Storm Over Stromboli

"It's a 20-minute travelogue of Stromboli in an 89-minute film. When things get dull, they throw in a little sex."

This thumbnail review by an indiscreet studio executive was about all that the public really had to go on before RKO rushed Producer-Director Rossellini's Stromboli into more than 400 U.S. theaters this week. After loudly ballyhooing the movie for weeks as a kind of lurid peepshow ("Raging Island, Raging Passions"), the studio had suddenly refused all advance screenings for movie critics. The reason, RKO frankly admitted, was fear that unfavorable reviews might cool the fever of public interest in the Stromboli idyll of Director Rossellini and Ingrid Bergman (TIME, Feb. 13).

There seemed little chance of that. Even before Stromboli opened it had stirred up a public turmoil that a whole stable of pressagents could hardly reproduce. Church groups, women's clubs, legislators and local censors in more than a dozen states joined in demands that the picture be banned. At least one movie exhibitors' association urged its members not to book the film. Movie bigwigs ordered a sequence of Actress Bergman in Joan of Arc snipped from a screen anthology of famous historical scenes.

But some took up the cudgels as ardently in Stromboli's behalf, among them the American Civil Liberties Union. The Roman Catholic Legion of Decency found the movie acceptable for adults, explaining: "It is our policy to judge the film itself, not the actors in it."

From Rome, Director Rossellini added one more note to the controversy. RKO's Stromboli, he claimed, "differs substantially" from the film he made. But he was more concerned with his own affairs. Actress Bergman's Mexican divorce from Dr. Peter Lindstrom had come through ahead of schedule; to head off any attempt by Dr. Lindstrom to claim Ingrid's ten-day-old son, he registered the baby as Renato Roberto Giusto Giuseppe Rossellini, "mother ... to be named later." Then he hurried plans to marry the mother.

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