Streaming on Kanopy, indefinitely, from the Criterion Collection.
Along with Vittorio de Sica’s The Bicycle Thieves, Journey to Italy is considered one of the seminal films of postwar Italian Neorealism.
So imagine my surprise at finding that 90% of the dialogue is not in Italian at all, but in crisp British-inflected English.
Also that the warring husband and wife protagonists (George Sanders and Rossellini’s real-life lover, Ingrid Bergman) are not working-class Italians but haute bourgeois Brits, the owners of a showy limousine and of a lavish villa outside of Naples they have journeyed to Italy to sell.
Not that Italy is given short shrift by this fascinating film—both its Vesuvian and Virgilian ancient past and its postwar present work as a foil to set off this rich couple’s disintegrating marriage. Bergman’s character, for instance, is left to play solitaire while her spouse cavorts, to relieve his angst, in Capri.
Nevertheless, I admired Bergman’s performance here as the alienated wife that has assisted her husband’s rise to a position of importance and affluence only to find herself sidelined in the subsequent years. The ending, I thought, was a bit contrived, but in the final analysis I concluded that the couple was nuts about each other all along.