This is a quite pretty movie. I’ve been a bit disappointed with previous Rossellini movies I’ve watched, but this starts off very nicely indeed.

I’ve never quite understood where Rossellini fit in… he doesn’t seem like a neo-realist, and he’s certainly no Nouvelle Vague director… he seems to exist in a grey area between art movies and commercial movies? But I’m totally uninformed; I know nothing.

If you read film interviews and articles from the 50s, Rossellini is always mentioned… but he seems like he’s largely forgotten these days, except as the father of a different Rossellini.

Ingrid Bergman is wonderful here, though.

I’m watching a 2K restoration by the BFI, but… it could have been restored some more? There’s all irregularities on the brightness that could have been fixed, and the audio is quite hissy. But it’s typical that the BFI would do this box set: They’re the champions of movies that fall between the cracks.

It’s a bit hard to get into the Bergman character’s head space… OK, here’s a plot recap: She (for some reason) was in an Italian post-war camp (she’s from the Baltics), and wanted to ship out to Argentine, but they didn’t take her. So instead she marries this Italian guy and goes off to this island. And is super. Depressed. About. It. All.

Which makes no sense! She was going off to an uncertain future in South America, but instead she marries this hunk, and goes to a gorgeous island in Italy! With a huge house!

Sure, it’s dilapidated, and there’s no jazz clubs on the island, and everybody would balk at that, but… She hunk is super nice! The neighbours are great! The views are incredible!

So Rossellini has really stacked all the cards for Bergman’s character, but we’re still asked to see her as a tragic character, and… that’s just odd?

Perhaps it’ll resolve itself.

OK, now the husband is an asshole.

The casting here is really odd. That is, there’s two hunky guys… and I can’t tell them apart. Which makes a lot of the scenes confusing: Is that her husband or the guy her husband thinks she’s having it off with?!?

This little island seems more populated by the minute.

Oh wow. The tuna scene is amazing.

OK, I was totally into this until the last… fifteen minutes? And then it kinda faded.

But speaking of the BFI — the extras on this bluray are fantastic. First we get a 40 minute interview with Ingrid Bergman from like 1981, and it’s incisive and interesting. Then we get a (quite recent?) fifty minute Italian documentary about Stromboli… and the movie that Rossellini’s er wife? was doing concurrently with Stromboli. It’s really good! Nine thumbs up for the BFI selections.

It looks like this:

Stromboli, Land of God. Roberto Rossellini. 1950. ⚄

I’m mopping up the Clive Barker: Last year, I read a bunch of Barker-based comics, and the year before that, I watched all of the Hellraiser movies. So now I’m watching the other movies he directed… and this is the final one anybody allowed him to make?

Nightbreed wasn’t very good, so my expectations here are very low indeed…

And it totally bombed at the box office, which explains why nobody wanted him to make any further movies, I guess.

Well, that’s not a pose you see very often in movies.

This is kinda hokey… but it’s really really weird, and I like that. It’s got the marks of a filmmaker who doesn’t give a fuck any more, but just wants to do what he wants to do, while Nightbreed was like a committee had been fucking with it.

And suddenly! It’s that guy who isn’t Captain Kirk!

Yeah… dialogue scenes…:

On seeing Barker’s cut of the film, MGM decided that it was too long and there was too much time spent on dialogue scenes that occur in-between scenes involving death or horror elements.

I assume that this is euphemism for “MGM saw all the gay stuff and freaked out”.

Dance!

This is a quite bad movie — the pacing is so wonky that it destroys most of the tension — but it’s quite original, so you have to give it kudos for that.

Lords of Illusions. Clive Barker. 1995. ⚂

Hey! It’s Cary Grant! Steering a car with his feet!

I think this is the best start to a movie ever.

This is so much fun… but these two screwballs aren’t Topper — it’s the staid bank guy. Grant and Constance Bennett play the perfect dream team: They’re rich, they’re funny, they’re drunk. They’re perfect!

And then they’re dead! DEAD! Half an hour into the movie! WHAT IS THIS!

Ghosts, that is.

OOPS SPOILERS

I like the little touches like bringing back the bell hop Topper had gotten fired (inadvertently) from his previous job. But these are the 30s…

So the main gag here is that the ghosts are invisible much of the time, so you have scenes like this, where there’s an invisible Bennett in the shower. These gags are well made! So I totally understand that the audiences at the time were amused… as I am now.

The plot, though. Oy vey. It’s basically Topper getting un-emasculated… Masculated? Hm. Because his wife is a bitch, but then she learns to be less bitchy over the movie, and it’s just a bit … eww?

But it’s funny.

Topper. Norman Z. McLeod. 1937. ⚄