Stromboli (also known as: Stromboli, terra di dio) is a 1950 Italian-American film directed by Roberto Rossellini and featuring Ingrid Bergman.^[1] The drama is considered a classic example of Italian neorealism.^[2]

Plot[link]

Bergman plays Karin, a displaced Lithuanian in Italy, who escapes the internment camp by marrying an Italian POW fisherman (Mario Vitale), whom she met in the camp on the other side of the barbed wire. She soon discovers that his home island of Stromboli is very harsh and barren, and the people traditional and conservative. They act with hostility towards this strange, foreign woman.

Karin speaks little Italian adding to her difficulties. Karin becomes increasingly despondent and eventually she wants to escape the volcano island. The film also features documentary-like segments about fishing and an actual evacuation of the town after an eruption of the volcano. Most villagers are played by actual people from the island, as is typical of neo-realism.

Cast[link]

• Ingrid Bergman as Karin
• Mario Vitale as Antonio
• Renzo Cesana as The Priest
• Mario Sponzo as The man from the lighthouse
• Gaetano Famularo as Man with guitar
• Angelo Molino as Baby, uncredited

Background[link]

The film is the result of a famous letter from Ingrid Bergman to Roberto Rossellini, in which she wrote she admired his work, and she wanted to make a movie with him. However, the film is best remembered for the affair between Rossellini and Bergman that occurred during this time, as well as the resultant child out of wedlock. In fact, the affair caused such a scandal in the United States that Bergman was denounced on the floor of the US Senate by Colorado Senator Edwin C. Johnson. Furthermore, her Hollywood career was halted for a number of years, until her Oscar-winning performance in Anastasia.

Critical reception[link]

At the simplest level, the film may be viewed as a remarkable historical snapshot of the way that the Island's residents lived less than seventy years ago. The staff at Variety magazine gave the film a mixed review. They wrote, "Director Roberto Rossellini purportedly denied responsibility for the film, claiming the American version was cut by RKO beyond recognition. Cut or not cut, the film reflects no credit on him. Given elementary-school dialog to recite and impossible scenes to act, Ingrid Bergman's never able to make the lines real nor the emotion sufficiently motivated to seem more than an exercise...The only visible touch of the famed Italian director is in the hard photography, which adds to the realistic, documentary effect of life on the rocky, lava-blanketed island. Rossellini's penchant for realism, however, does not extend to Bergman. She's always fresh, clean and well-groomed."^[3]

In an expansive analysis of the film, critic Fred Camper wrote of the drama, "Like many of cinema's masterpieces, Stromboli is fully explained only in a final scene that brings into harmony the protagonist's state of mind and the imagery. This structure...suggests a belief in the transformative power of revelation. Forced to drop her suitcase (itself far more modest than the trunks she arrived with) as she ascends the volcano, Karin is stripped of her pride and reduced — or elevated — to the condition of a crying child, a kind of first human being who, divested of the trappings of self, must learn to see and speak again from a personal "year zero" (to borrow from another Rossellini film title)."^[4]

See also[link]

• Tonnara, the tuna fishing technique documented in the film.

References[link]

External links[link]

• Stromboli at the Internet Movie Database
• Stromboli at the TCM Movie Database
• Stromboli titles and selected scenes at YouTube

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