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Last night Isabella Rossellini was at the Brooklyn Academy of Music for two screenings - David Lynch's Blue Velvet and then one of her father Roberto's movies, his first out of five with her mother Ingrid Bergman, 1950's Stromboli. (Bonus: Here's a grainy picture I took of Isabella last night.) Have you ever seen Stromboli? You can watch it on YouTube but be warned it doesn't have subtitles for the occasional Italian parts. The film was also released in a beautiful boxed set from Criterion recently, and one assumes that's got the subtitles. Anyway it's a great film with some eye-popping imagery (the tuna fishing scene!) and a killer role for Bergman - her character's terrifically unlikeable for huge portions of the film, but Bergman's face, with its beautiful broad planes, is a movie screen you can't stop staring at no matter how badly she's behaving.
That's not why we're here, though.We're here because her co-star Mario Vitale was a total dreamboat, of course. Look at him! He was a fisherman without any acting experience before this movie - Isabella told a great story about how her mother wasn't prepared for the non-actors she'd be working with, and when she showed up Roberto was all, "Well let's head down to the wharf and pick up your leading man," and then they did! They did well too, wouldn't you say?
Swoon. Isabella said that Vitale loved the attention and tried to make a go of acting - IMDb does list several more movies for him over the course of the next four years. But he gave it up after that, so this film seems to be our main document of his beauty.
Let us soak up what we can.
Hit the jump for a bunch of caps.
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