Before
Pitt, Jolie, and Aniston dragged their relationships through the tabloids,
Ingrid Bergman, Roberto Rossellini, and Anna Magnani thoroughly outraged the
filmmaking world. However, they did it
with exponentially more talent.
Francesco Patierno documents their headline-making scandal and the
competing film sets on which it played out in The War of the Volcanoes (trailer here), a selection of
the Cinema Reflected sidebar at the
50th New York Film Festival.
Rome, Open City was an
international triumph for both Magnani and her director, Rossellini. They quickly became close collaborators and
lovers, despite their differences in temperament. Magnani was the passionate, ever faithful
diva. Rossellini was the charmed smooth
talker. It probably would not have
lasted, even without Rossellini’s mutual admiration for the unhappily married Ingrid
Bergman.
Looking
for a break from the Hollywood system, Rossellini’s Stromboli appeared to be the perfect project. A morality play set against the exotic
backdrop of the volcanic Aeolian Islands, Stromboli
was largely lifted from a proposal developed by Rossellini’s cousins—or at
least that is how they saw it. Slightly
put out by the appropriation, the budding filmmakers produced their film
anyway, with Hollywood director William Dieterle at the helm and none other
than the spurned Magnani herself as the star.
Guess which director brought their film in on-time and within budget.
As
production began on the isolated Stromboli Island, thanks to Howard Hughes, the
relationship between Rossellini and Bergman intensified. With rumors swirling and pictures of PDA’s
splashed across the newspapers, she became radioactive for her former Hollywood
colleagues, leading to no end of stress for the Swedish movie star. The narrative elements of both competing
films, featuring disgraced women shunned by narrow-minded islanders, did not exactly
help either, but it certainly represents fertile soil for film critics and historians
to analyze.
Most
movie fans will know the broad strokes of this infamous story, but the details
are fascinating. Patierno completely
eschews talking heads, telling the tale through anonymous voiceover narration, archival
publicity footage, and shrewdly selected clips from the principles’ films that
thematically fit the events under discussion (like for instance, Hitchcock’s Notorious). Almost entirely black-and-white as a result, Volcanoes captures a vivid sense of the era’s
sophistication.
