In a recent radio interview about Gena Rowlands, host Jason Di Rosso asked me what other actresses might even enter the foyer of the foyer of what Gena Rowlands does as an actress. I’ve got my Top 4: Gena Rowlands, Isabelle Huppert, Liv Ullmann, and the great Italian actress Anna Magnani. These actresses are different and have a way of making the work of other actors – even highly skilled, even gifted people – look like they’re playing it safe. The concerns of these actresses do not even seem to be “give a good performance.” It’s something else entirely that they are doing. (David Thomson observed about Claude Chabrol’s Violette that while Stéphane Audran gives a very good performance… “Isabelle Huppert is a phenomenon.” Night and day.)
You watch the work of Anna Magnani and you realize you are witnessing a phenomenon.
Anna Magnani won the Best Actress Oscar in 1956 (for The Rose Tattoo), but her real impact came out of the post-war years in Italy and the rise of neo-realism. It was difficult to place Magnani, outside of that brutal religious and war-torn context, but her work in two films written by Tennessee Williams (both The Rose Tattoo and The Fugitive Kind), showed that her dramatic fearlessness was a perfect match for Williams’ extremely challenging psychological material.
A lot of her other films are extremely difficult to see. In 2014, I went to see Magnani in The Passionate Thief at The Film Forum, a film that rarely plays anywhere – on TV, in repertory – and that’s the case with a lot of Magnani’s work (outside of the major films she did with Rossellini, Pasolini, and then the Tennessee Williams American films). It was so hilarious that a guy sitting behind us laughed so hard I thought he would have a heart attack. Not that I wasn’t howling too. She is so funny in it (she was a brilliant dry comedian, who could say more with a weary eye-roll than most actresses could say with a 2-page monologue.)
Anna Magnani was the only actor that Marlon Brando was openly afraid to work with, so afraid he talked about it. He was talking with Truman Capote (in Capote’s infamous New Yorker profile of Brando) about the stage production of Tennessee Williams’ Orpheus Descending, only in its planning stages at that time, and there was the hope that Anna Magnani would play the lead role, opposite Brando. Brando said to Capote:
“I had no intention of walking out on any stage with Magnani. Not in that part. They’d have had to mop me up.”
And he did end up working with her in The Fugitive Kind: his terror of her, of being “shown up” by her, is why the pairing is so electric. She was AS spontaneous as he was.
All of this is to say: Exciting news: The Film Society at Lincoln Center is running an Anna Magnani retrospective, from May 18th to June 1. There are the most famous ones, but, eureka, they’re playing the hard to find ones, too, the lesser-known films.
I’ve made out a list of the things I need to see, either because I’ve never seen them on the big screen, or I’ve never seen them at all.
Even better news: This Retrospective will be traveling: it’s going to San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Chicago, Houston, and Columbus.
My friend Dan Callahan has written a gorgeous tribute to Anna Magnani: “La Lupa”: A Celebration of Anna Magnani, which is a great guide to Magnani’s career. This part is especially important:
And Magnani brought the same conflict and hope to her other Williams movie role, Lady Torrance in “The Fugitive Kind” (1960), in which she acted with Marlon Brando, listening to the far-out frequencies he is accessing and then responding to them in an overwhelming way. Some people might think what Magnani does is too much, too extreme, but maybe that’s because they are afraid they could never endure such extremity in living themselves.
YES. YES.
The essay has Dan’s typical excellence in analyzing performance and articulating WHY Magnani was so great, so unique, so “above and beyond” that she seems, frankly, to be practicing a different profession than other actresses. She’s in her own category.
