DVR Diary: THE NIGHT VISITOR (1971)

To answer the theoretical question, "What if Ingmar Bergman made his film debut directing a Monogram mystery film?" Max von Sydow, Liv Ullmann and fellow Swedish star Per Oscarsson performed in English for director Laszlo Benedek and producer Mel Ferrer. Scripter Guy Elmes adapted a story by American writer Sam Roeca set, like many a contemporary Italian giallo, in Great Britain, with the Swedes playing Britons alongside such authentic but indifferent performers as Trevor Howard and Andrew Keir. By this point von Sydow was quite fluent in English -- he's one of the very best English-as-second-language actors -- but Ullmann in particular, in a largely thankless role, strikes me as rather wooden in her first or second English performance (depending on what language she spoke on the set of Terence Young's Cold Sweat), while Oscarsson gets a pass because he's playing an escalating hysteric. The Night Visitor is meant to be a shocker, and it shocks right at the start by showing us von Sydow running amok in a wintry landscape in his skivvies. The fire of revenge keeps him warm, apparently, since his character, Salem, proves to be a wrongly convicted, allegedly insane prisoner who's escaped to punish those who framed him, particularly Dr. Jencks (Oscarsson). Jencks sees Salem during his first rampage, but the escapee sees no need to silence his enemy. He's confident that no one will believe he's escaped, since he plans to return to prison in time to be questioned by the local policeman (Howard). The story isn't a whodunit but a howdedoit, and the middle section of the film reveals Salem's elaborate arrangements, which range from manipulating a dotty chess-enthusiast guard to performing Fairbanksian or at least Lancastrian acrobatics making his way down from his high cell in the hilltop asylum. I never knew Max von Sydow to be a do-his-own-stunts type guy, but he's quite impressive here, especially when you take the in-his-underwear-in-the-cold factor into consideration. The scene loses some of its inherent suspense once you remind yourself that Salem's supposed to have done this before. It might be more interesting in a Count of Monte Cristo way to see him planning and experimenting his way out the first time, or if we didn't see him killing the first time and had to take Jencks's word that he saw him. The way the film actually goes about it only emphasizes how implausibly elaborate Salem's scheme is. Anyway, it now develops that Salem, who strangely feels the cold more the second time out, wants to frame Jencks for the axe-murder of Mrs. Jencks, Salem's own sister (Ullmann) and/or drive him insane with his impossible appearances. And he would have gotten away with it, too, if not for that meddling parrot! If you want that one explained, you have to watch the picture -- or, if you're lucky, you can look it up online.

DEVIL'S BRIDE (Tulen Morsian, 2016)

Saara Cantell's film turns a 17th century witch craze on a Swedish-ruled Finnish-speaking island into something of a Christian allegory. That's an interesting twist when most of the film feels like The Crucible with Abigail Williams -- the Winona Ryder character from the most recent movie version -- as the heroine. Anna (Tuulia Eloranta) lusts for a married man and tries to ruin his wife by accusing her of witchcraft. All she wants, though, is to drive the other woman from town, as Anna's own mentor, Valborg the midwife (Kaija Pakarinen) is banished early in the picture. It's not Anna's fault that the witch mania escalates to a lethal degree. The persecution is driven by hypocrisy and learned intolerance. The local pastor is the hypocrite, a serial rapist of young women whose main beef against Valborg seems to be that she performs abortions, presumably killing his children. The local judge (Magnus Krepper), for whose mother Anna works as a maid, is a pharisaical figure as intolerant of "superstition" as his like in future generations would be toward religion itself. He flaunts the latest thinking from academia, somehow more credulous toward rumors of witchcraft than the literature of his mother's time, which Anna, a bright girl, is able to read. As Valborg's banishment opens a flood of accusation, the patriarchs increasingly demand death for the accused, who in all too familiar fashion are tortured into confessing and denouncing others.

