How Ingrid Bergman Became Hollywood's Exile

ingrid bergman we haven't talked about her a lot which is surprising given how much we talk about the 1940s on this channel and how immensely successful she was in that decade there are so many ways to approach her career but today we're going to talk about her second academy award for best actress in anastasia the scandal that at one point made that award seem impossible and a series of collaborations which gave her a new context to demonstrate her skill as an actress but before we get into the video i want to say thank you to skillshare for sponsoring today's video skillshare is an online learning community with thousands of classes that anyone can join and later in this video i'm going to tell you about how i used it to improve my video editing and how skillshare can work for you if you click the link in my description below in 1938 hollywood was at a turning point many of the most famous stars had been labeled box office poison and studios were scrambling for ways to either update their images or replace them altogether it was around this time that david oselznick saw a swedish film called intermezzo and set his sights on signing a young star by the name of ingrid bergman a film actress since age 19 she had recently been voted the most admired movie star of the year by swedish film goers selznick believed she might have the beauty and talent to inherit the title of america's favorite european import from garbo or dietrich and asked her to remake intermezzo in english for american audiences looking to grow her career and seeing no other pathways to do so other than going to germany which increasingly seemed like a bad idea she agreed so in 1939 americans were introduced on mass to ingrid bergman and boy did they love her good initial reviews teed her up for a spectacular streak of absolute bangers throughout the 1940s dr jekyll and mr hyde casa blanco which consistently ranks among one of the greatest films of all time in critic and fan polls for whom the bell tolls the second highest grossing film of 1943 gaslight which popularized one of the internet's favorite terms and won ingrid her first academy award in 1944 spellbound the third highest grossing film of 1945 the bells of st mary's the highest grossing film of 1945 and notorious which has one of the 40s most famous love scenes by 1946 film exhibitors had voted bergman the most popular female star in hollywood and for the next two years various fan polls followed suit in other words she had a lot to lose cattle now to the point in your career where it also crumbled apart which is 1950 wasn't it when you went to uh to make stompoli it crumbled because i left i liked that [Laughter] in 1946 roberto rossolini's film rome open city hit american theaters paison soon after that landmark films of the neorealist movement they exposed ingrid to a style and techniques that sharply contrasted with the work she'd been doing in hollywood work she'd begun to find routine i mean i was so moved and so taken by uh open city there was nothing like it in in hollywood what did you say what quality the realistic quality that it looked real everything was in the street everything was in a real house and the actors that had actors but they didn't look like actors you know they had not comb their hair and they had no makeup and long eyelashes they looked like real people and then of course the story is really so moving about rome and the open city during the war did you feel at that point in your career though that whatever you had done in hollywood although it was wonderful was a little too glossy yes and too i started to feel that i had been 10 years and though i was very lucky i i'm not knocking hollywood because i had a very good time good directors good stories good leading men and it was just that in me is the quality i want to change i wanted to do something different and i thought another movie was similar to this one and then i see this movie and of course immediately i wanted to go to italy and do a movie like that the precise details of their correspondence are difficult to pin down but basically ingrid wrote to roberto told him she admired his films and that she would love to work with him after he learned who she was he apparently didn't watch movies like that's not a joke he actually apparently didn't watch movies they began planning a collaboration which eventually became stromboli the film follows a displaced woman who marries an italian man in order to escape a refugee camp in the aftermath of world war ii she moves with him to his home on the titular volcanic island of stromboli where she clashes with the locals and struggles to craft a life of her own howard hughes agreed to produce the film at rko and shooting began in italy in april of 1949. so far so good the crumbling started when rumors spread that ingrid and roberto were having an affair both were married both had children and actually roberto was already in the middle of another affair with actress anaminyani they denied it but they totally were and the press confirmed it more rumors spread that ingrid was pregnant once again they denied it but she totally was and that december the press once again confirmed it in early february of 1950 their son was born which as the new yorker put it pushed even president truman and his hydrogen bomb onto the second page of hundreds of american newspapers and i initially thought that was a joke but i actually found front pages of newspapers that gave more space to ingrid bergman's