Word: andersson
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Here comes Chess, the biggest new musical hit of the international theater season. A colorful satiric pageant about the political and romantic gamesmanship attending a world chess championship, the show has won raves from European critics for Lyricist Tim Rice (Jesus Christ Superstar, Evita), Composers Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus (of the Swedish pop quartet ABBA) and the piece's star, Elaine Paige. Chess has spun off two top-of-the-pops singles: the ballad I Know Him So Well resided at No. 1 in Britain for four weeks, and the insinuating disco rap One Night in Bangkok...
Black cats skulk underfoot; the faces on wall icons frown with disapproval at any liberal impulse; the chief servant, Justina (a delicious turn by Harriet Andersson), has the butch haircut and sadistic ca prices of a prison-camp guard. In this house of silent horror the children can take refuge only in dreams of escape - to the arms of an old family friend, the Jew Isak Jacobi (Erland Josephson), whose house has some old, dark secrets that, in the mind of a child, can seem as exciting as black magic...
...Swedes 15 hours after the grounding to get a navy picketboat to the scene, but then the pace quickened. Armed with submachine guns, Soviet crewmen paced the deck of the sub, a diesel-powered relic from the 1950s, which lay stranded like a great gray whale. Swedish Commander Karl Andersson boarded the intruder and talked to Captain Pyotr Gushin, whose increasingly melancholy air bore a remarkable resemblance to that of Actor Theodore Bikel, the beleaguered commander of the Soviet sub in The Russians, etc. Andersson emerged to say that the Soviets "blamed their accident on an error of navigation." Then...
Charo, Martha Raye, Alain Delon, Mercedes McCambridge and Jimmy ("J.J.") Walker were also along for the ride. At one point the audience gets to witness a sex scene between George Kennedy and Bibi Andersson...
Quintet's tedium is in no way relieved by Altman's film-making technique. In place of his usual brio, the director has used pretentious cinematic gimmicks, monochromatic sets and portentous, dissonant music. He reduces an all-star international cast-Newman, Fernando Rey, Bibi Andersson, Brigitte Fossey, David Langton, Vittorio Gassman-to interchangeable (and often indistinguishable) ciphers. He blurs the perimeters of his images with Vaseline. Though two writers assisted Altman on the screenplay, the witless lines amount to paint-by-number existentialism: "Every time you cheat death, you feel the pure thrill of life...