To her credit, Anna is horrified by this. She never really wanted her supposed rival, Rakel (Elen Petersdottir) to die, and the death sentence pronounced on the innocent wife crushes Anna's spirit. She begs forgiveness of the prisoner, promising to baptize Rakel's newborn daughter and eventually (and blasphemously?) doing it herself, but Rakel is understandably reluctant to forgive. Guided by the judge's mother, whose wits remain sharp despite a stroke, Anna challenges the entire premise of the witch trials, only to have the old literature scoffed away by the judge -- who nevertheless suspects that something is fishy about the anti-witch evidence pushed by the pastor. Finally, there's only one thing Anna can do to save Rakel. It won't be enough to admit her original lie. She has to accept guilt for all the fantastical sins others have attributed to the other woman, or that Rakel has been forced to admit -- in effect, to confess to witchcraft and effectively sentence herself to death.

Cantell may be best known in her own country for a popular series of films about the friendship between two young girls, so Tulen Morsian must have been a profound change of pace for her and those familiar with her work. She nails the terrifying escalation of the witch-craze, from the minor tragedy of Valborg's banishment to brutal mass executions. These are the makings of a horror movie, but  Devil's Bride proves to be a powerful emotional experience as Anna accepts martyrdom -- though the film teases us with a legend of her miraculous escape -- in order to expiate her own sins and those of the entire community. The awakening of her sexuality initially drives Anna wild and makes her a menace, but the awakening of her conscience -- her true coming of age -- redeems what might have been written off as a misogynist stereotype and makes a real heroine of her.  Taking the viewpoint of an accuser strikes me as a novel approach for a witch-trial film, and the gamble of inviting identification with an apparent villain pays off emphatically. In many ways Tulen Morsian is as horrifying and infuriating as any film in its grim genre, but in a modest way, with less of the barnstorming bombast of The Crucible (which is still tremendously entertaining in its own right), it's one of the most sincerely moving of witch-trial films.

DVR Diary: THE NEW LAND (Nybyggarna, 1972)

Jan Troell's two-part naturalist epic about Swedish immigrants in the U.S. was some kind of weird, only-in-the-Seventies phenomenon. Part one, The Emigrants, was nominated for Best Foreign-Language Film of 1971, and returned in a edited-down English dub (it played with subtitles instead in some markets) and got a flat-out Best Picture nomination in 1972, while New Land (the original title translates to "The Settlers") was up for Foreign-Language Film. Most freakishly considering the grim content of these films, they inspired an American New Land TV series in 1974, but at last reality reasserted itself and the show died a quick death opposite All in the Family on Saturday nights. Troell shot the two films simultaneously, adapting a tetralogy of novels by Vilhelm Moberg, Nybyggarna being the third book. New Land thus resumes the saga of Karl-Oscar Nielsen (Max von Sydow), his wife Kristina (Liv Ullmann) and his brother Robert (Eddie Axberg), who struggled their way from Sweden to Minnesota in The Emigrants. Like that film, New Land is episodic rather than strongly plotted, probably in keeping with the Moberg novels. So a lot of stuff happens. Robert grows impatient to strike out on his own and finally leaves for the California gold fields, only to return flush with cash. Kristina battles homesickness and keeps having kids until a doctor says to stop, but then keeps on trying. Karl-Oscar makes constant improvements to his farm, deals with new Swedish neighbors who threaten to bring the old country's religious conflicts to Minnesota with them, volunteers for the Civil War only to be rejected due to his limp, and sits out the suppression of a violent Sioux uprising to tend his ailing wife.