baby than to the hydrogen bomb so that's a lot of drama for less than one calendar year and needless to say this was a scandal of unparalleled proportions ingrid was for lack of a better term cancelled women's groups protested the vatican weighed in as did several other religious groups the press published truly invasive articles about how she left her daughter behind in la senator edwin johnson took to the floor of congress to propose a resolution barring her from returning to the united states and called her a horrible example of womanhood and a powerful influence for evil you were described as an apostle of degradation that's right dirty lousy and filthy i'm sure you can imagine the tenor op-ed columnist hook too lots of fun little quips like decent people must challenge the devil's theology that would make ingrid bergman's license a saintly act miss bergman's conduct is a disgrace not only to her profession but to all american women i'm glad she's a foreigner the bergman rossellini affair has done more harm to the family ideal and to the church than any stalin or lenin could ever hope to do so this was the ingrid bergman discourse when rko tried to release stromboli in theaters two weeks after her baby was born given the controversy surrounding the film some theater owners hesitated to book it in their theaters the georgia state senate passed a resolution banning stromboli from public screenings theaters in memphis banned ingrid's entire filmography full stop saying we are banning her pictures because of her conduct not because of the pictures we haven't even seen stromboli and we don't expect to see it but as with anything that feels remotely scandalous this only encouraged people to go see it where it was available but that morbid curiosity only carried so far and attendance sharply dropped after its opening weekend causing variety to call it a one day box office wonder the film had a lackluster reception with critics as well although they claimed their reviews separated the art from the artist so to speak the tone often seemed needlessly aggressive as if they were trying to impose punishment by other means bosley krauther of the new york times for example wrote as to the artistic merit of stromboli that's easy to state in this corners estimation it has absolutely none as a matter of fact it is dumbfounding that two people with such acknowledged gifts as mr rossellini and miss bergman should have spent their talents to such an end it is shockingly and dismally deficient and believe us we've weighed those words so by the end of 1950 the scandal hadn't dissipated ingrid had settled in italy with her new family and her career in america seemed to be over her banishment is often blamed on the antiquated self-righteous culture of 1950s america and certainly that was part of it the strict moral codes of that era did not tolerate adultery divorce quote illegitimate pregnancy or generally any sexual freedom for women on screen or otherwise still the magnitude of the reaction seems kind of intense no after all it's not like ingrid bergman was the first movie star to ever cheat on her spouse affairs were like the sin du jour in hollywood so why such severe consequences 1. publicity versus reality upon her arrival in hollywood the studios attempted to give ingrid bergman the same makeover they gave everybody else a new name new teeth new hair color new eyebrows eyebrows were apparently a big sticking point slather a bunch of makeup on her and call it a day but she refused so they tried a different approach embrace it market her as a counterpoint to the typical glamorized heavily made up star a healthy and uncomplicated nordic natural a simple no-frills girl next door which is of course hilarious because nobody has neighbors who look like this as part of this persona she was portrayed as a happy homebody who bought her own groceries and was satisfied with her roles her salary and her life in general writers assigned to interview her found her notoriously poor copy for what was there to say about a woman whose private life was centered completely on her home husband and child audiences connected that off-screen ingrid with her work in the bells of saint mary's and joan of arc which cast her as literal religious figures devout wholesome infallible women fighting and sacrificing for the greater good to them she was saint ingrid by beginning the rossellini affair ingrid didn't just commit a moral offense she shattered an illusion as one writer succinctly put it in screen land other stars who go through love affairs as easily as they do their most casual and social engagements haven't aroused as bitter comment either from the press or the public instead their escapades only built up their reputations as charming gay personalities they didn't make the mistake of stepping out of character as bergman did unsurprisingly this persona had little to do with the real ingrid the real ingrid was an ambitious sensual woman who never liked doing the same thing for too long and had a troubled marriage but that persona had everything to do with david oselznick he once admitted i'm afraid i'm responsible for the public's image of her as saint ingrid i hired a press agent who was an expert at shielding stars from the press and we released only stories that emphasized her sterling character we deliberately built her up as the normal healthy unneurotic career woman devoid of scandal and with an idyllic home life i guess that backfired later oops ironically as james d'amico notes selznick's version