Rossellini and Bergman’s Break From Tradition. (The New York Times, 9/29/2013)
Excerpt 1: The scandal has long been forgotten, but “Stromboli” — which is being reissued this week in a superb Criterion Collection edition, along with two other Bergman-Rossellini films, “Europe ’51” (1952) and “Journey to Italy” (1954) — now stands as one of the pioneering works of modern European filmmaking. The “strange listlessness and incoherence” that Crowther went on to object to represents a studied reaction to the “well made” movie of the day: the rhythms of “Stromboli” are no longer those of tension and release, of peaks and valleys; its characters no longer the psychologically coherent and clearly motivated figures of popular fiction; its narrative no longer the closed, symmetrical structure of the three-act play.
Excerpt 2: New York exhibitors, though, tried to exploit the film’s notoriety by opening “Stromboli” on 120 screens, plainly hoping to cash in before the word got out that the film was, in fact, a work of great ethical seriousness and profound religious feeling — or, as Bosley Crowther, the Times’s chief film critic described it, “incredibly feeble, inarticulate, uninspiring and painfully banal.”
...in “Europe ’51,” she is the wealthy wife of an American businessman living in Rome;
...in “Voyage to Italy,” she is an Englishwoman visiting Naples with her husband to settle the estate of a relative.
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