Troell may have been depending on his superstar leads, king and queen of Swedish thespians, to dominate the film, but the most interesting things happen to other people. To be specific, the most visually interesting things happen to other people, perhaps Troell felt he had to be more creative as a director when von Sydow and Ullman weren't on screen. The main case in point is the long flashback telling the truth of Robert and his buddy Arvid's (Pierre Lindstedt) misadventures en route to California. Scored with modernist percussion, the sequence is an increasingly delirious montage climaxing when the Swedes get lost in a desert chasing a mule. Arvid dies after drinking from a poisoned stream while Robert contracts yellow fever (or some variant on the blood-coughing Movie Disease) tending his dying Mexican guide. He strikes gold quite by accident by inheriting the guide's savings in gold coins, but foolishly exchanges them (I assume he thought they'd prove he didn't literally mine gold) for Southern Bank of Indiana notes that are worthless back in Minnesota, where he presents them to his brother and sister-and-law as triumphant gifts. While most of the two films are paced and shot so they seem like windows into the actual 19th century, Robert's story feels very much like a Seventies movie, and it's the closest Troell gets to making the Swedish equivalent of a spaghetti western. The other major sequence, the Sioux uprising, feels more like an American revisionist western of the period.That's not to say Troell sympathizes with the Sioux, though Karl-Oscar is told by another immigrant that, while he may not personally have stolen land from the Indians, he definitely purchased stolen land. Instead, the uprising is introduced with an atrocity sequence, the massacre of a Swedish family, that arguably tops anything similar in American films of the time with its gruesome exclamation point of an impaled human fetus. Then, skipping over the war against the renegades, Troell just about tops that, measured by pure horror rather than raw gruesomeness, with the mass hanging of a few dozen Sioux, one swing of an axe dropping the platform under all of them while the director holds the camera to let us watch them swing.

While the most spectacular sequences are only tangentially relevant to the Nielsen saga, Ullmann and von Sydow are powerful enough actors to make their family scenes just about as compelling as the more violent moments. If New Land has a unifying plot it's the Nielsen's struggle with a homesickness that Kristina never really overcomes, each horror or other setback merely renewing it. Her final scene gives the film a crowning irony. Kristina's astrakhan apple tree has at last blossomed, and Karl-Oscar offers her its first ripe fruit. Barely able to bite into it, she's enraptured by the smell of it. "I'm home!" she says, but the tragic truth is that, in her delirium, "home" still means back in Sweden. There's a further irony in the denouement: by the time of Karl-Oscar's old age, his children have fully made themselves at home in the new land, but in doing so they've ceased to be Swedes. An old neighbor has to write to the old country of Karl-Oscar's death because his children don't know the language. An American superpatriot might say that's just as it should be, but the loss that goes with the process is still tragic, while Troell, still observing from a Swedish perspective, leaves viewers questioning whether everything really was worth it. In a sense he isn't telling the full story because the Nielsen children get short shrift in the last half of the picture, but it may be the same way in Vilhelm Moberg's novels. In any event, Seventies cinema tended to question the purpose of almost every endeavor once taken for granted, and in that respect Troell's immigrant films are quintessential Seventies movies.

THE GIRL KING (2015)

Any Swedish actress who takes on the role of Christina, her nation's most famous queen, has big shoes to fill. Greta Garbo most famously essayed the role in a 1933 Hollywood film, while Liv Ullmann took her turn in a 1974 British film. Each could claim to be one of the most famous and acclaimed actresses in the world when they played the role. Malin Buska can't say the same, though like her predecessors she performs the role in English for Finnish director Mika Kaurismäki's history play. While Garbo's Queen Christina and Ullmann's The Abdication were prestige pictures in their day, I suspect that Buska's Girl King is aimed at a niche market. Here, what is only hinted at by Garbo's infamous kiss of a lady-in-waiting becomes almost the main subject of the film. I say almost because The Girl King aspires to be more expansive in its portrayal of Christina as an Enlightenment intellectual and a woman ahead of her time. Unfortunately, it leaves you with the impression that the queen was a pretentious brat.

