The image that America could not forget, Ingrid Bergman in “The Bells of St. Mary's.”
Movies, specifically Hollywood movies, are the greatest machinery of propaganda the world has ever known.
So powerful is Hollywood and its ability to convey a message that in modern times America has never achieved victory in war without Hollywood’s support. When the Hollywood community turns against an American conflict, defeat is assured. Witness Vietnam, the first casualty of Hollywood’s ideological wrath. The Jane Fonda, Jon Voight vehicle Coming Home (1978) was a turning point in Hollywood’s hard left turn, a film that convinced large segments of the American public that Vietnam was a war whose moral foundation, the fight against Communist dictatorship, was rendered invisible and replaced by a narrative of veterans coming home broken in body and spirit, victims of an inchoate American imperialism.
Hollywood’s propaganda machine reaches past the content of movies into the very lives of movie stars. Certain roles register powerfully with the public in a manner impossible to predict. These performances end up defining an actor in a manner that resonates so profoundly with the audience that any deviation from that persona can thoroughly shatter an image—and career—beyond repair.
Perhaps the most fascinating example is the career of Ingrid Bergman (1915-1982).
A Swedish actress of unnatural natural beauty—she was ravishing, glamorous without make-up—and transcendent talent, Bergman starred in a series of films that secured her position as one of the most popular actresses in the history of American movies. Many of her films are modern classics with performances marked by a down-to-earth nobility that is rare among Hollywood stars. Besides the WW II morale booster Casablanca, (1942) her films include: Intermezzo (1939), Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1941), For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943), Gaslight (1944), The Bells of St. Mary’s (1945), Spellbound (1945), Notorious (1946), Joan of Arc (1948) and Under Capricorn (1949).
In 1949, chafing under the rigid Hollywood system, Bergman wrote a fan letter to Roberto Rossellini, the Italian director who made something of a splash with his gritty, if tedious, neo-realist movies that mixed professional with non-professional actors, concentrating on little stories of the poor and oppressed, often shooting with only a bare outline of a screenplay.
Like most European artists who claim to despise Hollywood Rossellini immediately offered Bergman, one of the most bankable Hollywood stars, the lead role in Stromboli (1949). It’s the bleak story of a young woman whose only route out of a post World War II DP camp is through marriage to a poor uneducated fisherman who lives on the desolate island of Stromboli, a soul-crushing volcanic rock that makes the DP camp look like Disneyland.
Roberto Rossellini and Ingrid Bergman on the set of “Stromboli,” 1949.
During production, Bergman and Rossellini fell in love. The problem was that Bergman had, in 1937, at the age of 21 married dentist Petter Lindström. Newscaster Pia Lindström is their daughter. Bergman and her director had a passionate affair. Bergman became pregnant with their son Renato out of wedlock in 1950. Later, after Bergman and Rossellini were married she gave birth to twin girls Isabella and Isotta.
Word of the extra marital affair caused a scandal in the United States. Of course, American audiences knew that many of their beloved stars misbehaved. But the studios covered up a cottage industry of star abortions, mad affairs, mental illness, raging alcoholism and drug addiction. In contrast, the Bergman-Rossellini affair was brazen, out in the open. Hollywood was unable to soften or deflect the scandal.
But Ingrid Bergman’s worst sin was that the American public identified Bergman as the saintly Sister Mary Benedict in The Bells of St. Mary’s, and the authentic saint Joan of Arc, two morally unblemished virgins.
Here was the Hollywood star machine in all its relentless glory. And here was an actress openly violating her own image, a shattering of the covenant between star and her faithful, adoring public. The dissonance between the sublime shadow on the silver screen and a cold reality of flesh and blood was too vast, too painful to absorb.
America felt betrayed. How could an American family ever again watch these lovely chaste movies with any degree of trust or belief?
Denounced on the floor of the American Senate, Bergman’s appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show was also cancelled. Unable to secure work in Hollywood, Bergman remained in Europe.
The American public is forgiving and Bergman eventually returned to Hollywood where she triumphed in several fine roles.
When Sidney Lumet was directing my script for A Stranger Among Us (1992) we talked about Bergman whom he directed in Murder in the Orient Express (1974). Sidney explained that he shot her one big scene in a long five-minute take because she was such a riveting actress that he didn’t want to cut into her performance.
Hollywood, as a vehicle for propaganda, is as vital and powerful as ever. Public morals have changed drastically since the infamous Bergman-Rossellini scandal. Now, Hollywood stars openly live together and have children without benefit of marriage. We are no longer shocked. Outrage is considered quaint if not a sign of Jacobean-like intoleranace.
But consider how we have come to this point of normalizing the immoral: it is, for the most part, a product of Hollywood movies, of stars whose image and influence is so powerful that their private lives made public have shaped and continue to shape how we live.
Ariel Chaim Avrech, ZT'L, May His Righteous Memory be a Blessing.
20 Comments
I keep telling myself there’s no way things can actually be as awful in the media as I think they are (don’t own a TV, don’t watch many shows via the internet, don’t often go to movies, don’t subscribe to any magazines other than the Economist and have an enduring love of National Geographic), and then every once in a way, I dip my toe into mainstream popular culture. And promptly feel vaguely ill at the images and messages being given out. It’s amazing how when you disconnect (partially, I don’t realistically think total disconnection is desirable or feasible) you become resensitized to what’s really out there. And most of it isn’t pretty.