of ingrid was so widely accepted that the general public either didn't notice or rationalized away the specifically sexual character of the largest proportion of her roles it would in fact be most accurate to describe her filmography as an exploration of the relationship between eroticism and suffering she's often portrayed as a sympathetic adulterer as in casablanca and intermezzo struggling with a horrible marriage as in gaslight or rage in heaven or explicitly characterized as promiscuous as in notorious and dr jekyll and mr hyde i mean look at this trailer really had to bury that one deep in the subconscious huh this isn't to say that a screen persona determines a person's fate it's only to say that the broad perception about ingrid bergman was never an accurate or realistic one and that's mostly publicity's fault had audiences not been trained to see ingrid bergman as a literal nun her fall from grace might have been a gentler one an easier more relatable move to grasp people saw me as joan of arc and declared me a saint she said i'm not i'm just a woman another human being i'm a human being two rejection of hollywood filmmaking american moviegoers sat down for an ingrid bergman movie with a certain set of expectations perhaps to be held in hitchcocky in suspense or to vicariously fall into the arms of gary cooper or to laugh at an innocent playground scuffle to in one way or another be entertained imagine their surprise when they showed up to a movie that promised raging passions thanks howard hughes and instead got a film with an extended tuna fishing documentary sequence look i love stromboli just wait i'm about to fangirl but it's not that kind of entertainment even ingrid bergman would admit as much to film comment magazine rossolini has never been a man that can entertain i think that for my audience for my so-called fans it was disappointing because they had seen me in hitchcock movies and all kinds of entertainment now suddenly they saw me as an ordinary woman and the dialogue might not have been so brilliant the tonal and aesthetic differences between rossolini's work and ingrid's typical fair was of course what attracted her to his films in the first place but also completely intentional on his part italian neo-realism was a direct response to the glossy studio-bound hollywood-influenced productions approved by mussolini's regime near realists didn't want to dazzle or enchant or fantasize instead they took to the streets to neglected communities and their surroundings to show the real italy in all its diversity to highlight the hardship and upheaval of the post-war period their films were less straightforward less glamorous and often moved at a slower pace compare for example casablanca and stromboli in hollywood a life upended by war is a gripping and glamorous adventure played out over drinks and impeccably designed suits for rossolini a life abended by war is haunted by compromises you regret is played out through barbed wire rooms without furniture and in languages you barely speak of course this doesn't mean that one is more valid or more meaningful but the differences in tone and intention are clear the problem was hollywood had fallen in love with the version of ingrid bergman we see in casablanca generally speaking stromboli wasn't the kind of film that average american moviegoers were interested in or wanted to take the time to understand for ingrid to abandon this kind of filmmaking was to abandon her fans to prioritize her own interests over their entertainment critics and scholars have since recalibrated the consensus on these films and thank god because they're genuinely very good so i don't think i need to spend a lot of time necessarily convincing you that bosley crowther was wrong i do think it's worth talking about how these films specifically set ingrid bergman apart from her peers of the classic era what beyond the scandal did these films add to her filmography as far as i can tell ingrid bergman is the only major actress from the classic era who left the hollywood bubble while at her peak to continue working in another market her peers who had similar success at the box office with fans and with the academy of which there are few stuck almost exclusively to working within the studio system each approaching that system differently but sticking with it nonetheless by changing a context in which she performed she achieved a different kind of performance and shifted her place in film history to more international and art house audiences rossolini practiced a completely different form of filmmaking than ingrid had been used to in america and even in sweden for example where warner brothers might hire a team of screenwriters to perfect a script rossolini didn't even provide dialogue in advance of shooting describing his process ingrid said he knew what he wanted but he didn't know exactly the words and very often he would say well this is a scene here you walk down the street and you meet so and so so you say to her anything you want so you have this tension between a director who hoped for the best from a freshly improvised scene and a highly trained actress seasoned in one of the most meticulously controlled filmmaking systems ever yet the synergy they found between them was absolutely wonderful stromboli highlights this tension in action most palpably there's a pervasive sense that ingrid bergman is out of place there she's usually the only person even remotely attempting acting technique she's like three inches taller than the next tallest