Word: bergmans
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Casablanca, where even the cameos are memorable and throwaway lines seem pregnant with mysterious meaning. Everyone who says anything in Murder on the Orient Express is a distinguished, if not a great, actor or actress. It's silly, but a lot of fun, to have an actress like Ingrid Bergman playing a Scandanavian nanny who "was born backwards" and has visions of "little brown babies" and talks like a night-club comic imitating Greta Garbo...
They got Albert Finney to play Hercule Poirot. They also got, in alphabetical order as protocol dictates, Lauren Bacall, Martin Balsam, Ingrid Bergman, Jacqueline Bisset, Jean-Pierre Cassel, Sean Connery, John Gielgud, Wendy Hiller, Anthony Perkins, Vanessa Redgrave, Rachel Roberts, Richard Widmark and Michael York, all as murder suspects. And still they got nothing...
...idea is that everything will be more interesting if Sean Connery or Ingrid Bergman, rather than the characters they play, is suspected of having committed the foul deed. The device does not work, despite the occasionally droll efforts of most of the cast, among whom Connery, Bergman. Redgrave and Widmark are the most effective. Everyone seems to have had a good time lurking about in the Calais coach in his posh 1930s duds. But the amusement is a little offputting. It is like watching a few people enjoy themselves at a party that hardly anyone else can bear...
...another factor is the open-endedness caused by cutting the movie from 300 minutes of Swedish TV to three hours for U.S. theaters. Bergman made all the cuts himself, dropping most of the minor characters--even the pair's children--and cutting references to them in other places. The film, as cut, is all of one piece, but it leaves out so much that it isn't the same work. It seems, from the published screenplay, that the film he released is like a violent sketch for a larger, more detailed painting that would lose sensation because it covered...
ENDING OUR MARRIAGES makes us reborn, Bergman seems to say, and he may be edging near the truth. The marriage he shows came from a social base where everything worked against it, and the new lives of the reawakened partners seem no more fulfilling. But if Marianne and Johan have even a slightly better idea of what went wrong, they may pass on that little bit of wisdom--speeding the apocalyptic day when love won't conquer anyone but will make peace with all, in an age of sense and reason and sexual equality. But it's not even clear...