Stromboli Island is dominated by its continuously active (though infrequently deadly) volcano. The Tyrhennian island has a desolate look. Its men fish the waters north of Sicily and west of Calabria, its black-kerchiefed women mind their business and watch everyone else's. There is little money, no electicity and no running water. The morality is traditional and narrow. In that world it is a given that the man is the boss. He keeps his own counsel. He chastises a wayward wife as he would an unruly child. His woman's body is a utility for his release. The woman's pleasure is not a proper concern for the man. Or the woman. Like the movie, life in Stromboli is black and white. In the best exposure ever of the fisher's life, we see the boats net a school of desperately thrashing tuna. Somehow Rossellini captures the scene from the fish's point of view. In another take, the hero puts a ferret after a rabbit and enjoyably watches his wife's distress with the killing. He scorns her discomfort with this reality. An elemental man, he accepts that what you is eat is what you kill. Karin (Ingrid Bergman) was a flirtatious Lithuanian refugee with a well-developed sense of the world and herself. She wanted out of her post-WWII internment. Antonio (Mario Vitale) was a simple, horny soldier looking to acquire a wife. Eccola, Karin's ticket! They married and he took her to his island but it was apparent right away that Karin could not fit with the primitives of Stromboli. Antonio, though, expected her to come to terms with her situation, to "come around. At the end a pregnant Karin is shown in an agony of conflict: the necessity to go from Stromboli and the necessity to stay. Unfortunately, we can't care for Karin inspite of her impossible situation: she is stuck on her own predicament to the exclusion of any concern for her husband. Antonio is a nice guy who does feel for his wife's misery. Although Antonio gives Karin a cuffing after one embarassment and tries to imprison her to keep her from leaving, his actions are restrained given his place and the time. And the provocations he's endured because of her eye for other men. She has made a fool of him. She has estranged him from his own people. We could care more for Karin if she cared a little more about the predicament she's caused poor Antonio. Note: Even a great director like Rossellini had to bow to Hollywood standards to get a showing in the U.S.: Antonio and Karin sleep in separate single beds a la Ozzie and Harriet (in Stromboli!) and Karin, toward the end of the movie, rests on the ground after coming through the smoky fulminations of the volcano with not a hair out of place, makeup perfect, dress as clean and neat as if it had just come from the cleaners. What a gal. Jim Smith----------------
