Actress made us love Italy
It wouldn’t be hyperbole to suggest that actress Anna Magnani was a key figure in helping to rehabilitate Italy’s image after World War II.
Playing the wife of a resistance fighter in Roberto Rossellini’s landmark Neorealist classic “Rome Open City,” Magnani sacrifices her life trying to save her husband from Fascist and Nazi authorities in the waning days of World War II.
Shot on a shoestring budget and bombed-out streets soon after Allied forces retook Rome, “Rome Open City” served as a plea to the world to take pity on the Italian people. Time magazine wrote that the film “helped regain the nobility lost under Mussolini.”
Magnani would go on to become the stand-in for tough, working-class women in Italy’s difficult rebuilding years in films by such masters as Rossellini, Luchino Visconti and Pier Paolo Pasolini, and forge a strong presence in Hollywood, where she was nominated twice for best actress Oscars, winning once. And all this success from a career that essentially began when she was nearly 40.
Magnani’s powerful force will again light up Bay Area screens for more than two months beginning Saturday, Sept. 24, with the first of two tributes.
Luce Cinecittà, the Italian Cultural Institute and Cinema Italia San Francisco present a day of screenings and a party at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco, beginning with “Rome Open City” at 1 p.m.
On Sunday, Sept. 25, the Berkeley Art Museum’s Pacific Film Archive begins a 17-film retrospective — aptly called “Anna Magnani, Eternal Soul of Italian Cinema” — that runs through Dec. 4.
In several of these films, it’s apparent that Magnani was as much a genius at comedy as melodrama. So many of these movies are really funny, and that includes her Oscar-winning performance opposite Burt Lancaster in “The Rose Tattoo” (6 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 24, at the Castro; Nov. 20 at BAMPFA). In a film written for her by Tennessee Williams, she stars as a Sicilian widow in a rural Louisiana town who is still mourning her husband — a smuggler with an eye for the ladies — years after his death, and is constantly at odds with her Americanized teenage daughter.
Lancaster — then 42, five years younger than Magnani — doesn’t appear until halfway through the movie and plays a simple-minded suitor who adores this vivacious woman (Magnani worked with Williams again in Sidney Lumet’s “The Fugitive Kind” opposite Marlon Brando, screening Nov. 19 in the BAMPFA series).
Several films offer up a parody of acting and the movie business. In Visconti’s “Bellissima” (1951), she is a former actress trying to stagemanage her 7-year-old to child stardom; in Jean Renoir’s “The Golden Coach,” she’s part of a traveling theatrical troupe in South America; in comic master Mario Monicelli’s “The Passionate Thief,” she teams with comedic star Toto as movie extras and eternal hams who combine partying and larceny (Ben Gazzara plays a pickpocket) during a long New Year’s Eve night.
Perhaps her quintessential performance is as an ex-prostitute in Pasolini’s 1962 masterpiece “Mamma Roma” (Nov. 13, Dec. 3 at BAMPFA). Still able to pull off the object-of-desire role at age 55, she quits the business to raise her teenage son in a “respectable” way. It doesn’t go well. The ending of that film, so powerful, is Magnani at her most magnificent.