STRANGE BEAUTY: Roberto Rosselini's STROMBOLI (dir by Roberto Rossellini, w/ Ingrid Bergman, 107mns, RKO, Italy/USA)

STROMBOLI is a strange film. A strange and beautiful film.

The first collaboration between Italian neorealist master and his new wife, movie star Ingrid Bergman (who scandalized the US by leaving her previous husband at the height of her Hollywood fame for Rossellini), STROMBOLI has many powerful, unexpected rhythms. Like the overwhelming sea that surrounds the island of the movie's name.

The story almost feels like the fourth entry in Rossellini's World War II series (ROME OPEN CITY, PAISAN, GERMANY YEAR ZERO). It starts in a POW camp just after the war. Bergman's Karin, denied a visa to Argentina, agrees to marry Mario Vitale's Antonio, a loving and simple Italian soldier on the other side of the barbed wire, just to get out of the camp.

But when he takes her to his spartan fishing village isolated on the volcanic island of Stromboli, Karin finds it's an arrangement too much for her to honor. The village is a collection of simple buildings clinging to the rocks. A volcano threatens eruption at any moment. And the intense restrictive morality of the townspeople only heightens Karin's feeling of not belonging.

Ingrid Bergman embraces the complexities of her character, Karin. So much so, she feels like an anti-heroic 1970’s lead a la Five Easy Pieces.

The movie is a bit of a shocker for its time. Karin is unlike any role Bergman played in Hollywood. A survivor, Karin uses her allure to try to persuade men on the island to help her when her husband won't. She even goes so far as to come on to the local Catholic priest. She is also unrelenting in her anger towards her husband for bringing her to such an isolated place. And he, in turn, is angry and resentful of her refusal to adopt to his town's manners and customs.

And yet, the wife and husband do have real feeling for each other. As a viewer, you believe this is a real marriage and a real story. You're just shocked to see something so brutal, jagged, asymmetrical, unsentimental that stars Bergman.

The picture is full of stunning sequences, most notably a documentary like fishing sequence where the fisherman pull up, hook, draw in hundreds of huge fish. The climactic sequence of the picture in which Karin scales the volcano is equally powerful.

Though filmmaker Rossellini is pursuing the muse away from the Italian neorealism that characterized his World War II trilogy, Stromboli has one of his most near documentary sequences in an amazing fishing sequence with dozens of extras and hundreds of huge fish.

We don't want to give away or spoil the ending, so we won't. We will say it is almost as shocking in its power as the rest of the picture. How you feel about it may depend on your own philosophical beliefs but there is a visceral BOOK OF JOB like power to it that galvanizes even today.

Stunning imagery like this pervades the entire picture.

STROMBOLI, as with so many of Rossellini's great pictures, is a triumph of messy yet powerful humanism. Nothing comes easy to his characters and they fight hard. Watching a Rossellini movie sometimes feels like plowing a field with your bare hands. They're a bloody mess when you're done.

But you suddenly have a place that will provide sustenance and abundance for years to come.

Craig Hammill is the founder.programmer of Secret Movie Club