STROMBOLI (1950)

After the war, displaced persons camps were set up all over Europe for some of the millions who were refugees from the Nazis or otherwise forced from their homes. Karin (Ingrid Bergman), a young Lithuanian woman, is at one of the camps in Italy. At night, local men congregate at the camp fence to flirt with the women, but one young man, a fisherman named Antonio (Mario Vitale), hangs back a bit and serenades Karin specifically. Though they barely know each other, he wants to marry her. When her request for a visa to Argentina is turned down, she somewhat reluctantly agrees to marriage to get out of the camp. He takes her to his home on the island of Stromboli. Any romantic images of a bucolic island life are shattered when she arrives and finds the island is bleak and rocky and has an active volcano at its center. Karin tries to spruce up their dilapidated stone home but can only do so much, as Antonio has no money and fishes in a communal group. She goes to a local woman to have a new dress made, but discovers that the woman is the local prostitute and soon she is seen as a bit suspect herself. She goes to the village priest for guidance but he has little to offer. The lighthouse keeper is sympathetic but also helpless. When she discovers she is pregnant, she is determined to leave the island, but Antonio is just as determined that she stay. One night, when Antonio has locked her into her room, the volcano begins to erupt. The lighthouse keeper helps her escape but as she struggles up the mountain, she seems to realize that she really has no option but to face life as it is, and in the morning, she heads back to the village.

This movie caused a bit of a sensation on its initial release because Ingrid Bergman had left her husband to live with, and make movies with, Italian director Roberto Rossellini, and her 'immoral' behavior caused her to be condemned in Congress. But viewers hoping for a scandalous movie out of this, their first collaboration, would have been disappointed. Despite the aura of immorality around the narrative and its production, any salaciousness would have to come from the viewer's imagination. This is a fairly drab looking film (despite the occasional nicely framed view of the island setting) with a dull, plodding narrative. We get some hints about Karin's background that she's no pure innocent, but she is otherwise just a humbled person looking to live a better (and certainly, a livelier) life. Similarly Antonio seems like a good and simple sort who gets into his marriage over his head, and his response is to behave rather brutally. The ending on the volcano is often assumed to be about a spiritual epiphany that allows Karin to return to the village a happier person, but that conclusion comes off as murky and unearned. Mario Vitale was a fisherman who was discovered by Rossellini; he's fine here, holding his own with Bergman (who herself seems a little tamped down), and went on to a short acting career. The opening was filmed at a real displaced persons camp, and the rest was shot on Stromboli with mostly locals in other speaking roles. Overall, a bland melodrama that feels beneath the talents of Bergman, though she tires hard. [Criterion Channel]