Word: devilled
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Council of 1869-70, even though it was the first churchwide convocation in more than 300 years, did little more than define papal infallibility before it broke up at the onset of the Franco-Prussian War. Thus, in its present battle against the secular world, the flesh and the devil, Roman Catholicism lumbers along on a centuries-old collection of codes, rites and practices, many of which hinder rather than help its missionary objectives in the modern world. Among the significant issues that the council must face...
Seeing The Devil's Eye makes one wish Ingmar Bergman would stop playing with his damn symbols for a while and just tell a story. If he had been willing to do so, this film might have been the funniest comedy of the year. As it stands, it is merely a confused tale, that never says enough humorously or seriously to make it worth the bother...
Certainly Bergman has the makings of an excellent comedy. Working from the Irish proverb, "A woman's chastity is a sty in the eye of the Devil," he develops the story of a devil plagued with a sore eye, which his advisors attribute to a Swedish vicar's careful daughter. The arch fiend considers his resources and finally decides Don Juan is the man to remedy the situation...
...devil dispatches him to the surface to relieve the girl of her virtue. The don is accompanied by his manservant, Pablo, and an assistant demon to keep everyone in line. They contrive to meet the vicar, who introduces them to his wife and daughter. Pablo immediately seduces the vicar's wife, and Don Juan begins on the daughter. The great lover--whom Bergman has made the personification of the "greasy, plastered-down look"--finds, however, that the girl will not be seduced. Instead she offers to give herself to him out of pity. In the end he falls hopelessly...
...Devil's Eye is a film that does not do what it was intended to do, or even what it starts out to do. By posing questions more suited to a medieval morality play than to a fantasy of love and seduction, Bergman has lost his chance to produce what could have been one of the finest foreign films of the year...