 

Christina was raised to rule despite her gender and grew up a tomboy who apparently never reconciled fully with her femininity and the expectations it created. Like Elizabeth I of England Christina resolved to be a virgin queen, going so far as to adopt an heir to the throne rather than make one herself. Like many women of her time, she had at least one special female friend, Countess Ebba Sparre (Sarah Gadon), but as in those cases it's unclear how intimate (by our standards) the women were with each other. By our standards, at least, it seems odd for Christina to flirt with Ebba at one moment, and with the Catholic Church in the next. Then in another moment she's assisting Rene Descartes (Patrick Bauchau) in a dissection of a cadaver's brain, revealing the pineal gland which the philosopher declares the physical seat of the human soul, while nobles and courtiers huff and hurl. Buska lacks Garbo's innate gravitas (I haven't seen Ullmann in The Abdication) and by giving her too many interests the filmmakers make Christina look flighty rather than enlightened.

 

The Girl King suggests that Christina's abdication was precipitated by the discovery -- apparently in the nick of time -- of her sexual attraction to Ebba, who is kidnapped and quickly married off to a blond, blank nobleman. Her Catholic hobby is an additional deal-breaker but the film's message seems to be that she can no longer be queen if she can no longer live and love as she chooses, so she'll go to Rome and hang out with the Pope instead. I guess he could commiserate about the celibacy, or perhaps explain alternatives to the new exile. The movie ends with Christina's abdication ceremony, culminating with her crowning of the new king and her shucking off the royal robes to march off in a man's costume, saying in effect that she's free, though to do what is left an open question, since she isn't able to take Ebba with her. It's closer to history than the Garbo film, in which Christina's great love is a Spanish nobleman, but that's pretty much its only advantage over the 1933 picture.In the end, I doubt whether Girl King is romantic, tragic or titillating enough for its presumed target audience, and it's most likely less of all these things for everyone else.

DVR Diary: THE EMIGRANTS (Utvandrarna, 1971-2)

 

If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Jan Troell's Utvandrarna was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign-Language Film of 1971, but lost to Vittorio De Sica's Garden of the Finzi-Continis. Nevertheless, Warner Bros. saw something marketable in Troell's tale, adapted from the first in a series of Swedish novels by Vilhelm Moberg, of immigrants struggling for a better life in America than they'd endured in the old country. Warners lopped something like 40 minutes off the original running time, leaving it approximately 150 minutes long, and re-released it both with English subtitles and in a full English dub to which stars Max Von Sydow and Liv Ullmann contributed their own voices. As The Emigrants Utvandrarna became one of the few movies nominated for Oscars in multiple years, with Troell nominated for direction and his contribution to the adapted screenplay -- he also did the cinematography and editing -- and Ullmann nominated for Best Actress. There was a nomination in the main Best Picture category as well this time, but awards night was a wipeout, as 1972 was the year of The Godfather and Cabaret. Still, Warners felt they had found something in Troell, who already had a sequel ready to roll and would finally report to Hollywood to make a real western, Zandy's Bride, with Ullmann, for the studio. Well, it was the Seventies and the public was in the mood, so it was resumed, for revisionist views of the American experience. Troell was the man for the job, for if anything his portrait of his homeland, presumably reflecting the viewpoint of an author who would commit suicide at arguably the moment of his greatest global fame, in 1973, is far less flattering than what little we get of America in the final act of The Emigrants.

The early acts, set in some rural backwater, are reminiscent of the more sordid revisionist westerns made by Americans. Equally far from the Swinging Sweden of the X-rated imagination or the austere Symbolist landscape of Ingmar Bergman, the Sweden of Utvandrarna is a filthy place from which anyone in his right mind would want to escape. Farmer Karl-Oskar (Von Sydow) can't support his wife Kristina (Ullmann) and their growing brood of kids -- they argue frequently over who's to blame for the expansion -- on his rocky soil. The couple ends up leading a little band of losers and outcasts -- two brothers, one of whom is cruelly accused of making love to his heifer, as well as dissident members of a local church congregation -- across the Atlantic in a wretched, life-threatening passage. In America, they struggle to make their way to the open, fertile country, depending on one man reading phrasebook sentences to strangers in the hope of getting directions. It's here that the absurdity of an English dub becomes apparent. In this format, we get the emigrants asking their English expert, in English, to ask for directions; he asks and is answered, and the emigrants ask, in English, what the American, in English, had said. That aside, I can see why Warners went for it, especially since Von Sydow and Ullmann were by then fluent in English, though it also means that the dubbed film suffers a little from the sense that the words are spoken in a vacuum, while the obvious presence of omnipresent voiceover actor Paul Frees among the voice artists undercuts the naturalist authenticity Troell was aiming for.

