Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Gilbert, Tiffany

Titel

Mississippi Magnani: Transatlantic Collaborations and Civil Rights in The Rose Tattoo and The Fugitive Kind

Ist Teil von

• The Tennessee Williams annual review, 2017-01 (16), p.9-36

Ort / Verlag

Murfreesboro: Historic New Orleans Collection

Erscheinungsjahr

2017

Quelle

EZB Electronic Journals Library

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• (63) His treatments of Italian subjects in The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (1948), The Rose Tattoo, and Orpheus Descending, as well as his search for “new forms,” were inspired by the post-World War II flourishing of neorealist cinema, a dynamic visual sensibility and language perfected by directors like Roberto Rossellini, Luchino Visconti, and Vittorio De Sica. Daniel Mann and the cinematographer James Wong Howe, according to R. Barton Palmer and William Robert Bray in Hollywood’s Tennessee: The Williams Films and Postwar America, reproduced the neorealist style for the film version by incorporating its visual hallmarks: [T]he camera sometimes focuses as much on the community—particularly the chorus of village women, who serve mainly as comic relief—as it does on the principals. (113) Williams’s ambitions to master new modes of expression notwithstanding, Giuliana Muscio in “A Transcultural Perspective on the Casting of The Rose Tattoo” credits Magnani with securing Williams’s neorealist bona fides and with keeping The Rose Tattoo’s complex aesthetic project together, through her incredible performance, in which all her abilities are at play: her earlier experiences in vaudeville, encouraging her spontaneity, her work with the neorealist masters, the strong female characters she was called to play in those years, her very womanhood (the special gift to be both a sloppy housewife and a seductive Southern Italian woman), most of all, her intensity. [...]Magnani’s outsider status affords Williams critical and creative “cover” to crack the veneer of a romanticized South alluded to in plays like A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.