person on that island and let's face it when you put ingrid bergman next to normal people it's just more obvious that she's famous because bone structure i guess but rosalini perfectly translates her foreignness and other worldliness into pain and alienation perfect for the character as she searches for someone anyone to talk to as her neighbors ostracize her as she fails to connect with her husband this performance would not have been possible in hollywood because the details that make it so stark and raw would not have been allowed the final sequence of the film is a great example it depicts ingrid climbing the erupting volcano in a last-ditch effort to escape her life it's an absolutely stunning physical and emotional challenge that lasts nearly 9 minutes it's difficult to imagine such a sequence lasting longer than a minute in america anything longer would threaten the film's pacing but here we see a character slowly ground down defeated by nature and god by her own exhaustion and fear before being saved by her own resilience also can we just talk about her hair in this movie like can we give it the attention that it deserves should i make a fan cam no no italy also opened up different themes to ingrid aura gelly writes the qualities that came to be associated with bergman's hollywood persona her intense sexual energy the combination of suffering and defiance were opened up and in a sense politicized in the films she went on to make with rossolini we might even go so far as to say that these films used bergman to explore precisely what was left out of or what was absent from or repressed in the hollywood films of the 1940s in europe 51 a deeply political film roscellini links her saintly persona with the suffering of the underserved in post-war italy their film journey to italy puts a troubled marriage under a microscope less quote unquote neorealistic than their other collaborations this film was profoundly influential on new wave filmmakers and is now considered essential to the evolution of modernist cinema critic richard brody noted in the new yorker in retrospect the brazen originality of stromboli and rossolini's other three dramatic features with bergman is hard to detect because the tone they strike is one that has become the dominant mode of modern filmmaking bergman and rossellini made five films and had three children together a complicated and lengthy battle against his possessiveness prevented her from working with other directors until 1956 when she starred in elena and her men for director jean renoir seeing that she might finally be free to pitch director amatol litvak approached her with a script for anastasia much like the frankly superior 1997 animated film anastasia takes place in the aftermath of the russian revolution a former general convinces a young woman with no memories of her past to pose as the grand duchess rumored to be the sole survivor of the royal family ingrid agreed and so after litvack convinced fox that hiring bergman would be a good idea her first american-made film in seven years was underway the film was in some sense a reintroduction to ingrid what kind of woman was she they wondered how had the past turbulent years changed her from the beginning ingrid displayed an openness critics and audiences would have been receptive to she was relatively available to the press conducted interviews in no less than five languages and even cooperated with figures like luella parsons who broke her pregnancy story and might have let's say evoked some negative feelings the film also signaled a willingness to re-engage with hollywood's brand of filmmaking unlike the somber darkness of italian realistic pictures anastasia conformed to the familiar standards of other large-scale technicolor productions the industry made that year like the king and i and the ten commandments things seemed to be going well but was she forgiven it's hard to say exactly i mean forgiven by who certainly murmurs of the controversy lingered but the mood generally seemed to have shifted from ingrid bergman is worse than stalin to let's let bygones be bygones the primary actors in the whole debacle had faced consequences ingrid had been through you know all of that and was now facing divorce with rossolini who obviously once again had already moved on to another woman anaminyani the scorned woman in the affair had just won her own oscar there's also some indication that her quote-unquote cancellation was never quite as fixed with average american moviegoers as it was with the morality police who had the biggest platforms as early as 1953 fans voted for her to return to american films by wide margins the press backtracked on their mistreatment of ingrid suddenly was repugnant to pass judgment on the personal affairs of others at least if you believed in justice and fair-mindedness of course this is laughingly disingenuous it's not as if the press or even america at large actually learned anything from the way they treated ingrid that cycle of shame and redemption would be applied to elizabeth taylor literally the next year and countless others in years to come but i think the most important thing to note is that ingrid bergman wasn't asking for forgiveness and didn't need it her interviews from this time are very clear firm and consistent she always maintained that hollywood had become professionally boring that she never regretted making films in italy that she never regretted her relationship with roscellini and that she didn't believe anyone had the right to intrude