Stromboli · reception & legacy

How Stromboli has been received, argued over, and remembered.

The arc

Buried on release — RKO recut it, American critics panned it, and the Bergman-Rossellini scandal drowned out the film itself — Stromboli was later champed by the Cahiers du cinéma crowd as the start of one of cinema's great director-star collaborations, and now sits comfortably in the canon via Criterion's Bergman-Rossellini box set.

What's debated

Fans still argue over whether the collision of a Hollywood star with Rossellini's neorealism is the whole point or the film's central flaw — and over that famously ambiguous ending.

Its footprint

The film is inseparable from the scandal around it: Ingrid Bergman's affair with Rossellini during production got her denounced on the floor of the U.S. Senate as an 'instrument of evil' and effectively exiled from Hollywood for years — one of the most notorious star scandals of the century.

Where it stands

A 'you must have seen this' for anyone working through Rossellini or Bergman — the gateway film to the trilogy that Cahiers critics treated as the birth of modern cinema.