Word: stromboli
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...Stromboli (RKO Radio). Any film by Director Roberto Rossellini and Actress Ingrid Bergman would seem anti-climactic after their own stormy, thoroughly publicized private lives. As an anticlimax in moviemaking, this one can stand on its own feet. A bleak, draggy little picture, it fulfills neither RKO's prurient advertising claims, nor Rossellini's obviously artistic intentions...
Actress Bergman plays a piece of postwar European flotsam. As a desperate means of getting out of a D.P. camp, she marries a simple Italian fisherman (Mario Vitale) and follows him to his native Stromboli, a volcanic island where life is primitive and the islanders hostile. She is appalled to find it no less a prison than the camp she has left...
Along the way to this clumsy denouement, Stromboli offers some well-shot scenery, a volcanic eruption and an exciting tuna-fishing sequence. Virtually nothing suggests the Rossellini who directed Open City and Paisan. Though he has disowned the film as RKO's tampered version, much of the blame is clearly...
...Actress Bergman, Stromboli is a triumph of sorts. It gives her the "different" role she had longed for, with a shabby $30 wardrobe and a full range of seamy emotions, and she gives it the full measure of her considerable talent and beauty. But she is surrounded by such mediocrity that her performance seems pathetically wasted. Would-be moralists who are trying to punish her and Director Rossellini for their private transgressions by banning Stromboli might serve their own ends better by having the picture shown as widely as possible...
Vitterie De Siea has grown in distinction as a director of Italian films until he now ranks with pre Stromboli Rossellini. De Siea's "The Bicycle Thief" comes to Boston after being honored as the best foreign film of 1949 by the New York critics, and receiving several other American and European awards. "The Bicycle Thief" is an excellent, occasionally brilliant document of the plight of "the little man." In all the noise about "the world's most acclaimed motion picture," however, one is apt to forget that it has short comings, like most other films...