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.
She tries everything: rebelling openly, putting up with her hard lot and, finally, when she becomes pregnant, scheming to escape. In the film's best scene, she even tries to tempt an island priest (Renzo Cesana) into helping her get away. Finally her wiles succeed with a young lighthouse keeper, who gives her the money she needs to go fleeing across the island.
Overcome by black fumes at the rim of the volcano, she spends the night on a lava bed and awakens (without a smudge on her face) to a morning scene of serene grandeur. Then, with no dramatic preparation but her awed look and a line of dialogue ("What mystery! What beauty!"), an offscreen narrator baldly announces that she has found the religious strength to return to her husband.
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 his.
For 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.
Three Came Home (20th Century-Fox). A month after Pearl Harbor, U.S.-born Author Agnes Newton Keith, wife of a British colonial official, became a prisoner of the Japanese in North Borneo. Out of her three-year ordeal, she wrote a bestselling factual account of how she and her two-year-old son fared in tropical prison camps until liberation reunited them with the husband whom the Japanese had imprisoned near by. As a movie, done with reasonable fidelity to the book, it is often as harrowing, moving—and sometimes as monotonous—as what the war did to the Keiths.
The picture thoroughly deglamorizes Claudette Colbert in the leading role, and takes pains to recreate authentic Japanese prison compounds against jungle backgrounds filmed in Borneo. It shows considerable restraint in its treatment of Japanese soldiers; there is even a sympathetic Japanese colonel feelingly played by the silent screen's Sessue Hayakawa.