Word: bergman
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Bradbury wrote the excellent script of John Huston's movie version of Moby Dick; and his novel Dandelion Wine was a firm, straightforward remembrance of a youth in Illinois. His science fiction, however, has drawn him into a world he never dreamed of entering. Ingmar Bergman corresponds with him. Fran?ois Truffaut is writing the scenario for the movie version of his novel Fahrenheit 451. Christopher Isherwood has compared Bradbury to Edgar Allan Poe. And Ilya Ehrenburg says that he is one of the five most popular American writers in the Soviet Union, along with Hemingway, Faulkner, Steinbeck...
Guided by Director George Cukor, who had played Pygmalion to many a Hollywood Galatea (Garbo in Camille, Ingrid Bergman in Gaslight), she exquisitely personifies "a squashed cabbage leaf" transformed into an English rose. Her comedy scenes are delectable, her charm ineluctable, and her first appearance among society folk at Ascot-in a gown created by Designer Cecil Beaton, whose art nouveau sets and costumes are a splendid show in themselves-is one of those great movie moments seldom accomplished without the help of brass bands and fireworks. And Hepburn tops that when she begins describing, in precise Mayfair accents...
...black-veiled mistresses and his wife. Flashbacks detail the end of the great man's life in a series of slapstick sketches played against the ricky-tick accompaniment of Yes! We Have No Bananas. In the sprawling Villa Tremolo, where he keeps his women (among them such Bergman favorites as Eva Dahlbeck, Bibi Andersson and Harriet Andersson), Maestro Felix is heard but seldom seen. The women are the issue, for the artist's playthings, like his public, adore him, scorn him, help him, hinder him, pay him all the tributes that mediocrity pays to genius-and when...
...Bergman's primary target is the foppish critic (Jarl Kulle) who sniffs out the "personal details" of Felix's life, even appropriates one of his mistresses. He composes critical jargon so dense that he himself cannot penetrate it ("What the hell do I mean by that?"), writes atrocious music, and finally wheedles Felix into playing it. Once compromised, the cellist collapses, corporeally and artistically kaput...
Despite an occasional stab of wit, Bergman's portrait of the artist as the victim of his fickle followers and corrupt critics, if it is funny at all, is heavy, testy humor. Teeth clenched, he wields the apparatus of slapstick boldly, but draws neither laughs nor blood because his northern variations on 8½ do not lend themselves to pie-in-the-face comedy. Even the most accomplished cinema stylist can scarcely hope, perhaps, to be the Fellini of the frost belt and a Scandinavian Sennett at the same time...