The Rose Tattoo
The Rose Tattooi is an unmitigated piece of shit.
The one thing that works well is Magnani's approximate grasp of the English language, resulting in awkward, simplistic constructions that nevertheless fail to grate -- principally because they're so amusingly reflective of the nonsensical, awkward, oversimplified relations the film's purporting to describe that you suspect deliberate tongue-in-cheek subversion.
To add insult to injury, the truck that burns because it exploded and explodes because it fell over (two whole feet!) and falls over because it was shot at, from a pistol, once, is evidently not being driven, by anyone, throughout. The cab's fucking empty, from the get-go. This is called symbolic in the trade, because it connotes (albeit unintentionally) the general state of things : nobody was involved in driving this project, it simply fell off a cliff, exploded and then burned down spontaneously, through sheer neglect.
You'll miss nothing by skipping it, except perhaps two hours' worth of contemplating just how fucking intolerable the average UStardian is, whether pretending to be a priest, a high-school teacher, a sailor or whatever else. But then again I can't conceive how this'd be a kind of merchandise in short supply for anyone, anywhere.
———- 1955, by Daniel Mann, with Anna Magnani, Burt Lancaster [↩]
