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The Worst Film Ever

So much average

An absolute waste of money

There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

Roberto Rossellini's film is very powerful. So, I don't want to review more. His work makes his film great. And he is one of the great filmmaker of the world. I am agreed with that. 'Stromboli' one of his great work. At first I thought it is a fiction film but at the last few scenes make me to change my mind . I knew that it is a non fiction film. Roberto Rossellini captured some scenes of fishing that are non fiction and real. So it is fiction and non-fiction both of them. I like it very much. It is also an example of Italian New realism.

Smoke waves run over the opening credits. Karen, performed by Ingrid Berman is standing alone under war refugees in the barracks for females. She talks to a man through barbwire in bomb-out backyard. The man wants to kiss through the barbwire and gets cut in it. This is how "Strombolli" produced by Roberto Rossellini in 1949, opens its curtain towards a journey of a woman, who does not belong and finds a life, dancing on a volcano with the certainty of eventually eruption.Of course, Karen marries the infantile man Antonio. They set off by boat to the volcano island. When the couple arrives at the Island's shack, Karen realizes how much work needs to be done to create a kind of living. She lets herself be overwhelmed by despair of being imprisoned in a rotten cage. Direcor Roberto Rossellini masterfully build the following scene with his female protagonist encountering a boy playing in urban ruins.Karen's journey in a society microcosm of the isle follows more in encounters with a craftsman, a priest and the native women before her husband, starts working a fisherman to bring some money to the table, which is going to be in Karen's world never enough. She is different and apart, having no humility for herself. Karen seduces the priest eventually to love her. She fails, like a woman in metropolitan city looking for a shake-up as adventure in an isolated world.In a 2017 context, the film feels remarkably like an art-house version of the historical occasion of "Pompeji (79 A.D.)", which wants me to research on the Hollywood version from 2014.Nevertheless Roberto Rossellini keeps its character of Karen focused with witnessing a magnificent scene captured in 35mm live-action format of catching Tuna-Fish in an Italian cove, followed by Karen's pregnancy announcement, the volcano erupts. The evacuation of the Island begins. Karen holds a sleeping girl on her lap in a skiff under tight environmental conditions. She misses her chance to break away from Antonio, getting pulled back onto the island.The screenplay tightens its noose for Karen, who prostitutes herself to earn some money and organize her escape poorly with a route over the volcano. She loses all her luggage before Karen runs for complete exhaustion. With her whole body down in the black rock dust, she turns to prayer."Stromboli" is a picture of great simplicity in every sense. The director organized script-writing session to make it a razor-sharp script. It feels lean as a cheetah patiently crouching for its prey before the chase. The emotional journey for the spectator starts when the film is over. I'm writing this two weeks after my initial viewing. The emotional landscape sticks with the spectator. The majority of nowadays directors lack this kind of vision. Roberto Rossellini had the empathy and understanding of a universal human need and took to transcend over the medium film.© 2017 Felix Alexander Dausend

After watching "Rome, Open City" I was really looking forward to "Stromboli". But wow...what a whiff!Awwww, "poor" Karen!! A miserable woman complains about her miserable fortune for a miserable 107 minutes. Ingrid Bergman plays a very convincing American brat who consents to marry and live with a simple-minded fisherman. Her character uses the line, "What did I do?!? It's not my fault!" at least three times, and finds a way to whimper and cry in every scene. Because no one likes her, she tries to escape the small fishing town, but gets stuck at the top of an active volcano. Then Karen vomits out the most pitiable prayer to God, more tears, and then––"The End". Didn't get it. And I won't try to get it. Let this film go to sleep and die, as it should have back in 1950. Blah.

While Ingrid Bergman was in Europe shooting Under Capricorn for Alfred Hitchcock, she had a meeting with Italian director Robert Rosellini which would dramatically change her life and lead to one of the major film scandals of the 20th Century. She and Rosellini began an affair which resulted in her pregnancy which stars did not go public with back in those days. Especially if they were already married. It led to her Hollywood exile. But all that came after she agreed to leave Hollywood and star in Rosellini's new film Stromboli.The financing of the film according to the Citadel Film series book the Films of Ingrid Bergman was from Howard Hughes. And RKO Studios released it here in the USA. According to Rosellini American censors butchered the film and he disowned the American product. It got mixed reviews over here, a lot of that due to Ingrid's indiscretions. It is fascinating how stars get bound to an image. No one who played saints and nuns on the screen could be involved in anything as sordid as an illicit affair resulting in a pregnancy. Our puritanical selves exiled here for years, she would not do another American production until her second Oscar film Anastasia.Watching Stromboli today I have to say that the story did not make Ingrid a sympathetic figure in the film. She's a displaced refugee after World War II and marries an Italian soldier discharged who takes her to his home on a Mediterranean volcanic island named Stromboli. The people there make their living as fishermen and Bergman who has some education feels totally out of place. She can't make any friends there save for a lighthouse keeper Mario Sponza. That friend her husband Mario Vitale doesn't like and he beats her when he suspects an affair.Even after Bergman discovers she's pregnant she still wants to leave Stromboli bad. In a scene that I can't believe got by the censors she's even trying to seduce the village priest who offers her pious platitudes and nothing more.Looming over all is the volcano and these people who know any minute that the volcano could destroy them all, just live and accept where they are. Someone who wants to get out as bad as Bergman does, simply doesn't compute in their lives.Best scenes of all with the realism that Rosellini made his stock and trade are the scenes fishing and the volcano activities. Fishing was truly a group activity as you'll see and the volcano is up close and personal.I could never sympathize with Bergman's character so hence I could not really get into the story of Stromboli. Considering the alternatives that Bergman might have had, she was lucky to be there. There were in fact clear holes in the story, a product of bad editing.Still without a strong leading man, Bergman made Stromboli a most personal vehicle for herself. But overall the film was not strong in and of itself.