[citation needed] The film is the result of a famous letter from Ingrid Bergman to Roberto Rossellini, in which she wrote that she admired his work and wanted to make a movie with him.

He sent a telegram to Joseph Breen, director of MPPDA's Production Code Administration, urging him to compare the original script with the RKO version, as he felt that the religious theme he had written into the screenplay had been lost.

Bosley Crowther of The New York Times opened his review by writing: "After all the unprecedented interest that the picture 'Stromboli' has aroused — it being, of course, the fateful drama which Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini have made — it comes as a startling anticlimax to discover that this widely heralded film is incredibly feeble, inarticulate, uninspiring and painfully banal."

"[13] The staff at Variety agreed, writing, "Director Roberto Rossellini purportedly denied responsibility for the film, claiming the American version was cut by RKO beyond recognition.

Given elementary-school dialog to recite and impossible scenes to act, Ingrid Bergman's never able to make the lines real nor the emotion sufficiently motivated to seem more than an exercise ...

The only visible touch of the famed Italian director is in the hard photography, which adds to the realistic, documentary effect of life on the rocky, lava-blanketed island.

"[14] Harrison's Reports wrote: "As entertainment, it does have a few moments of distinction, but on the whole it is a dull slow-paced piece, badly edited and mediocre in writing, direction and acting.

Other characters have no real identity, and hardly begin to come alive ... Ingrid Bergman makes a gallant effort with a part ill-conceived and scripted, and calling for a personality and quality which she cannot command.

"[9] In an expansive analysis of the film, critic Fred Camper wrote of the drama, "Like many of cinema's masterpieces, Stromboli is fully explained only in a final scene that brings into harmony the protagonist's state of mind and the imagery.

Forced to drop her suitcase (itself far more modest than the trunks she arrived with) as she ascends the volcano, Karin is stripped of her pride and reduced — or elevated — to the condition of a crying child, a kind of first human being who, divested of the trappings of self, must learn to see and speak again from a personal "year zero" (to borrow from another Rossellini film title).