Around the world, it seems, the Seventies were a golden age of cinematic naturalism, providing aesthetic justification for the pervasive mud and dysfunctional personalities of revisionist westerns and genre revisionism in general. Audiences seemed to want to see the world and its people warts and all, scrubbed clean (ironically speaking) of the romanticism of generations of genre. Before the decade was out, the rigors of such films as Utvandrarna left audiences ready for romance again, but if the squalor of Sweden wasn't alienating enough, Troell filmed the story in an anecdotal rather than dramatic narrative manner, without character arcs or film-length conflicts or courtships to tighten its focus. Perhaps appropriately, that narrative style may have made the film authentically foreign for Americans, whether they saw it subtitled or dubbed. In any event, audiences were more adventurous then, or so we think when idealizing the Seventies, and Troell's grim chronicle is convincing and compelling enough to make me eager to see The New Land, the sequel, at some point. More immediate on my agenda, however, is a TCM showing later this month of Zandy's Bride, which should make for interesting comparisons if nothing else. Watch for a DVR Diary review, coming soon to this blog.

THE DEMOCRATIC TERRORIST (Den demokratiske terroristen, 1992)

Pound for pound, or proportionate to its size, Sweden may be the world's superpower of mystery fiction. In the U.S. we see countless translations of Swedish mystery and crime novels, with the "Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" series just the tip of the iceberg. My impression is that we don't see so much of Swedish spy fiction. Maybe the Swedes don't write so much in that genre, or maybe their attitude toward the Cold War made their stories untranslatable in the U.S. Nevertheless, Sweden has its own pop spy fiction, and if not the Swedish James Bond, Jan Guillou's Carl Hamilton seems to be one of the country's most popular fictional spies, adapted often into TV and film. Per Berglund's film is the second adaptation of the second novel in Guillou's series, and you can see why, despite the effort to film as much of this movie in English as possible, Carl Hamilton might not appeal to Americans. Democratic Terrorist has a familiar enough story: the spy must infiltrate a leftist terror cell of the German Red Army Faction to prevent an attack on the American embassy in Stockholm. But Hamilton himself (Stellan Skarsgard) has a reputation as a leftist, and one of his greatest exploits before this was to wipe out an Israeli hit team that had attacked a Swedish office of the Palestine Liberation Organization. While this makes him an ideal infiltrator, it raises the risk that he might go native, if you will.

Democratic Terrorist nevertheless seems aimed at a U.S. audience, if only because English is spoken more than Swedish or German. In story terms, that's because Hamilton knows only "ein bisschen" of German, and the Germans know even less Swedish. English thus becomes a kind of lingua franca of Europe, since it seems to be everyone's second language. Skarsgard handles the task easily enough; the future Dr. Selvig of Avengers fame had already made inroads in Hollywood by this time, and it's fun to see him kicking ass in his prime here. The other cast members may all be dubbed, for all I know.

