Word: goulding
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...lovers speak English to each other and Swedish is spoken when the Blochs are at home. In the version we saw, currently playing at the E.M. Loew's Fine Arts Cinema II in Portland, Me.--beneath the unpromising marquee "Directed by Inga Bergman"--everyone speaks English, except for Gould, who for all the world sounds like Charles Bronson in a Japanese shootem-up. And Bergman's sententious (nee "sensitive") English script pays no more attention to the way people really talk than Gould's jerky rendition pays to the way they screw. That about does it for the language...
...certainly the film's most memorable frames--with the probable exception of the donkey, who appears briefly in a slide show staged for David's entertainment. ("Andreas," David muffles, "can't I see a picture of your wife NOOOD?") But seriously, von Sydow's performance in a confrontation with Gould, and in one with his wife, is miles above everything else in this hokey genre-piece, the latter scene giving him the opportunity to proclaim with Bergmanic suggestiveness that "this drama has been going on for two years; how long can suffering be prolonged?" Something deep within us sighs...
...film's unguarded moments. Bourgeois society is given another well-deserved kick in the head, and there is some heavy talk about this Madonna which is being eaten by maggots, and they don't know how it got there. There is also some stuff about communication, and Gould gets the chance to glower the word "touch", or one of its close derivatives, an astounding seven times in the space of a single breathless close...
...interesting to see a garbage movie by a great director: the Bergman attention to detail is there, the symbolism machine churning, with ingenuity if without a point or poignancy. But somehow Bergman's most basic instincts have failed him. It is said he decided to cast Gould in The Touch after seeing not MASH, but I Love My Wife, where Gould, fresh from Candy Bergen and Getting Straight, and well on his way to becoming an almost-was, turned in a performance as smarmy as the one he gives here...
Providentially, the opening of The Touch in Cambridge this week coincides with Gould's much-heralded appearance here to receive the Lampoon's Worst Actor of the Year award. Gould's ingratiating good-guy performance at Sanders Theater last weekend, before a stink of cantankerous thrill-seekers (including many bolsheviks and "hippies"), was demonstration perhaps that he is rank only on film, and might live happily and successfully as ice cream man or door-to-door stockbroker. To betoken our good will, we have deleted from paragraph five a particularly gratuitous and leering reference to Barbra "Color Me Barbra" Streisand...