Ron Perlman Revisits The Name of the Rose, and the Novel Italy Gave the World

The Guardian published an oral history this week in which Ron Perlman recalls making The Name of the Rose, the 1986 film adapted from Umberto Eco's novel, including the scene in which his character spits in Sean Connery's face. According to Perlman, Connery told him, "if you don't actually spit in my face, we'll be here all day," and the take had to be repeated, by Perlman's count, sixteen times. The same piece describes how the project began: Perlman read an article about a curious book that had drawn strong reviews in Italy, a murder mystery about monks in the Middle Ages.

That detail is the one worth pausing on. Eco's novel, published in 1980, was a commercial and critical success in Italy before it became an international property, and the film that followed was a foreign production working from an Italian source rather than an Italian film working for export. The Guardian's account is a first-person, set-level record of that translation, not an assessment of the novel itself, and it should be read that way.

What the piece documents is the mechanism by which an Italian book becomes a film made elsewhere: a reader in one country encounters the novel, a production assembles around it, and the adaptation carries the title abroad in a new form. It is a familiar pattern in the other direction as well, and the Guardian's framing treats the Italian reception of the book as the starting point of the story rather than the end of it.

The Name of the Rose has a long afterlife in the English-language press, and this week's item is a reminder of how much of that afterlife is anecdotal. The Guardian's piece is built on recollection — Perlman's memory of the spitting scene, of Connery's instruction, of the number of retakes — and on the account of how he came to the material in the first place. It names no Italian production company, no Italian director and no Italian distributor, and it does not describe how the novel was received in Italy beyond noting that it had great reviews there.

For readers who follow Italian writing in translation, the interest lies in the asymmetry the piece quietly records. Eco's book circulated first as Italian fiction; the film that made it a mass-culture reference point was made in English, with an American and a Scottish lead, and it is that version most foreign readers now encounter first. The Guardian does not draw that conclusion, and it should not be attributed to the paper, but the sequence it describes supports the observation.

The wire today offers little else on Italian letters. The Guardian's picture gallery on the femminielli of Naples and the New York Times report on Anne Hathaway's third number-one film of the year concern different subjects entirely, and neither is anchored in Italian publishing or Italian cinema. A dispatch on either would have to be built on material the sources do not contain.

There is no Italian reaction in the wire, no statement from Eco's estate, no festival screening and no re-release attached to the Guardian's piece. It is a single retrospective interview, and it should be reported as one. What it establishes is modest and verifiable: a foreign outlet has revisited a film made from an Italian novel, and the actor at its centre has described how it was made.