Word: bergmans
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...great performances; of a heart attack; in Los Angeles. He was known, to his occasional annoyance, as a woman's director for his ability to evoke inspired work from many of the great actresses of the 1930s and '40s, including Academy Award-winning performances by Ingrid Bergman (in Gaslight, 1944) and Judy Holliday (in Bom Yesterday, 1950) and memorable ones by Greta Garbo in Camille, Judy Garland in A Star Is Born, and Katharine Hepburn, Cukor's discovery, in ten productions, including The Philadelphia Story and Adam's Rib. Cukor also directed James Stewart, Ronald Colman...
...hasn't worked out that way. Directors have generally been content either to substitute handsome actors for the singers supplying the sound track or simply to shoot a stage production. A breakthrough came in 1975, when Ingmar Bergman produced a charming The Magic Flute that began in a replica of Stockholm's 18th century Drottningholm Court Theater and from time to time moved beyond the confines of the stage. Even more ambitious was Joseph Losey's mesmeric Don Giovanni (1979), expansively set amid the Palladian splendors of northern Italy...
...European film makers were finding it harder to attract attention, especially in the American market. The "art houses" of the 1960s, where a United Nations of cinema once reigned, now play host to mainstream movies from the suburbs of Los Angeles. Critics' groups, which had regularly knighted Ingmar Bergman and Federico Fellini, now bestow their awards on Steven Spielberg and Sydney Pollack. With many American critics, moviemakers and moviegoers on a slumming spree, the intellectual cachet of European films has been broken. But there is still cinematic ingenuity to be found outside the U.S., and sometimes even...
...dressed in an off-white suit: Victor Laszlo, played by Paul Henreid. Henreid is still alive. So, for that matter, is Ronald Reagan, whom Jack Warner originally wanted for the part of Victor. (All wrong, too American, as wholesome as a quart of milk.) But Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman and Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet and Claude Rains and Conrad Veidt are all dead. The movie they made has achieved a peculiar state of permanence. It has become something more than a classic. It is practically embedded in the collective American unconscious...
...Kiss me as though it were the last time! . . . Play it, Sam. Play As Time Goes By ... I saved my first drink to have with you. . . Round up the usual suspects . . . We'll always have Paris. It has inspired bits of business: Sydney Greenstreet bowing graciously to Ingrid Bergman in the Blue Parrot and then with brutal abstraction swatting a fly, which for the instant becomes the moral equivalent of any refugee in Casablanca. Or the alltime triumphant moment of literal-minded symbol-banging exposition: Claude Rains dropping the bottle of Vichy Water into a wastebasket and giving...