Art house: Rossellini classic defies the years

Neo-realism meets Hollywood in this highly influential 1954 drama by Roberto Rossellini that the British Film Institute ranks among the greatest cinematic works of all time.

Lauded upon its initial release by film journal Cahiers du Cinema, many of whose critics went on to unleash France's New Wave, it is a fascinating work that has retained a quirky freshness that defies the passage of almost 60 years.

The director of earthy classics such as Rome, Open City (1945) and Paisan (1946), Rossellini took a different path in detailing Journey to Italy's anti-romantic sojourn in Naples by a bored, bourgeois British couple whose eight-year marriage is on the verge of collapse.

The mainly English dialogue, delivered by two Oscar-winning leads on hiatus from Hollywood, gives the proceedings an invigorating "fish out of water" perspective.

The duo at its centre is Alex and Katherine Joyce (George Sanders and Ingrid Bergman), a husband and wife pair who have co-existed for years on their home turf in London with little meaningful interaction. It is a situation that radically changes when the sale of a bequeathed Neapolitan villa forces them to experience life in each other's company away from familiar surroundings.

The scenario, co-authored by Rossellini (with Vitaliano Brancati) and loosely based on Colette's 1934 novel Duo, offers few piercing insights, and the acting by the stellar duo doesn't surpass their Academy Award-recognised efforts in All About Eve (1950) and Gaslight (1944). It's something else entirely that makes the film so compelling.

By taking this Hollywood-style subject matter and giving it a most un-Hollywood treatment, Rossellini imbues Journey with a quality that could never have been achieved in the physical and spiritual confines of a Los Angeles studio.