Whatever Guillou's novel was like, Berglund's movie offers a campy caricature of Germany, from the sleaze and grunge of Hamburg's red-light district to the dilletante fanaticism of the young guerrillas Hamilton seeks out. Knowing that they're looking for a Swede to aid them in setting up their plan, he takes a room in a no-tell motel and lurks the mean streets while the director observes the freaks and slobs around him. After Hamilton picks a fight over a pinball machine and shows off his fighting prowess and his Swedishness, he's approached by the RAF people and taken to their spacious pad. After promptly taking charge and chiding them all for their amateurishness, he solidifies his credentials by leading them in a bank robbery. Before long, he's falling in love with one of the pretty young terrorists who has a wealthy background. He's also entrusted to accompany two of the gang on a weapons-buying trip to Syria (played here by the Kingdom of Morocco) that goes sour when the PLO gets wind of what the Germans are up to. The Palestinians feel, as Hamilton does, that the attack on the Americans in Stockholm will only damage the international anti-imperialist cause. Worse, it'll probably be blamed on them. Their solution is to kill the Germans, but to save himself Hamilton blows his cover, explaining that only he can thwart the attack at this point. The Palestinians check his references and respect his way with Israelis, but insist that he prove his sincerity on this occasion by killing his German companions. As they curse him as a traitor, he cuts the Germans' throats; Berglund illustrates this with a suggestively gruesome shot from Hamilton's hip as blood suddenly gushes from above. But that's not the end of his Syrian sojourn. To convince his marks back in Germany that he'd been tortured but escaped, he has to let the Palestinians shoot him and otherwise mess him up.

What follows is fairly predictable as far as both the spy and romance plots are concerned, but the film's main point has been made. All institutions, even ostensibly revolutionary entities, act according to self-interest first before considering principles. The Palestinians readily sell-out their German sympathizers and justify that betrayal of solidarity with appeals to realpolitik. Individuals are expendable, as Hamilton will learn when he tries to spare one from the retribution the German police are planning. This is espionage as tragedy rather than romance. Nations may win, individuals may not. Beyond that, Berglund's movie is nothing special. The plot is by the numbers except for that PLO twist, and the script has too many terrorists to deal with to develop many of them adequately as personalities. But I found it worth watching if only for the different perspective it provided on terror wars back. The Hamburg scenes are amusing in a way that may not have been intended, but Skarsgard gives just the performance the material demands. He does enough to get you empathizing with him despite the film's faults, and you can see why Hollywood grabbed him. And if the novel's in English somewhere, I might even read it someday.

Now Playing: MARCH 13, 1962

Less than five months after its Swedish premiere, Ingmar Bergman's newest has its American premiere in New York City.

This film will go on to win that Best Foreign-Language Film Oscar -- and Bergman would get nominated again the following year for writing it. As Tino Balio noted in The Foreign Film Renaissance on American Screens, Janus Films did a brilliant job establishing Bergman as a brand name. We can see a sample of their salesmanship in this trailer, uploaded by MagicWorksofBergman.



The trailer's a historic artifact in its own right. Notice how it flaunts the good word of Bosley Crowther, the New York Times reviewer who was already a byword for philistinism in some quarters yet actually played an instrumental role, as Balio notes, in promoting the foreign-film boom starting back in the 1940s. Notice, too, how some reviewers were so well known that their first names could go unmentioned. It's either that, or the names didn't really matter at all, just the papers. But were they right? Only those who've seen this one can say.

Now Playing: JAN. 11, 1962

Charleston, SC: A local arthouse welcomes a comic fantasy by Ingmar Bergman.

And here's a "message from hell," courtesy of of luvgod on YouTube.



The line separating art from exploitation was often fuzzy in 1962, but this announcement from Franceville, IN may help illustrate the difference.

The lead feature is the pre-gore debut film of Herschell Gordon Lewis.The second feature is a 1958 portrait of a nymphomaniac -- and for that, Something Weird Video provides a clip.



Is there no family-friendly fare anywhere? Do not fret:Nevada, MO is your refuge tonight.

What we have here is a 1956 West German biopic, predating even the stage version of The Sound of Music, though it didn't reach the U.S. until after the Rodgers & Hammerstein show had hit Broadway. Here's some unexpected Americana from the film, provided by Jairdan.



No disrespect to Canada, but calling a film  The Canadians does not raise expectations. On the other hand, Burt Kennedy directed it and Robert Ryan stars, so I'd probably give that second feature a look if given a chance. And that's all for today ... but there's more tomorrow!

