Perhaps I just don’t understand mid-century Italian cinema, but this is a god-awful movie. After Casablanca, it’s hard to imagine Ingrid Bergman in a movie as bad as this one. She plays a woman in post-WWII Europe who marries a former Italian soldier in order to get out of a displaced persons camp. He takes her to his home on the volcanic island of Stromboli and, literally, the minute she steps off the boat she starts complaining about how someone of her class simply cannot live in a place like Stromboli. And then it goes downhill from there (no pun intended). At one point, the movie felt like a documentary about the Italian fishing industry and at another point, her husband nails a piece of wood across the front door of their house to thwart her stated purpose to leave the island. She escapes, tries to cross the island over the volcano, spends what I assume is supposed to be “a dark night of the soul” on the volcano and wakes up the next morning, looks down at the village and calls out to God - then the movie ends. Unfortunately, calling out to God couldn’t help this movie. The only thing that could have made this movie any worse would have been a mime at the end releasing a balloon into the sky.
Of course, Ingrid Bergman is always nice to look at but this movie is so bad, the only reason to waste your time on it is because of the consequences it ended up having on her personal life and subsequent movie career. Otherwise, on its own merits, this movie is dreck.