Word: bergmanic
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...that headline writers identify him by his initials alone: P.G. He has a small circle of close friends: professors, psychiatrists and other intellectuals; he relishes their barbs at business because they challenge him to "see the other side." He is married to a social worker, who looks like a Bergman beauty. He has written three books about society, industry, the future. He is a world-class sailor and plays a folk guitar. At 34, he became president of Sweden's largest insurance company. At 36, he rose to president of Scandinavia's biggest industrial combine, Volvo...
Director-Writer Robert Benton and his cast have made their own Scenes from a Marriage-a domestic drama that starts at a wrenching pitch and builds and builds to the threshold of pain. Yet the film is not imitation Bergman; it is, above all, peculiarly American. Adapting a popular novel by Avery Corman, Benton tells an unpretentious story that might well have served such vintage Hollywood tearjerkers as George Stevens' Penny Serenade and King Vidor's Stella Dallas...
...Ingmar Bergman's Magic Flute, always cited as the best-realized opera film prior to Don Giovanni, neatly sidestepped all the conceptual problems of the hybrid genre--it pretended to be a filmed record of a performance in a provincial opera house, with shots of the audience thrown in to be sure you understood the universality of Mozart's message. Losey never wavers from his no-holds-barred outdoors staging, using the Palladio villas near Vicenza as an occasional refuge from the bright sun that over-exposes many of the scenes...
...wheatfield. In Don Giovanni, when the camera zooms in on a singer's mouth, the voice becomes more distinct and louder--and you can tell simply by listening whether a singer is indoors or out. Losey's dubbing technique, too, seems more precise and less distracting than most, including Bergman's. Only one singer, Malcolm King as Masetto, suffers from the "disconnected mouth" disease endemic to filmed singers...
Despite the musical ambition implicit in the international cast and the Paris Opera name (Bergman used an all-Swedish cast for his Magic Flute), this Don Giovanni is musically undistinguished. Lorin Maazel's conducting sounds muddy and sluggish throughout--which could easily be the fault of the Exeter Street's Rocky Horror-blasted sound system. None of the singers does very much of the ornamentation most music scholars today believe was a critical part of performances in the composer's time. Most of all, there's a surprisingly lackadaisical air about Mozart's music as Losey presents it--as though...