Recent dispatches from Rome report that Roberto Rossellini repudiates the American version of "Stromboli." I don't blame him. But he can't disclaim all responsibility for the film. An actress of Bergman's abilities should never have been cast in an Italian movie.

The unusual success of the post-war Italian film has been with proletarian tragedy. Its shoeshine boys and unemployed slum-dwellers are caught up in vast economic forces beyond their comprehension or control. Both Rossellini and de Sica had only to step out in the street to find actors who had already lived the roles. But Rossellini had to depart from the sociological for the psychological to give Miss Bergman a role with depth enough for her talents.

Unfortunately this sort of vehicle plays havoc with the amateur talent recruited from the fishing people of Stromboli. While Bergman ably throws herself about sobbing "I'm going mad," the rest of the east don't quite know how to play roles requiring emotions they themselves have never experienced.

Miss Bergman struggles admirably against these handicaps to portray a displaced Czech who marries a young fisherman solely to escape from the life of a DP camp. The difficulties encountered by the girl in trying to fit into the almost primitive life of her husband's native fishing village on the volcanic island of Stromboli are supposed to lead to her religious conversion.

But apparently Rossellini is correct in charging that most of the scenes explaining this conversion lie on the floor of the RKO cutting room. Certainly as it stands now, her conversion is one of the most absurd scenes ever filmed. Having at last gotten the money needed to leave her husband and the village, she is seen the next moment charging up toward the very mouth of the volcano whose rumblings have terrified her till now. Just what is going on as she plunges upward through the smoke remains unknown to the audience until the narrator's voice booms forth to explain that Karen has found God and will now return to live out her life in the fishing village. With the climax reduced to the incomprehensible, nothing much is left of this touted film except an exciting tuna catching scene.