Word: mesmerizer
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...Magician (Swedish). Writer-Director Ingmar Bergman's latest public fantasy, full of sharp physical images and foggy symbols; the story of a mid-19th century Mesmer and his touring Magnetic Health Theater, whose members include his wife (Ingrid Thulin), masquerading as a male helper, his witch grandmother, an ailing actor and an oversexed coachman...
Bergman's magician (Max von Sydow) is a mid-19th century Mesmer whose touring Magnetic Health Theater is entirely composed of psychological castaways: the magician's wife (Ingrid Thulin), masquerading as a male helper; his witch-grandmother; an ailing, tosspot actor; and a silly, sex-ridden coachman. Headed for Stockholm by coach, the troupe is stopped by police at a tollgate, taken into the custody of three local notables and challenged to prove its supernatural powers. As the magician prepares for the performance, his associates get seduced by the kitchen help, the hostess has hysterics, and grandma hands...
...other terms than Miss Kilgallen's. Even Bernstein's syntax makes his motives suspect. For the author, age regression is a "stunning spectacle." Speaking of his "opposition," he blithely remarks, "Men of science are, after all, human beings, basically the same kind of men who opposed Galileo, Mesmer, Newton...
Whirlpool (20th Century-Fox). "WARNING!" cry the ads for this picture. "If you are easily hypnotized, don't see it alone." The copywriter must have confused the hypnotic with the soporific. As the latest case history in five-reel psychiatry, with some Mesmer thrown in, the movie is a Freudian slip...
Hint from a Hypnotist. