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.

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.

An enormous step forward from his three neorealist classics listed above. Unfortunately, I think it might still be suffering from its original backlash. It was pounded by the critics at the time, but that was all for reasons outside the film itself (well, not exactly; the film seems to mimic real life at the time, even if it wasn't meant to). Of course, I'm referring to the affair that Ingrid Bergman, the film's star, and Roberto Rossellini, its director, had during the shooting, which resulted in the birth of an illegitimate child. Not only were they not married to each other, but they were both married to others at the time. That wouldn't, of course, cause most people living in the United States to even blink today, but it was a huge scandal at the time, resulting in a box office dud for RKO Pictures, who had produced it. Fortunately, we can look at Stromboli objectively today and recognize it for the great masterpiece that it happens to be.

Bergman, in possibly her best role, plays a young Lithuanian woman who has lived a sort of decadent life. She is now in an internment camp in Italy, praying to flee to Argentina. Her only other option is to marry the Italian soldier, several years younger than herself, who is flirting with her all the time. The first option falls through, so she is forced to go with her backup plan. All's well, until she finds out where the guy lives and has every intention of going back to: Stromboli, a volcanic island where only the toughest farmers and fishermen live. Bergman is immediately distraught. She has grown up wealthy, had a lot of luxuries. Now she is living in a hut on a dusty, barren rock with a husband who can only barely understand English, which is, incidentally, only a second language for Bergman, as well. There is little communication between them, and, indeed, in this land, that is not exactly important. Still, the husband really cares for her. In all actuality, although we can jerk our knees at his conservative ways, Bergman is the one who refuses to compromise. From the first day, she demands to be taken away from Stromboli, to America or Australia, maybe. But there is no money to do so. There are a lot of customs on the island which she doesn't understand. She doesn't even attempt to understand them. Even when a friend tells her she shouldn't enter a certain person's home, she goes in anyway, completely embarrassing her husband. When she complains to the priest that she is utterly unhappy, he replies that he understands, but her husband is just as unhappy, maybe moreso. After all, the first thing she did when he went fishing was store away all the pictures of his deceased family and a statue of the Virgin Mary. Stromboli is an amazingly fair film in this way. In fact, my only complaint would center on the print I saw (on TCM, of course) rather than the actual film: it is unsubtitled, which means that we are meant to see everything from Bergman's point of view, at least in this version. I think that the Italian should be translated in subtitles, because there are a lot of long segments where the Italians are talking to each other that go untranslated. Rossellini wouldn't have had this dialogue if he didn't want us to know what they were saying. Of course, it's not usually very difficult to figure out what they are talking about.

Among other things, Stromboli contains two of the most amazing set pieces in the history of film. First, Bergman has someone row her out to see her husband while he and other Strombolians are tuna fishing. In an extremely lengthy sequence, we witness this event. This is far more reality than Visconti ever gave us in La Terra Trema a few years prior. Second, the volcano at the peak of the island erupts and the residents have to sail out to sea in their boats for a very long time. The film also has a masterful finale, although I think I personally would have directed Ingrid differently in the final scene. It still works wonders. 10/10.