Stromboli (1950)

Truly Dreadful Film

the audience applauded

As Good As It Gets

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

I enjoyed reading "erupting beauty" (The Big Combo, 2 February 2004) for a good summary of Stromboli. Zetes ("A vastly underrated masterpiece", zetes from Saint Paul, MN, 15 June 2002) and bkoganbing ("Ingrid and the volcano", bkoganbing from Buffalo, New York, 29 August 2012) both include good background about the controversies surrounding it. Cogs ("Poor old Ingrid!!", cogs from London, England, 2 February 2005) sees similarities between Rossellini and Bresson that I share. I agree with Cogs that Bresson is more interesting.Stromboli is a showcase for Ingrid Bergman, who to my mind is easily the greatest actress in cinema. Karen's situation is Hellish. She marries to escape an Italian interment camp. She subsequently finds only misery with the desolate volcano-island that her fisherman-husband takes her to. The terrain is harsh and the locals are even worse. She discovers him to be overly simple and occasionally too beastly to bear. The finale reflects her desire for just a meager amount of happiness in such a world as this.Visually Roberto Rossellini is superb. His visual aesthetics are unsentimental but never boring. His camera work is unobtrusive.Two of the most memorable scenes feature a disturbing quotient of animal cruelty. In the first scene, a live rabbit is needlessly sacrificed by being placed near a ferret. Rossellini couldn't use stuffed animals. He has the audience, some of whom are animal lovers, suffer by showing the kill in detail. Of course, Rossellini is strengthening the distance between Ingrid and her fisherman husband, and identifying her with the suffering rabbit. However, I won't give Rossellini any credit for moving the story along with this thoughtless tactic.The second scene is the justifiably famous tuna slaughter with real fisherman, nets and spears. I have eaten tuna all my life and haven't thought much where it comes from. Also, I have no doubt that all of the tuna that we see being harvested was ultimately eaten. To give Rossellini credit, he filmed it well--with Ingrid nearby witnessing it as if she was one of the unfortunate fish. I just don't think that it takes great storytelling skill to rely on animal slaughter to move an audience.Two other scenes that are noteworthy is when Karen attempts to seduce a priest, and when she (apparently) seduces a lighthouse keeper. The character that Rosselini and Bergman are portraying is flawed, and very human. She's no saint, she's a woman with unfulfilled needs.Overall, Stromboli is a must-see member of the Italian neo-realism canon. Very few films venture to depict life without false pretenses. Ingrid's Karen really suffers; and her actions make her a polarizing figure to viewers, isolating her further. Rossellini and Bergman are showing what life is really like as every member of the audience understands it.

When this first came to the USA, it had already garnered quite a bit of publicity because of Bergman's liaison with Rosellini. But the initial reviews were very bad. Those reviews were correct.Seen today, the movie is a mush-mash. The voice of performers change in mid sentence. Continuity is amateurish. Bergman, the lead character seems to change her personality from scene to scene. Using real people as secondary characters may have seemed like a good gimmick when they were speaking a language not understandable to the audience, but when you hear them fumble with English and hear the risible dubbing, it is a major distraction,.

I have a special interest in films where the filmmaker is directing a woman he is in love with, often freshly in love. This is a rather iconic example because of the publicity surrounding its release, together withe critical rejection. Usually you can see the way the film is bent because of the love. This case is different. Its the actress that bends to the filmmaker, who has some very bad artistic intuitions. Oh, the philosophy of real narrative in a close-to-real container is well enough. Its a clean ideal, simple to describe. When it works you get the effect and you understand its effectiveness at the same time. Unfortunately, that effectiveness is rather blunt, of the kind a fishmonger would form. Since the method and the conveyed effect are linked you get films that when they work, are effective and comprehendable, but don't matter.This one doesn't even work. Sure it has a real village and villagers, real volcano and real fishing activity. I suppose it also is genuine in its depiction of lives and the church. But it seems random. Like a dogma picture — a similar manifesto — the real to purity compromises what matters. There's only one false episode in this, meaning one episode where it deviates from the realist ideal. It happens to be for me the only part that touched me.Its when the wife has decided to leave at any cost, that moment when she sits down in front of what would have been a dressing table in a better world. She is flustered and unsure, but determined. She — Ingrid — demonstrates this. Its acting of the highest order. It fits nothing before or after in tone because for that brief moment she escapes reality to show us what is going on inside her. This would not be how it would appear in reality, but in that case we wouldn't see or know anything. Here she acts and we see truth. Its the only place where we do.There are two other noteworthy things here that I caught.The first is that the story has some tentative shape that wants to emerge. Something not followed but indicated: a lover who isn't there for anything but escape. We learn at the end, after we know that she is seriously beset, that she is pregnant. The revelation may have been simply that the actress really did become pregnant and in the service of realism it was inserted. But there's a tantalizing reverse invented narrative that we can glimpse about the handsome fisherman who she secretly meets. Is he the father? Its counter to the world of the story, which simply grinds along. But its an attractive feature. The other interesting thing is how Rossellini has decided the world works. Its against us. Society is, the church is, nature is, individuals all are. We are trapped in a pinball machine of forces that simply don't care and its random what punishment you get for being alive. Its hard to see how Ingrid could have been attracted to such a man, and enlist to help him draw this for others. She does so not just in this film, but in a personal life she built with this man, stirring up unnecessarily hostile reporting on what otherwise would have been a simple romance. She becomes pregnant in two worlds.Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.

I must confess that I don't belong to those who consider this movie a big masterpiece. The main problem is Ingrid Bergman and her role. Somehow I found it hard to believe that a woman who seems to be reasonably urbane and worldly-wise, or at least streetwise, and who seems to have weathered difficult situations during a World War in comparative comfort would follow an illiterate peasant to a dead end island. She has many scenes on her own in which she – I can't describe it differently – throws tantrums and feels sorry for herself. It just becomes a boring routine after a while and a little ridiculous as well. There is no character development whatsoever. I liked Bergman much more in movies like Notorious or Gaslight were she probably received better direction.However, the fantastic locations more than compensate for those flaws. The island of Stromboli is nothing more than an active volcano. The main characters live on the edge between the sea and the towering crater. All important movements in this movie are vertical. The messages from hell fall out of the sky in the form of burning rocks or lower themselves over the heads of people as poisonous gases. A contrary movement – up from the bottom - is the awesome fishing expedition – for me the most unforgettable event of the movie. Large teams of fishermen haul in a huge net, singing. Gradually the surface of the water over the net starts getting agitated until at last huge fish (tuna, I guess) start emerging in a wild frenzy and are hauled aboard. This is perfectly filmed an edited – and simply horrific.All the elements come together and leave little action space for the cornered humans. The movie proposes two solutions: emigration or religion. The priest of the island plays a pivotal role in the story as he represents the link between the two options. However his actions seemed to me pretty inconclusive, at first he expresses himself overly optimistic, in an almost derisory way, as to the functionality of the ill fitted marriage of the heroine, then he declares himself incapable of helping the heroine, throwing her back onto herself in matters of religious belief. Eventually he comes through as the chief guardian of the dead buried on the island that is a kind of gateway to the world beyond. This is all interesting stuff, but it is not handled with particular care or discipline, which is a pity.