Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Actress 1955

The Contenders:

Susan Hayward: I’ll Cry Tomorrow
Eleanor Parker: Interrupted Melody
Jennifer Jones: Love is a Many-Splendored Thing
Anna Magnani: The Rose Tattoo (winner)
Katharine Hepburn: Summertime

Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Picture 1955

The Contenders:

Love is a Many-Splendored Thing
Marty (winner)
Mister Roberts
Picnic
The Rose Tattoo

Skin Deep

Films: The Rose Tattoo
Format: Movies! Channel on rockin’ flatscreen.

Most of The Rose Tattoo takes place inside the house of the main character, a good indication that this was based on a stage production, which it was. Tennessee Williams apparently wrote this with his friend Anna Magnani in mind, but she didn’t feel she had a good enough command of English to play the role on stage. Four years after the show debuted, Magnani did take the role in the Hollywood adaptation, one for which she won an Oscar. It’s a pretty straightforward play, based almost entirely around a single character.

I’ve seen plenty of Tennessee Williams adaptations--A Streetcar Named Desire, Summer and Smoke, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof--but this one was new to me. It’s also substantially different from some of Williams’s other plays, particularly when it comes to the ending. That’s not a good thing or a bad thing; it’s just a thing worth mentioning. Like many of his plays, though, The Rose Tattoo focuses on a woman in the south who is repressed in some significant way and damaged by the events of her past.