by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night I reached through my old recordings from Turner
Classic Movies and dug out the 1950 film Stromboli, one of those legendary movies I’d heard about for
years but had never actually seen. According to Garson Kanin’s memoir Hollywood, it began in the late 1940’s, when Ingrid Bergman
was one of the biggest movie stars in the world but was feeling dissatisfied
with the direction of her career. Kanin suggested to her that she seek out the
director Roberto Rossellini, an Italian filmmaker who had pioneered the
so-called “neo-realist” style in the film Rome, Open City, a 1945 production actually filmed in Rome as the
war was winding down, and featuring a professional actress, Anna Magnani, in
the lead but with most of the other parts played by nonprofessionals acting
roles similar to their real lives. Rome, Open City was a surprise worldwide hit and Rossellini made two
more movies about the aftermath of World War II in a similar style, Paisan (1946) and Germany, Year Zero (1947), becoming a favorite among intellectual
critics who thought most American and European movies entirely too slick,
glossy and unconnected to real life. Bergman had seen Open City and been excited by it, and encouraged by Kanin and
some of his other friends — Kanin recalls telling her that Rossellini was “a
real director, not a Hollywood
hack” (which seems decidedly unfair to the directors of her U.S. hits,
including Alfred Hitchcock, George Cukor, Victor Fleming, Leo McCarey, Sam Wood
and her Casablanca director, the
underrated Michael Curtiz) — she tried to find him. He wasn’t easy to find
because in Europe the studio system, such as it had ever existed, hadn’t
survived the one-two punch of the Depression and World War II, and Rossellini,
like most European filmmakers, worked for catch-as-catch-can producers rather
than established companies. But her letter to Rossellini offering to be in his
next movie did reach him at Lux
Film, an Italian studio where he did post-production on some of his films, and
he eagerly accepted the offer, thinking that working with an established
Hollywood star would bring him prestige and boost the popularity of his next
project.
What he had in mind was doing a film about a woman caught up in what
was then called a “displaced persons’ camp” and which would now be called a
refugee camp — so many modern-day displaced people are in such camps in Turkey
and Jordan fleeing the violence and civil war in Syria this part of Stromboli seems timely today — who, just to get out of the camp, marries a crude
fisherman and leaves with him to live on the island of Stromboli, off the coast
of Sicily. The biggest natural feature on Stromboli, in the film and in real
life, is a volcano that seems always to be emitting smoke and steam when it
isn’t actively erupting (search “Stromboli” on archive.org and the first things
that come up are films taken from space of the volcano Stromboli’s 2002
eruption, released by NASA); aside from that, it’s a primitive environment in
which the people —the ones who haven’t left, which is most of the population —
eke out a living growing barley and fishing. Ingrid Bergman plays Karin
Björnsen — when I first heard her last name on the soundtrack I thought for a
moment she was portraying her real Swedish nationality for once, but we’re told
she’s a Lithuanian who got caught up in World War II; later she explains that
she was living in a Nazi-occupied company and fell in love with one of the
German officers, for which she was shunned (a fascinating inversion of her Casablanca role as the wife of an anti-Nazi freedom fighter) — whose application to
emigrate from the refugee camp to Argentina is denied (there’s a grimly amusing
sequence of the four officials in charge of emigration, each speaking a
different language, debating the fates of the people applying to them for
permission to resettle somewhere).
She’s been cruised by Antonio (Mario Vitale), one of the soldiers guarding the
camp — their attempts to kiss each other through a barbed-wire fence grimly
symbolize the forces not only keeping them apart but blocking her off from any
normal life — and in sheer desperation she agrees to marry him and live with
him on Stromboli, where he was born and grew up.
Once she gets there about 12
minutes into a 106-minute film, Stromboli turns into a stunningly photographed and staged but dramatically
pretty ordinary fish-out-of-water tale, as Karin finds herself shunned by just
about everybody there. Most of the people don’t speak any English (Bergman acts
most of her part with the same Swedish-accented English she used in her
American films) and the ones that do tell her things like, “You’re not modest.”
Even the local priest (Renzo Cesana) who married her and Antonio ultimately
cuts her off — the script, by Rossellini himself with “collaborators” Sergio
Amidei, Gian Paolo Callegari, Renzo Cesana and Art Cohn (the last-named I
presume was there to supply the English dialogue; he would later die in the
same plane crash that claimed the life of Mike Todd, with whom he was working
on a film of Don Quixote that was
to have starred Elizabeth Taylor as Dulcinea), doesn’t explain why but strongly
hints that he has started to
respond to her as a woman and therefore doesn’t want to see her for fear she
would tempt him to break his vows — and when he isn’t going off on fishing
trips with some of the locals (and being cheated out of his fair share of the
proceeds from selling the fish in the market town of Messina — we’re told this
is a comedown for Antonio because before the war and the last eruption of the
volcano he actually owned his own boat), Antonio is getting jealous of Karin
and beating her. Ultimately the volcano erupts — I think it was Anton Chekhov
who once said that one of the basic rules of dramatic construction was that if
you established a pistol in Act I, someone had to use it in Act III; and
Rossellini and his collaborators no doubt were following that rule when they
established the Stromboli volcano in Act I and had it erupt in Act III — and
the eruption leaves Karin running around the island, desperate to escape her
miserable life and her battering husband, though at the end the film leaves us
uncertain as to whether she stays or goes.