THE MAGICIAN (Ansiktet, 1958)

For someone dedicated to exploring the wild world of cinema I've been shamefully neglectful of the work of Ingmar Bergman. Maybe I've never thought him wild enough. I think of the Swedish writer-director as a cinematic chamber artist when my ideal of cinema is spectacle. His concerns often didn't strike me as necessarily cinematic, and indeed, Bergman seemed to do just as well on television and the stage. I freely admit to speaking from ignorance here, but these were my impressions of Bergman based on his reputation as an austere student of human psychology. Since starting this blog two years ago, I've occasionally promised to get around to Bergman, but only now, with Criterion's release of Ansiktet, have I taken the plunge.

I remember having plenty of opportunities to see The Magician on TV back in the early days of cable. It seemed to be on pretty frequently on one of the arts-and-entertainment channels (though not necessarily the lamented A&E itself) that proliferated in the innocent Eighties, but I never felt motivated to give it a look back then. A sense of regret helped compel me to summon the DVD fron Netflix, but I was also inspired by what Tino Balio had written about Bergman in The Foreign Film Renaissance on American Screens, 1946-1975. Balio devotes an entire chapter to Janus Film's brilliant marketing of Bergman in the late 1950s, which climaxed in 1959, when five of the director's films, including Ansiktet, were playing in New York art houses and the Bergman "brand" had been identified with cutting-edge cinema. Balio sees the Janus buildup as a high-toned alternative to the exploitative ballyhoo with which, like many European films, Bergman's earlier work had been promoted in the U.S. Yet the superior sexual frankness of European film remained a strong part of its appeal throughout the "renaissance," and it remained an exploitable element of Bergman's work. The affinity between art and exploitation on the common ground of "frankness" is best illustrated by the well-known influence Bergman's Virgin Spring had on the creation of Wes Craven's Last House on the Left, but Ansiktet has a bit of exploitation flavor as well. Janus helped things along by calling it The Magician rather than translating the title literally as The Face. While Bergman's title is more meaningful once you see the movie, The Magician doesn't exactly do the film a disservice.

Somewhere in Sweden in 1846, Vogler's Magnetic Health Theater arrives in town. On the way the troupe has found an alky actor dying of exposure by the side of the road. Satisfied that he's expired, Vogler and Co. move on. They have to apply for a permit to perform in the community. To win it, they must give a command performance for the local notables: the consul and his wife, the chief of police and his wife, and Dr. Vergerus. Among the elite, skepticism seems to prevail. Chief Starbeck seems inclined to dismiss the mute Vogler (Max Von Sydow) as a crank, while the empiricist Vergerus wants to see the performance and draw his own conclusions. The consul's wife is haunted by the recent loss of a child and has greater hope for Vogler's supernatural powers. "You're here to explain why my child died," she confides in the Christ-like magician.

The Magician (Max von Sydow, right, with "apprentice" Ingrid Thulin) and the Skeptics (below)

The troupe is allowed to stay overnight at the consul's residence before the command performance, but they must dine and board with the servants. And can you blame the consul? Vogler's is a motley bunch: the weirdly intense mute himself; his apprentice "Mr. Aman" (Ingrid Thulin is fooling no one); the mountebank mouthpiece Tubal; Granny Vogler the herbalist and potions dealer; and their coachman Simson.

"Read my palm!" Bibi Andersson demands. It's definitely worth a closer look.

The servants prove a more credulous, appreciative audience, especially the maid Sara (Bibi Andersson) who falls almost instantly for Simson. Some of the servants come in for a scare when an all-too-real apparition invades the estate. It's the old actor from the road, who has failed to die and still craves drink. Though he's not dead yet, he boasts to Vogler that he's already better as a ghost than he was as an actor. When he finally passes out again, Vogler puts him in a box, as if for future reference.

Bengt Ekerot played Death in Bergman's Seventh Seal. In Ansiktet he plays Death Warmed Over.

Later in the evening, Vergerus finds Aman, a.k.a. Manda, out of costume in her true identity as Mrs. Vogler. She admits that Vogler can talk and is a fugitive, and Vergerus makes a vague proposition to her while noticing Vogler in the doorway. The magician throws the doctor out, tears off his fake hair and beard and utters his first words of the film, "I hate them!"

