Word: bergmanic
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...excitement is not just box office. This season Broadway has offered something for everyone. Oscar Winner Ellen Burstyn is back in the hit comedy Same Time, Next Year, Rex Harrison and Julie Harris star in In Praise of Love, and Ingrid Bergman is in The Constant Wife. Cleavon Little escaped Mel Brooks' clutches long enough to run off with the notices in Murray Schisgal's flip farce All Over Town, and Elizabeth Ashley returned triumphantly in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. The British sent over a generation of stars, including Alec McCowen and Diana Rigg playing together...
When it comes to the stage, Ingrid Bergman dotes on second-rate plays. In recent years she has appeared in inferior O'Neill (More Stately Mansions), hand-me-down Shaw (Captain Brassbound's Conversion), and now in fossilized Maugham. Bergman has treated each of these dilapidated vehicles as if it were the Queen's own royal barouche wheeling through the gates of Buckingham Palace. Indeed, Elizabeth II would not fault Bergman's acting technique-a tilt of the head, a flash of a smile and the wave of a hand...
...Constant Wife, Bergman is Constance Middleton, an amiable, idle woman who plays hostess to life in a well-appointed drawing room. Her husband John (Jack Gwillim) is a prosperous Harley Street surgeon who is having an affair with Constance's best friend, a blonde married flibbertigibbet. Omniscient as Sherlock Holmes and calmative as Candida, Constance knows all about it and does not wish to be told. But friends will tell...
...need variety," he says. "After clanging my balls as Sonny, I deliberately chose the mild Billy Buddish sailor in Liberty." He played a tall, sexy version of the short, unsexy Billy Rose with zest in Funny Lady "because I wanted to do a musical." Even if Ingmar Bergman summoned, Jimmy would go only for one, "possibly two" pictures. He is not brash; he simply wishes to avoid ruts, typecasting and difficult colleagues. "Otherwise," he says, "it's three months of pain...
...flaws, Ullmann has a thin voice with a narrow, monotonous range. In a Bergman film, with its still, deep pauses, this is not immediately apparent, but onstage it becomes a cumulative irritant. Ullmann's English is good, but not quite good enough. Taking the skylark and "little squirrel" imagery of the play literally, she skitters about the stage like a sandpiper. This does not destroy Nora's coquettishness, but it certainly diminishes it. There seems to be an arbitrary rhetoric of motions with which Ullmann plays the role. When she fears that her husband Torvald (Sam Waterston) will...