Word: bergman
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...Wilson, as Sam, plays a little something of his own-Rick's smoky Club:Americain where Claude Rains wins at roulete, where Bergnan's arrival earns Sam's state-Peter Lorre's escape, Sydney Greenstreet and the Blue escape, Sydney Greenstreet and the Blue Parrot. Conard Veidt, Bogart and Bergman and a lighthouse. It's the best melodrama, with unforgettable mood and many great characterizations. Director Michaell Curtiz integrated all the sentiment, all the style, to make a movie to be seen a dozen times...
...Bergman's films, the story-the premise-is meticulously simple. Two women, Karin (Ingrid Thulin) and Maria (Liv Ullmann), care for their sister Agnes (Harriet Andersson), who is dying of some awful unspecified illness. As they attend her during her last days, they remember and relive old memories of childhood, of deep bitterness and irresolvable rivalries. They touch each other, torment each other. The only source of strength in this stately, silent household is the stolid maid Anna (Kari Sylwan), whose own daughter has died and who lavishes all her love and her tenderness on Agnes...
...trouble with this, the reason that we cannot fully accept it, is that Bergman's anguish is so much more intense than this final fillip of grace. The despair is so much deeper than the redemption. There are but a few fleeting glimpses from Agnes' diary; perhaps there ought to have been more, to serve both as balance and counterpoint. There should certainly have been more about the men in the film, who are shadows and ciphers. The single most shattering scene in the film becomes, for this reason, unnecessarily oblique. Preparing herself for bed one evening, Karin...
...film, set unspecifically near the turn of the century, recalls Bergman's National Theatre staging of Hedda Gabler. Here, as in that production, the dominant color motif is red of a dark, smothering, somehow vaguely menacing hue. "Don't ask me why it must be so because I don't know," Bergman writes in the Cries and Whispers screenplay. Perhaps it is because "ever since my childhood I have pictured the inside of the soul as a moist membrane in shades of red." Both Hedda Gabler and this film share, too, a careful choreography of movement, with...
...Part of Bergman's genius has always been his awesome skill with actors. No one is quite so successful in stripping them of all artifice and cutting in so close to their very being. Each of the four actresses in Cries and Whispers is perfect, and no one is permitted to be supreme. Bergman orchestrates them scrupulously, so that the film is the very definition of flawless ensemble playing. Kari Sylwan, the only one of the quar tet unfamiliar from previous Bergman films, gives Anna a strange, almost mys tical sense of strength. Liv Ullmann's Maria...