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Maya:
Your media free life is also lived by my Hasidic friends. And whenever they do get a does of popular culture they are stunned and saddened.
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Thank you Robert. What beautiful essay you have written. My thought is always “hypocrisy is the last bastion of civilization.” To sin is one thing. To encourage others to do the same is quite another. Or in the words of of a former pastor, “I may not practice what I preach but at least I do not preach what I practice”. Yes, Hollywood is the great purveyor of moral values (I want to weep at the thought of how young people have been completely perverted by it’s influence). But there must be money somewhere to counter it’s effects. Is the Judeo-Christian world so effete, and so impoverished (intellectually and financially) that we can have no effect? I think not. I think that we are rather too immeshed with the world to stand for the kingdom of heaven. We tragically embody all the worst of the Weimar Republic. May your dear son pray for us. And G_d have mercy on us all.
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Elizabeth:
Thanks so much for remembering our son Ariel Chaim.
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Dear Elizabeth: In his essay “Raffles and Miss Blandish,” comparing E.W. Hornung’s Raffles with James Hadley Chase’s No Orchids for Miss Blandish, George Orwell wrote “Comparing the schoolboy atmosphere of the one book with the cruelty and corruption of the other, one is driven to feel that snobbishness, like hypocrisy, is a check on human behavior whose value from a social point of view has been underrated.”
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Could one even imagine Hollywood making a serious movie about a nun nowadays? The days of “The Nun’s Story” and “The Bells of St. Mary’s” are over forever.
If Hollywood made a movie about a nun nowadays, it would be about a nun who had a baby and murdered it. AGNES OF G-D, anyone? That kind of blood libel lead directly to the Charlestown Convent riot, August 11, 1834.
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Denounced on the floor of the American Senate, Bergman’s appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show was also cancelled.
Her appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show was denounced even though it was cancelled.
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CORRECTION.
Her appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show was denounced even though it was cancelled?
DO NOT DELETE. I ADDED A QUESTION MARK.
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Could one even imagine Hollywood making a serious movie about a nun nowadays? The days of “The Nun’s Story” and “The Bells of St. Mary’s” are over forever.
But Hollywood thinks it’s so clever to depict a nun lolling at the pool in a bikini, veil and rosary. As if!
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Franny:
Hollywood prefers to mock religion, unless it’s Islam, and then they get all respectful.
I wonder why?
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Even in her very last film, made shortly before she died, she was fantastic!
A Woman called Golda
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Exdem:
Bergman was dying of breast cancer when she played Golda. The production company was unable to secure insurance on Bergman but went ahead anyway at great financial risk. Ingrid was very sick but never complained and valiantly, brilliantly played the role. She died foiur months after filming. Ingrid Bergman was honored posthumously with an Emmy Award for Best Actress. Her daughter Pia accepted the Emmy.
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But consider how we have come to this point of normalizing the immoral: it is, for the most part, a product of Hollywood movies, of stars whose image and influence is so powerful that their private lives made public have shaped and continue to shape how we live.
You are spot-on there Robert. As I glance at the tabloids in the supermarket checkout line 2 stars are finally deciding to get married after so many children together (!?), another is, I think, bearing twins before marriage
But then I think this hasn’t really changed in Hollywood; it is no longer hidden by the star system.
And one must pity the children coming from this environment – is it any wonder so many are emotionally screwed up?
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Bill:
You “glance at the tabloids.”
I read them and call it research.
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“But consider how we have come to this point of normalizing the immoral: it is, for the most part, a product of Hollywood movies, of stars whose image and influence is so powerful that their private lives made public have shaped and continue to shape how we live.”
Amen.
Witness to the power of the media and mass communications.
Also note how few (truly) independent thinkers we have among us today. Most of the public (I can’t decide if I like the “Sheeple” moniker) swallow the bait — hook, line, and sinker. Heck, if Brad, Angelina, or Jennifer are doing it, it must be OK, right? In my grandparents’ time, the average man would have seen such outlandish behavior and said “that’s not right”. Period. Today, you only need to follow Twitter for a few days to see how ridiculous it’s become. Instant gratification… no, instant self-gratification is the paradigm today
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Alias Joe:
Watching a TV series like “Glee” is a textbook case of a propaganda vehicle pushing a leftist world view of deeply sexualizing our children. This series follows a relentless pattern of indoctrination that is structurally the same as North Korean brainwashing.
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An insightful take on a series of events with which we were familiar but requre reminding. An original analysis. More of this, please.
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Barry:
Thanks for the kind words. This post is part of a major lecture I’ll be delivering in Los Angeles in July on “Hollywood’s Betrayal of America.” Stay tuned for the announcement of time and place.
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For Libertas?
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Kishke:
It’s a round table forum with “Big Hollywood” Editor-in-Chief John Nolte and Mark Tapson, a Shillman Journalism Fellow, sponsored by Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and the Horowitz Freedom Center.
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