Stromboli

Roberto Rossellini's Stromboli opened in 1950 and was the film at the centre of one of the largest international scandals in twentieth-century Hollywood, the affair between Rossellini and Ingrid Bergman, who were both married to other people at the start of the production, and whose relationship and the resulting child were denounced from the floor of the United States Senate by Edwin C. Johnson. Bergman did not return to American film for seven years.

The production was shot on the actual island of Stromboli in the Aeolian archipelago, where Rossellini had constructed a small base, and used the local fishermen (none of whom had acted before) as the supporting cast. The eruption sequence at the centre of the film is a real eruption: Rossellini and his camera operators climbed the volcano during an active phase to capture the footage. Cinematography is by Otello Martelli, the longtime Italian neorealist cameraman who would later shoot Fellini's La Dolce Vita.

Two cuts of the film exist. The original Italian version (107 minutes) was Rossellini's preferred edit; RKO, the American distributor under Howard Hughes, released a substantially shorter and re-cut English-language version (81 minutes) over Rossellini's protest, with a different ending. The Italian cut (restored and reissued by the Cineteca di Bologna in the 2010s) is now treated as one of the foundational films of European art cinema and a turning point in Rossellini's evolution from neorealism toward the metaphysical-religious mode of his later Voyage to Italy.