Word: annas
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
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...
...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...
...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...
...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...