours’ yards, look flat and hot. Edith Head does her best work here by keeping it plain: Serafina’s slip, Rosa’s white graduation dress, Alvaro’s sweated-through work shirt. Alex North’s score leans on the mandolin and on the big moments, and there are stretches where the music is telling us what Magnani has already told us. Warren Low cuts fast for a film that is mostly two people in a room, and it does move. The trouble is the direction. Mann treats the play as a text to be delivered rather than a film to be found; scenes start when someone comes in the door and end when someone goes out of it, and the house never stops feeling like a set. The strand with Rosa and her sailor, Jack Hunter (Ben Cooper), is meant to set young love against Serafina’s, and Pavan is sharp and quick, but Cooper is stiff and the writing gives him little beyond good manners. The gossips are drawn as caricature. And the frankness the publicity promised, a widow with appetites and a husband who was no better than he should be, was strong stuff in 1955 and is mild now. What has lasted is the acting. Among the Williams films of the decade this is the comedy, and Williams meant it as one. [*A Streetcar Named Desire*](https://film.one/film/a-streetcar-named-desire), four years earlier, had Marlon Brando and a director in Elia Kazan who could make a room feel dangerous. This has Magnani and a director who knows to keep out of her way. It is the less complete film and the one we would more happily sit through again, because it is not asking us to suffer with anyone. It is asking us to watch a woman come back to life. Hal B. Wallis produced it, and you can feel a producer’s hand in the brisk running time. Watch it in one sitting and do not worry about the plot, which Williams did not worry about much either. Every scene is the same scene: Serafina deciding whether to open the door. *Fi1m score 76, published 20 September 2026.* ### Reviews we read (2) - **The New Yorker**, John McCarten (90/100, inferred): Anna Magnani proves she is the greatest actress in the world, weight for age, with a virtuoso performance that moves viewers to tears one minute and helpless laughter the next. She dominates the film completely while Burt Lancaster is adequate as the dim-witted suitor and the supporting young actors are attractive. [Read](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1955/12/24/adeste-fideles) - **Variety**, Variety Staff (**): The film establishes a realistic Italian atmosphere in the southern bayou but the story mainly serves as a showcase for its lead's histrionics. Anna Magnani delivers a spellbinding central performance full of animalistic drive, while Daniel Mann's direction keeps the pace moving despite some static situations. [Read](https://variety.com/1954/film/reviews/the-rose-tattoo-1200417774/) ## Details - **Director:** Daniel Mann - **Director:** Daniel Mann - **Screenplay:** Tennessee Williams - **Cinematography:** James Wong Howe - **Editor:** Warren Low - **Music:** Alex North - **Costume design:** Edith Head - **Producer:** Hal B. Wallis - **Cast:** Anna Magnani as Serafina Delle Rose; Burt Lancaster as Alvaro Mangiacavallo; Marisa Pavan as Rosa Delle Rose; Ben Cooper as Seaman Jack Hunter; Virginia Grey as Estelle Hohengarten; Jo Van Fleet as Bessie; Sandro Giglio as Father De Leo; Mimi Aguglia as Assunta - **Runtime:** 1h 57m - **Certificate (MPA):** NR - **Release (the US):** 12 December 1955 - **Genres:** Drama, Romance ## Where to watch in the US - Apple TV: rent $3.99, hd - Apple TV: buy $12.99, hd *Checked 2026-09-20.* Also available in: AT, BE, BG, CA, CH, CZ, DE, DK, ES, GB, HR, HU, IE, IN, LT, NO, NZ, RO, RS, US. Add `?region=XX` to this URL for another country. ## Awards - Academy Awards 1956: Best Costume Design, Black-and-White (nominated); Best Film Editing (nominated); Best Original Dramatic or Comedy Score (nominated); Best Picture (nominated); Best Supporting Actress (nominated); Best Actress (won); Best Art Direction, Black and White (won); Best Cinematography, Black-and-White (won) ## If you liked this - *Bellissima* (1951): Magnani as a Roman mother pushing her child at the cinema; Visconti lets her rip - *A Streetcar Named Desire* (1951), Fi1m 88: The other Williams film of the decade, harder, sadder and better directed — [Fi1m page](https://film.one/film/a-streetcar-named-desire.md) - *The Fugitive Kind* (1960): Magnani and Brando in Williams country, a mismatch that is fascinating to watch - *Mamma Roma* (1962): Pasolini gives Magnani a son, a flat and a past she cannot outrun - *Moonstruck* (1987), Fi1m 84: Italian-American widow, a suitor with too much feeling, and much better jokes — [Fi1m page](https://film.one/film/moonstruck.md) --- © Fi1m Ltd. 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