Married at the height of both their careers, the union of box office superstar Ingrid Bergman and highly acclaimed Italian director Roberto Rossellini was not a typical Hollywood love story.
When they met to make “Stromboli” (1950), each was married to another person. But soon Bergman became pregnant with Rossellini’s child. After she was denounced on the floor of the U.S. Senate, she left Hollywood and the couple got married, essentially blacklisting themselves from mainstream Hollywood cinema for years.
They had children together, eventually divorced, and the scandal became Hollywood history. But while Bergman will always have “Casablanca,” Roberto Rossellini has somewhat faded from public memory.
“His work remains too little seen in this country,” said David Pendleton, programmer for the UCLA Film and Television Archive.
So in honor of the 100th anniversary of Rossellini’s birth, the archive is presenting a Rossellini retrospective series in which around two dozen of the director’s films will be screened at the Hammer Museum’s Billy Wilder Theater.
This week, as a special part of the series, Isabella Rossellini will be speaking today and Wednesday, each night focusing on one of her famous parents.
Tonight, Isabella Rossellini will discuss the life and career of her mother Ingrid Bergman with Charlotte Chandler, author of “Ingrid Bergman: A Personal Biography.” Wednesday night, Rossellini and Chandler will be back to talk about the work of Isabella’s lesser-known parent, her father.
“One thing Isabella cares about a lot … is preserving the pictures of Roberto Rossellini, her father, because he’s not so well known,” Chandler said. “We all figure “˜Casablanca’ is not going to get lost, but the pictures that her father made with her mother and all of his films could get lost.”
The film that started the scandal, “Stromboli,” will be screened Wednesday night. The films Bergman and Rossellini made together are noteworthy for their departure from both of their signature styles.
“He was considered one of the greatest directors who ever lived at the time he met her, and she was … one of the most famous, beautiful starring actresses of all time,” Chandler said. “But when they got together, it wasn’t like that.”
Though their films together are appreciated more today, at the time, they seemed to be sacrificing their careers for the art.
“They weren’t actually a great filmmaking team as much as they hoped to be because she was a great actress in one kind of picture and he was great director in another kind of picture,” Chandler said. “It was a very difficult problem because everything he did was opposite.”
For example, Bergman was used to a working with a finished script. She had worked several times successfully with Alfred Hitchcock, who Chandler explained was the master of careful planning. Rossellini on the other hand, often worked without a finished script and liked to let actors create some of their roles.
Their styles also differed in a way more apparent on screen: Bergman was famous for commercial studio films, while Rossellini’s name is associated with post-World War II neorealism.
The melding of the two styles seemed to alienate some of their audience. For starters, Rossellini’s films were foreign, often told in several languages, and subtitles were still hard to sell in America.
But there were complications on the other end, too. Things were further compromised because Rossellini’s audience didn’t want to see the melodrama of Hollywood that Bergman was famous for.
“People may have been expecting more films like his late-’40s neorealism films, which were more about war and politics,” film Professor Jonathan Kuntz said. “But the films he created with Bergman are much more focused on individuals, and they don’t really take on the big world-shaking events and political crises like his earlier films.”
Whether the final products were well received or not, however, the independent spirit of Rossellini and Bergman is admired.
“You got to give her credit. She was a woman who was on top of the world in Hollywood and she threw it all over to do something different, to become part of his creative filmmaking team,” Kuntz said.
“That was a pretty bold move to walk away from all that stardom and all that money. You don’t see a lot of people do that then or now.”
Because Rossellini’s work has been relatively absent from the American public sphere, the filmmaker’s influence is unfortunately also missing from modern cinema.
“I don’t think his work has affected Hollywood,” Pendleton said. “I think if it had affected Hollywood, Hollywood filmmaking would probably be better right now.”