The next day's performance starts badly when the wirework behind Vogler's levitation trick is revealed behind a curtain. Tubal assures the audience that all the obvious trickery was done on purpose, as a joke to preface displays of Vogler's real power. The magician is a student of Mesmer's principles of animal magnetism, which he demonstrates by mesmerizing Chief Starbeck's wife, who promptly tells embarrassing tales about her husband but claims to remember nothing afterward. For his next trick, Vogler will bind the consul's thuggish coachman in the "Invisible Chains," applied in pantomime by Aman. The coachman sells it like a madman, thrashing about in an increasingly desperate effort to free himself. Finally he falls on Vogler and throttles him before bolting out of the room. Vogler is declared dead, but the skeptical Vergerus decides to perform an immediate autopsy on the magician, though his objectivity is shaken when he finds himself locked in an attic with a "corpse" whose behavior proves unpredictable....

Ansiktet finds Bergman working in the same mode as in his most famous movie, The Seventh Seal. The characters are types and archetypes, and they exist so Bergman can make points about high and low class, science and superstition. This isn't the sort of intense psychological study that the Swedish director became known for in his creative maturity. Instead, The Magician is a classical spookshow that wouldn't necessarily look out of place in Val Lewton's roster of RKO horror programmers. It has crisp, eerie black and white cinematography by Gunnar Fischer that really rises to the occasion when Bergman wants to scare us but also impresses on location as the Vogler coach rolls through the forest.

In The Magician Bergman explores a continuum of skepticism, superstition and cynicism. Granny Vogler unashamedly exploits the credulity of simple folk. Temporarily short on love potion, she tells Tubal to give a customer a bunion cure, since "what matters is how the bottle looks and how the potion tastes." On at least one level she's right; appearances help make the sale. But belief in the power of love potions also seems to prove their power, though that may only mean that the desire for a love potion proves that love already exists. Magic is only our attempt to make tangible those things that really do haunt us, like the dead child of the consul's wife, or those powers that seem to make us fall in love. Faith in magic can make it real despite the mercenary cynicism of those who'd exploit that faith. Skepticism, meanwhile, isn't invulnerable. Vergerus should have reason to expect that Vogler is trying to fake him out in some way. He should probably expect the supposed corpse to come to life if he assumes Vogler is faking. But he feels fear anyway, because he knows Vogler is an enemy who has already been violent with him. That fear may give Vogler a real power over the skeptic. That power might not be magic, but it's still something real. Magic (or "animal magnetism") is just a label that mystifies reality.

The Swedish title refers to the false face that Vogler wears, one that obviously inspired George Stevens to cast von Sydow as Jesus in The Greatest Story Ever Told. Stevens was on to something, since I'm sure Bergman meant Vogler's marks to be inspired or awed by the magician's Christlike visage and his somewhat otherworldly manner. Max's own clean-shaven, close-cropped mug is shocking by comparison in its plainness, a blank to be filled in by his own imposture just as people invest the stage figure of Vogler with their dreams and fears of supernatural power. There's something abject in his blankness, and once the show is finally, truly over he comes across as a pathetic beggar, even as he's appeared to demonstrate real power. But was it his power or was it all in the minds of his audience, believers and antagonists alike? That's a question that Bergman doesn't need to answer; it's yours to take home with you.

Ansiktet is the sort of story that requires people in close quarters to fall in love or feel strong emotions; it's a fable with a point to make. In that sense it's too neat, too blatant by certain standards, but there are definitely times and places for such stories. With its genre trappings and melodramatic story, The Magician might make a good starter Bergman for the curious, though I don't know how much it prepares you for his major works of the Sixties and Seventies. On its own terms it's pretty entertaining and proves Bergman as much a showman as an artist. He has a forbidding reputation, but Ansiktet is quite accessible and even a little hokey. Genre fans will leave it believing, if only for a moment, that Bergman was one of us after all.