Word: bergmans
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...Bergman's Winter Light, 6:35, 9:35, weekends at 3:35; The Naked Night, 8 p.m., weekends...
...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...
...bungled by being to flatly spelled-out; the flashbacks are too insistent, show too much. Everything is reduced to a simple formula; each murderer gets his motive neatly assigned to him. The energy is lost that should be generated in any room containing John Gielgud, Wendy Hiller, Ingrid Bergman et al. Lumet doesn't seem to realize that such energy won't generate itself, that he has to do something to make it happen. The pace of his film is slow, so slow at the beginning that you can enjoy it purely as an atmosphere picture, as the camera takes...
Clearly, the aim here is oblique; the all-star cast is being used to reflect some sort of distortion upon itself. Something should happen when Ingrid Bergman parodies her idealistic, spiritual Elsa of thirty years ago. Nothing does; it's played for laughs. Maybe when you have such an assemblage of fine actors and actresses, you assume they can take care of themselves. Lumet seems to have concentrated on keeping the dialogue sparse, and the characterization quick and neat. The result is like a museum restoration with a very serious curator but subject matter laughably warped out of shape...
...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...