Word: ballade
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...makes a bet he can "get his foot in the door" before the week is out. He wins the bet, loses the girl, wins her back at the fade. Time and again the scriptwriters run out of ideas, and whenever that happens Elvis just hauls off and belts a ballad. There are ten of them, and every last one is goshawful. The dialogue is not much better. She: "How can I ever repay you?" He: "Oh, I'll think of something...
Derived from a ghastly-lovely medieval ballad (Töres dotter i Vänge), the film tells the story of two sisters, one dark (Gunnel Lindblom) and one fair (Birgitta Pettersson), one serving Wotan and the other Christ, one sunk in nature and the other lost in light. The dark sister hates the fair sister, and one morning, when the two girls ride together through the forest to bring candles to the village church, the dark sister secretly opens the fair sister's bread and slips a toad inside. Then, in the depths of the forest, she turns...
Soon the fair sister meets three hungry goatherds. When she offers to share her bread with them, the toad jumps out. "The herdsmen three," the ballad continues, "took her to wife/ And then from her they took her life./ Her body in the mire they lay/ And with her garments went away." That night the murderers take shelter at a farmhouse, unaware that the farm belongs to the father (Max von Sydow) of their victim. When they offer to sell him the girl's garments, he slaughters them like the animals they are. Then he rushes through the forest...
...Like the ballad that inspired it. The Virgin Spring is a myth, and as a myth it is treated in this film. Bergman's style, usually subtle and allusive, is startlingly simple. The script, written under Bergman's supervision by Novelist Ulla Isaksson, who also did the screenplay for Brink of Life, is as clear and grave as a Mass. The actors, as always finely disciplined by Bergman, behave as formally as acolytes. The photography is as beautiful as it generally is in Bergman's pictures, but if anything more plain-there are very few cute shots...
Adds Viederman: "Nothing is sacred. Even the old bawdy ballad called 'Barnacle Bill the Sailor' takes on a new look." The Russian version...