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3.0 out of 5 stars
Okay, Jul 29 2002
Anna Magnani stars as a grieving and overwrought Italian widow in this movie based on the Tennessee Williams play. Magnani is truly great in the role, and she is only 1 of 4 foreign actresses to have ever won an Academy Award for a performance. I do give her credit there, but still, after an hour of almost nothing but her emoting and carrying on about the loss of her husband, it really gets to be almost too much of a good thing. Finally, when I was about to give up on the film, Burt Lancaster comes into the picture and things do pick up from there.It's entertaining to see Lancaster play a goofy, stumbling, truck driver who's as lonely as Magnani and watch his bumbling attempts to bring her out of her shell. Eventually, he succeeds but not after she loses her Sicilian temper at him a couple of times and smacks him around like a nerfball despite the fact that all he did was stumble half-drunk and half-naked into her teenage daughter's bedroom in the middle of the night looking for Magnani and tries to snuggle up to her daughter by mistake in the dark. Oops. Despite this little misadventure and the beating he receives from Magnani, Lancaster is only briefly deterred by this. By sheer dogged persistance he manages to get back in Magnani's good graces by the end of the movie, and everything ends more or less on a happy note. Well, I guess that's Sicilian courtship for you. The movie does have its moments, and I do give Hal Kantor credit for making a valiant attempt to adapt this Tennessee Williams play to the silver screen. But overall, it just doesn't make for a particularly strong movie, and I'm sure it was probably better as a play. It drags too often in places, and some of the scenes are really a little silly or overly melodramatic. Maybe I'm a cultural barbarian, but I thought it was more interesting watching Burt Lancaster playing a bumbling simpleton (which he does well) than Magnani's award-winning performance, which is just too maudlin. Okay, she's lost her husband, but on that account, she gets abusive or at least hyper-neurotic with her friends, her priest, her daughter, her daughter's boyfriend, and just about everybody else in her life, not to mention Lancaster, who really does seem to care for her, and who comes off as a basically decent, well-meaning, and fun-loving guy even though he is pretty goofy and wacked-out himself. And as I said, it's sort of entertaining watching Lancaster, who usually portrays more studly, leading-man roles, playing an inept, lonely, Sicilian banana-truck driver who spends much of his time stumbling half-drunk through people's backyards and bedrooms and getting their dogs (or Magnani herself) sicced on him. (I guess all those bananas aren't much comfort on those balmy and moonlit Florida nights). But I preferred his character to the high-strung, overwrought Magnani, who's wrapped tighter than a pig in a blanket. The movie was filmed in old Florida Keys, so I give it points for overall ambience, but all in all I can't give it more than 2 or 3 stars--unless the move counts as a primer on Sicilian dating and courtship rituals.
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