Word: bergmans
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...have nothing against Alec Guinness. Each of the films you mentioned has played here at least once, but how can you seriously propose that a festival of his films would be preferable to a retrospective of Bergman's art? You are comparing a group of good commercial films with the life work of a director who has won himself a place in the history of the cinema...
Your opinion of Bergman's films is certainly a rash statement. After the first Bergman Festival opened in New York, the conservative New York Times called the retrospective "rare movie-going fare..." from a director "whose striking ideas and imagination have greatly enriched the movie medium over the last two decades." At the opposite end of the spectrum, the weekly Village Voice urged its readers to attend the Festival...
...sure Mr. Bergman would be pleased by your inference that his films are crassly commercial while those of Guinness are for "we happy few." Bergman has always entertained the hope that his work would reach a larger public, but I think it only fair to state that the most successful of his films are less profitable than even minor ones featuring Alec Guinness...
From July 29 until the beginning of September the Air Conditioned Brattle Theatre, as it has taken to calling itself, will present some 18 movies directed by Ingmar Bergman. These are billed, collectively, as the second half of the Brattle's "seventh annual summer film festival." Well, that kind of program is no summer festival: Bergman has made one masterpiece (Wild Strawberries), and two movies worth seeing (The Seventh Seal and Smiles of a Summer Night), but the rest of his movies are either bad or silly...
...away from them. The Brattle people, you see, are also (as Janua Films, Inc.) the national distributors of every Bergman movie. Consequently, Bergman to them is sound economics, which means solid profit. Which means the Brattle has sold...