Stromboli is an example of what the critic Dwight Macdonald
called “the Bad Good Movie,” the opposite of “the Good Bad Movies” that would
make up most of the fare offered (and mocked) on Mystery Science Theatre
3000. It’s obviously an attempt to make a
film of real dramatic and artistic quality, but it just as obviously goes wrong
even though watching it, it’s not altogether clear what’s wrong with it. One
thing the critics at the time noticed about it was how badly Ingrid Bergman
fits in with the neo-realist style — reviewers who’d liked Rossellini’s
previous films turned against him on this one and said he had no business
working with a Hollywood star — not only does she look too good to be
believable as a piece of human flotsam who’s been dragged through the war and
ended up first in a refugee camp and then on a primitive island, her acting
style, though naturalistic by U.S. movie standards and credible for the
character, clashes badly with the non-professionals with which Rossellini
filled out his cast. Bergman ended up falling in love with Rossellini, starting
an affair with him and ultimately bearing his child (Isabella Rossellini),
which given that she was still married to Dr. Petter Lindstrom, the husband
she’d brought with her from Sweden to the U.S., sparked a nationwide scandal
that resulted in Bergman being blacklisted from the American screen for six
years. It got so ridiculous that she and Rossellini were actually denounced on
the floor of Congress by U.S. Senator Edwin C. Johnson, who said, “The
degenerate Rossellini has deceived the American people with an idiotic story of
a volcano and a pregnant woman. We must protect ourselves against such
scourges.” (In the film Karin gets pregnant with Antonio’s child, but our only
clue that that’s happened is the way she’s rubbing her belly during her final
scenes.)
Though Bergman was falling in love with her director, her attitude
towards her co-star couldn’t have been more different; Mario Vitale had never
acted before in his life — though on-screen he comes off as surprisingly
charismatic, a cross between Mario Lanza and Montgomery Clift — and Bergman
despaired of the whole experience as Rossellini called for take after take
after take of their scenes together
to try to get a semblance of a performance out of him. The most interesting
parts of Stromboli are the
semi-documentary portions — notably the early scenes in the refugee camp
(filmed at the real one in Farfá, Italy that Bergman’s character is supposed to
be interned in), the scenes of the island itself — including the black rocks,
spewed forth by the volcano during its periodic interruptions, that strew its
beaches — and above all the scenes in which Vitale and his fellow fisherman put
out to sea in rowboats and actually catch fish. The fishing scenes are shot in
much the same overdramatic manner as British documentarian John Grierson used
in his first film, Drifters
(1929) — when I saw that movie with Charles we agreed that Grierson must have
had an orgasm watching Battleship Potemkin and decided to shoot his fishing film the same way, and one wanted to
take him aside and tell him, “Look, the sailors in Eisenstein’s film were
making a revolution; your guys are just catching herring!” — complete with relentlessly
overdramatic music by the director’s brother, Renzo Rossellini (one aspect of
Rossellini’s film that was all too much like the Hollywood conventions of the
time was the overwrought, over-loud, over-obvious and overused music) — but the
fishing scenes, particularly the last one in which the fishermen are trying to
keep the large tuna they’ve caught from either escaping back to sea or flopping
around in the ship’s hold and dying before they can get them to market, are far
and away the most exciting and entertaining ones in the movie.
Stromboli was a box-office flop — Bergman’s former producer
David O. Selznick wrote a memo at the time saying he thought her career could
have weathered the scandal if Stromboli had been a better movie, but even without the scandal and the
denunciations from the U.S. Senate Bergman would have been in trouble because
her two immediately previous films, Victor Fleming’s Joan of Arc and Alfred Hitchcock’s Under Capricorn, had also been flops. It didn’t help her career that
with one exception — a 1954 film of Arthur Honegger’s oratorio Joan
of Arc at the Stake, made in France with
Jean Cocteau directing — Rossellini didn’t let Bergman make films for any other
director for the next six years, though at least in their future projects he
compromised enough to give her professional actors like Alexander Knox and
George Sanders as her leading men. Eventually Bergman got tired of making films
in the Rossellini manner (though their marriage lasted until 1962) and accepted
a rather gingerly and tenuously made offer from 20th Century-Fox to
star in Anatole Litvak’s Anastasia
(1956), about the Paris street woman in the 1920’s who was picked up by a
crooked Russian expatriate (Yul Brynner) and passed off as the Grand Duchess
Anastasia, one of the five children of Tsar Nicholas II and his wife Alexandra.
The Tsar’s kids were slaughtered in 1918 by the Communists who had taken over
Russia, but there were rumors for years that Anastasia had somehow escaped —
and this movie was built around that legend, with Helen Hayes cast as Nicholas
II’s mother, the person the schemers have to convince in order to admit the
supposed Anastasia to the Tsar’s family and, more importantly, his fortune.
Helen Hayes was known as such a hard-core Roman Catholic that her willingness
to act in a film with Bergman was considered proof positive that Bergman had
repented and could be readmitted to American movie houses and their audiences,
and Anastasia was a smash hit and
won Bergman her second Academy Award.
