Viaggio in Italia

George Sanders and Ingrid Bergman are Alexander and Katherine Joyce, a well-to-do English couple who have come to southern Italy to sell some property and do a little sightseeing, but something in their enforced leisure, the disturbing beauty of the landscape and vertiginous sense of history accelerates a crisis in their troubled marriage.
VIAGGIO IN ITALIA is often characterized as a study in ennui and curdled dolce far niente, a sunbaked torpor and languor that incubates marital despair. But actually, Alexander’s and Katherine’s senses have been peeled; they are more alive than ever, intensely aware of each other and themselves, and although irritated, they are perversely intrigued by one other. It is a kind of delayed anti-honeymoon of dark revelation, made more poignant by the incessant Neapolitan love songs Rossellini creates in the background. Katherine’s revelation of a previous tendresse for a young poet associated with the locale – together with the couple’s surname – may faintly recall Joyce’s short story “The Dead”. The final sequence in Pompeii, as the stunned couple witness the exhumation of two people at the moment of death, is electrifying and moving. There is real greatness in this movie. (Peter Bradshaw)