At a local library book sale, I picked up a DVD of The Rose Tattoo, a 1955 film adaptation of the play by Tennessee Williams, one of the foremost American playwrights of the twentieth century. I had seen the film years ago, but my memory of the plot was muddled. I did recall that the film starred Anna Magnani, an Italian actress, and Burt Lancaster, the well-known American film star.
While watching the film at home, I turned to my wife and said that Magnani must have won an Academy Award for her performance, something that a quick online check verified. Magnani played a Sicilian woman who had come to America after her peasant family had arranged a marriage for her with an Italian man working as a truck driver in the American South. Initially fearful of marrying an unknown and unseen man, her fears were overcome on their first meeting. He was a handsome hunk with a beautiful rose tattoo on his formidable chest. He also had a touch of nobility in his blood. She came to adore the man whom she claimed was a baron.
Unfortunately, after fifteen years of marriage the man turns out to be a smuggler who transports more than bananas in his truck. At the beginning of the film, he dies in a truck accident while fleeing the police. She is left alone with a beautiful fifteen-year-old daughter to care for and must eke out a living as a seamstress in her home. Worse gets worse when rumors begin to fly that her beloved husband had been a philanderer.
The rumors foul the memory and reputation of her spouse, and most of the film deals with her efforts to deal with them. Complicating things is the intrusion of another Italian truck driver with a body like her late husband’s but with little else. He is poor and clownish and played well by Burt Lancaster in an unfamiliar role. There is also a subplot involving a budding romance between her daughter and a young sailor.
However, the movie is all Magnani. Tennessee Williams said that he wrote the original stage play with her in mind after seeing her in post-war Italian neo-realist films. He called her “volcanic,” and she certainly is. There had never been anything like her before in American films. In The Rose Tattoo she is earthy, vivacious, and sensual all at the same time. In a word, she is Italian. Subsequently, she would be followed in American by other fiery Italian actresses: Gina Loll0brigida and Sophia Loren come immediately to mind.
Coincidentally, in 1955 the Best Actor award went to Ernest Borgnine, himself an Italian immigrant, who played a second-generation Italian American butcher in Marty which that year won the award for Best Picture. Looking back I can see that the success of these two films was a remarkable achievement that marked the acceptance of Italian immigrants in America. It took three generations but Rome was not built in a day.
Since Edward G. Robinson played an Al Capone like ruthless gang boss in the 1930s, Italians had usually been portrayed as either mobsters or cheap hoodlums. There were some notable exceptions but 1955 marked a real turning point. It’s true that mob films like the Godfather were yet to come, but Marty and The Rose Tattoo portrayed Italian Americans as ordinary people, albeit full of life and emotion.
I often think that most people living through great historical changes do not realize what is going on. During the Italian renaissance, for example, I doubt if most people had even heard of Leonardo, Raphael or Michelangelo. I was a sixteen-year-old third generation Italian American living in New York City in 1955 and I do not recall seeing either of these films at the time. I certainly did not think that films like these had any historical importance.
My paternal grandparents had moved out of their Italian neighborhood in Manhattan years before to Woodside, a section of the borough of Queens that was then, as well as now, a true melting pot. On my block facing busy 69th Street, there was an Italian barbershop on one corner, and an Irish family on the other. In the center of the block my parents lived above a deli next to my grandparents’ home. The deli was run by a German American family as was the neighborhood soda fountain and candy store across the street. My parents could understand Italian but only used it with their parents, not with their children. They wanted their children to be American.
Now that I think of it, perhaps nothing contributed more to the acceptance of Italian Americans than the success of baseball’s New York Yankees. Before his retirement in 1951 the Yankee center fielder Joe DiMaggio had been the best player on the greatest team in baseball. Even after his retirement, the Yankees, led by Yogi Berra and Phil Rizzuto, went on to complete a string of five straight World Series victories. I think it safe to say that the Yankees were beloved in New York’s Italian American community. It is true that 1955 was not a good year for the Yankees. In that year they lost to the hated Brooklyn Dodgers in the World Series, and the great DiMaggio’s marriage with movie idol Marilyn Monroe came to an end.
Nevertheless, 1955 marked the real arrival of Italians in America. The way was open for films like Moonstruck and My Cousin Vinny as well as the Godfather epic with its host of imitators in both the movies and on TV. Of course, it would not be long before pizza would become as American as apple pie.
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