Voyage to Italy

One of the most quietly revolutionary works in the history of cinema, Roberto Rossellini’s third feature starring Ingrid Bergman (his wife at the time), from 1953, turns romantic melodrama into intellectual adventure. An English couple—Alex (George Sanders), a cynical, supercilious businessman, and his sensitive, cultured wife, Katherine (Bergman)—arrive in Naples to deal with an inheritance. As they travel alone together for the first time after eight years of a childless marriage, their repressed estrange­­ment bursts into open conflict. Filming on location, Rossellini devotes as much attention to the Italian settings and their cultural treasures as to the characters wandering among them; at Pompeii, the entwined bodies of lovers blasted by Vesuvius put an existential spin on Katherine’s misery. Rossellini realizes his political agenda—concerning bourgeois sophisticates whose sensibility is stunted by comfort—with a vision of redemption through aesthetic passion and populist experience. Like the characters themselves, the stars get out of the Bentley and into the streets. From Rossellini’s example, the young French New Wave critics learned to fuse studio style with documentary methods, and to make high-relief drama on a low budget.

— Richard Brody The New Yorker