No scandal ever rocked Hollywood more than that of Ingrid Bergman, the beloved star of Casablanca and The Bells of St. Mary’s who, leaving her neurosurgeon husband and ten-year-old daughter behind, went to Italy to make a movie and became pregnant with the director’s baby. The director was, of course, Roberto Rossellini whose Rome Open City and Paisan had made a huge impression on the Hollywood icon. The film she went to Italy to make was Stromboli, the first of three she would make with Rossellini whom she would marry after a quickie divorce and give birth to his son and two years later, twin daughters.

The Rossellini-Bergman marriage and film collaboration would end in 1954 when Bergman went to Paris to take on Deborah Kerr’s role in the French stage version of Tea and Sympathy after which she would make a triumphant return to glory in Anastasia. The films she made with Rossellini, all flops upon their initial release, but since acclaimed as masterpieces, are given sparkling new transfers in Criterion’s 3 Films by Roberto Rossellini Starring Ingrid Bergman.

In Stromboli, filmed on a remote island with an active volcano off the coast of Sicily, Bergman plays a Lithuanian World War II refugee who in essence trades one internment camp for another when she marries guard Mario Vitale and goes to live with him on the island where he is a fisherman. Shunned by the local women for her superior attitude and brazen seduction of a young lighthouse keeper, she sets out to cross the volcano in search of a new life on the other side of the island. Pregnant with her husband’s child, and realizing the futility of her situation, she breaks down on the peak of the volcanic mountain. Rossellini’s ending is ambivalent, but RKO’s original 1950 U.S. release of the film added a voiceover that announced her return to her husband’s village. The Criterion release is Rossellini’s original cut of the film in both the English and Italian language versions he filmed simultaneously.

Bergman plays a modern St. Francis in Europe ‘51, retitled The Greatest Love when it played L.A. in 1954, a socialite who becomes active in charitable works after the suicide of her 12 year-old son. Based on Rossellini’s idea that anyone who acted like Italy’s patron saint today would be deemed crazy, Bergman’s family and friends think she is and they eventually have her committed to an asylum where the doctors concur. The film ends with the saintly Bergman locked away and kept from pursuing further good deeds. Bergman is magnificent in the role, as might be expected; Alexander Knox makes the difficult part of the jealous husband believable and Giulietta Masina makes a strong impression as a working mother with six kids, though whoever dubbed her in the English language version sounds like Minnie Mouse. Both the English and Italian language versions have been restored.

Filmed in English, Journey to Italy, retitled Strangers for its 1955 L.A. release, is ostensibly about a bored, bickering English couple, Bergman and George Sanders, who have come to the outskirts of Naples to sell an inherited property. The heart of the film, though, is Bergman’s sightseeing which includes a museum, a volcano and a Pompei dig while Sanders is off having an affair with an unhappily married woman. They decide to divorce, but reconcile at the end. The film has had tremendous influence on films made by directors from Antonioni to Scorsese to Kiarostami.

The collection, which is available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD, includes numerous documentaries on Rossellini’s career and the making of the films as well as the excellent 1996 documentary on Bergman’s life narrated by her daughters, Pia Lindstrom and Isabella Rossellini.

Among Olive Films latest releases on both Blu-ray and DVD is 1945’s Guest Wife, directed by Sam Wood (Goodbye, Mr. Chips; The Pride of the Yankees) starring Claudette Colbert and Don Ameche. One would think from the pedigree that this is a lost gem. It isn’t. What it is is a lame screwball comedy about a woman (Colbert) posing as the wife of her husband’s (Dick Foran) best friend (Ameche) in order to impress his boss (Charles Dingle). The film pales in comparison to another 1945 film in the same vein, Peter Godfrey’s Christmas in Connecticut with Barbara Stanwyck, Dennis Morgan and Syudney Greenstreet. If you want to see Colbert and Ameche at their best together look no further than Mitchell Lesen’s 1939 classic, Midnight also starring John Barrymore and Mary Astor.

Speaking of John Barrymore, a recent Blu-ray/DVD release that seems to have slipped under the radar is 2012’s Barrymore in which Christopher Plummer repeats his Tony award winning performance as the legendary actor at the end of his life. It’s a two character play with John Plumpis featured as the great man’s promoter and confidant. Director Eric Canuel opens up the play a bit with scenes outside the theatre and in Barrymore’s dressing room, but most of it takes place on stage where the actor is rehearsing a planned comeback as Richard III. It’s an absorbing study of one of yesterday’s acting giants by one of today’s most assured thespians.

Warner Archive has released three of James Stewart’s much sought after early films

Stewart, in the film’s most famous set piece, is a soldier in the Union Army in 1938’s Of Human Hearts whose mother writes a letter to President Lincoln asking him to locate the son she hasn’t heard from in some time. Stewart is sent for by Lincoln (John Carradine) and lectured to, after which he wakes up and realizes what he owes his mother. It’s been a long time coming. Until then, the mother, beautifully played by Beulah Bondi in a great Oscar nominated performance, has been largely taken for granted by both her stern preacher husband (Walter Huston) and son, played as a child by Gene Reynolds and Stewart as a young man. It is she who sacrifices everything for him while encouraging him to follow his dream of becoming a doctor. Charles Coburn co-stars as the Ohio town’s doctor who also encourages Reynolds/Stewart.

Bondi, who would play Stewart’s mother six times over six decades, is also his mother in 1938’s Vivacious Lady, a terrific screwball comedy co-starring Ginger Rogers as Stewart’s secret wife. Academic Stewart brings nightclub singer Rogers home to meet his parents, college dean Charles Coburn and Bondi, but can’t quite muster the courage. Under Rogers’ guidance, Bondi, a shy, retiring, sickly woman finally gets the courage to leave her overbearing husband. The scene in which Rogers teaches Bondi to boogie is especially hilarious. James Ellsion co-stars.

Stewart and Rosalind Russell star in 1940’s No Time for Comedy, their only film together, another screwball comedy in which he plays a playwright and she, his Broadway star wife. The title comes from Stewart’s determination to write a successful drama after having become famous for his comedies. The machinations of the plot has him falling for banker Charlie Ruggles’ wife Genevieve Tobin and Russell retaliating by having a fling with Ruggles. Louise Beavers has a meatier role than usual as an actress who specializes in playing maids while doubling as Stewart and Russell’s wisecracking maid off-stage.

One of the best British TV mystery series of recent years has been Foyle’s War. The series, originally set to run the gamut of World War II, was forced to scrap episodes set during 1933 and 1944 when it ran out of funding and had to abruptly move to the end of the war in its fifth season. Since resurrected, but necessarily now taking place after the war, Acorn has released Foyle’s War: Set 7 on both Blu-ray and standard DVD. Although the post-war stories are not quite up to the original war themed mysteries, they are still potent and worth seeing..

This week’s new releases include the long awaited DVD and Blu-ray debut of The Big Parade and the Blu-ray upgrade of From Here to Eternity.