Stromboli [Stromboli, Terra di Dio] **** (1949, Ingrid Bergman, Mario Vitale, Renzo Cesana) – Classic Movie Review 6522

Producer-director Roberto Rossellini’s beautiful, brooding and delicately done 1949 Italian neo-realist film tells his story about an attractive Lithuanian refugee called Karen (Ingrid Bergman) who marries a young Italian fisherman named Antonio (Mario Vitale) to escape her internment an Italian refugee camp.

[Spoiler alert] But then she finds herself trapped by the isolation and tedium of her new life in Antonio’s village of Stromboli. So, when Karen becomes pregnant, she flees as the island volcano of the title symbolically erupts.

It was poorly received at the time in RKO Radio Pictures’ international version cut by 25 minutes, with its religious themes removed and a changed ending, replacing the artistic inconclusive one. But its true worth can now be appreciated in the complete restored print of 107 minutes. There is also an Italian release of 100 minutes.

In real life Bergman first met and fell for Rossellini while making this film, and, though unmarried to each other, they had a child, causing a huge scandal in America, leading to Bergman’s denouncement by politicians and religious figures and her effective blacklisting from US films. As a result of RKO’s cynical promotion of the controversy, the movie opened to great business in the US, taking nearly $1 million on its first day.

Also in the cast are Renzo Cesana as The Priest, Mario Sponzo as The Man from the Lighthouse and Gaetano Famularo.

It is written by Roberto Rossellini, Sergio Amidei, Art Cohn, Gian Paolo Callegari and Renzo Cesana (though Rossellini worked with no written screenplay but only some notes), shot in black and white by Otello Martelli, produced by Roberto Rossellini, and scored by Renzo Rossellini and Constantin Bakaleinikoff.

© Derek Winnert 2018 Classic Movie Review 6522

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