on her personal life she was of course polite but the dignity she allowed herself to have is absolutely refreshing to read anastasia was well received by both the public and critics groups which were keenly aware of the context in which they were judging her performance bosley crowther finally wrote ingrid a nice review in the new york times though couldn't resist another jab at neo-realism miss bergman's performance as the heroine is nothing short of superb he wrote it is a beautifully molded performance worthy of an academy award and particularly gratifying in the light of miss bergman's long absence from commendable films going into the oscars ingrid hollywood's most famous exile was the story her return after eight years overwhelmed any sense of competition in her category which included carol baker and baby doll katherine hepburn in the rainmaker nancy kelly in the bad seed and debra carr and the king and i when her name was announced the analogy wasn't hard to miss like anastasia ingrid bergman was royalty who fell from her throne he spent years away then polished up and reclaimed it unfortunately she could not personally accept her award that night as she was working in paris at the time cary grant accepted on her behalf and later opposed with the oscar backstage again betty this is pretty normal i'm just gonna say it somewhat predictably her win was framed as a final pardoning by hollywood a sign of amnesty that had become complete hollywood's prodigal daughter had achieved a sentimental and moral victory over those who had castigated and denounced her we still tend to frame this win that way and while i don't think that's incorrect i do think it requires a bit more qualification than that because although ingrid was readmitted to hollywood's favor she didn't really come back and that she didn't uproot herself from europe aiming to replicate her former fame and career that train seemed to have passed at 42 the roles weren't the same and the freedom on stage and in europe were too enticing to give up this situation combined with her inherent desire for change and challenge forced her to open up in a way that other stars who were so locked into the hollywood way of doing things did not by not relying on american stardom to find work she avoided many of the traps and tropes her peers fell into as they aged she never took roles she didn't absolutely want to do she never did have exploitation never did soap operas never did a short-lived poorly reviewed tv series and although she returned to the united states for films like cactus flower a majority of her post anastasia work was filmed abroad she earned another academy award for her very quick performance in murder on the orient express in 1974 and another nomination for autumn sonata in 1978 her only and perfect collaboration with swedish director ingmar bergman clearly america's reaction to england bergman's infidelity was unreasonably extreme it's comforting to know that she never regretted it and in retrospect to understand that her artistic choices broadened her skill and caused her to occupy a unique space in film history and frankly hell yes good for them more celebrities should have talented kids who grow up to be kooky animal scientists so yeah some of the things that happened to her kind of sucked but i still admire her bravery and resolve and commitment to her art form that to me is a story worth telling i'm a fully self-taught editor you can probably tell sometimes and recently i've been trying to up my game and learn new ways to make everything look a little nicer did you catch the spotlight effect in my last video because that took me forever so as part of this process i decided to tackle the scariest thing on the planet to me which is after effects and thankfully i've had skillshare to help make this program so much easier to understand skillshare is an online learning community with thousands of classes covering dozens of creative and entrepreneurial skills premium membership gives you unlimited access so you can join the classes and communities that are just right for you whether you want to fuel your curiosity creativity or even career skillshare is the perfect place to keep you learning and thriving especially when in-person classes and workshops aren't available like they aren't now so i picked jordi vandeput's after effects for beginners class and literally just followed along with him and it was so easy it sounds crazy to think that moving a circle across the screen would actually like make me proud of myself but honestly that felt huge because this program was so scary and that was like the third lesson so easy the good news is skillshare is incredibly affordable an annual subscription is less than ten dollars a month and because skillshare is kindly sponsoring this video they have offered an amazing deal the first 1000 people to click on the link in my description will get a free trial of skillshare premium so go ahead click the link check it out and tune in for my next video to see all the cool stuff i'm learning from jordy [Music] you

Channel: Be Kind Rewind

Views: 220,973

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Id: m1ZZXW9fkLQ

Length: 29min 33sec (1773 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 19 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/d0ubl]

This is an interesting video on Ingrid Bergman's career and how she was perceived in the 1940/50s, as well as how movies stars in general were seen in that era.

[u/visibly_hangry]

BKR is a real G out here