Word: magician
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...casting news of the Hollywood year: Swedish Actor Max von Sydow, 31, has been chosen to play Jesus Christ in The Greatest Story Ever Told. One of the ablest members of Ingmar Bergman's close-knit film and theater team, Von Sydow was the mysterious hero of The Magician, the God-haunted knight in The Seventh Seal, the avenging father in The Virgin Spring. When the Hollywood offer came, says Von Sydow, "I thought with horror of Cecil B. DeMille and such things as Samson and Delilah and The Ten Commandments. But when I saw the script, I decided...
Rosenberg excavates two late eighteenth century novels, Lewis' The Monk and Godwin's St. Leon, which portray the isolated Jew as black magician, and traces their lineage from Cartaphilus to DuMaurier's Svengali. In Trilby "the myths of Judas and of Cartaphilus met in the figure of a Victorian bogey-hypnotist...
...that Bergman, Eugenie. Ingmar Bergman, the director. The name of the movie is The Magician, and it's a very fine show. It's very metaphysical and allegorical, and it has excellent photography...
Then, there is the film's theme--I found, among many contenders, the conflict between Illusion and Reality most consistently referred to. Bergman seems especially fond of dropping hints that the real danger lies deeper than surface appearance. He emphasizes the unreal disguises of the magician and his wife as one of the reflections of this metaphysical concept--a crude and uninventive metaphor, I find. These admirable, is unoriginal, sentiments appear in a morass of conflicting counter-theories. Accident and the completely gratuitous introduction of the bizarre for mere effect add to the confusion--though they contribute immeasurably...
Though it does insist on this shadow-boxing with Symbol and Idea, Bergman's film remains a thrilling experience for its technically perfect rendition of the mysterious. As a work of surface brilliance, The Magician represents Bergman at the zenith of his considerable powers...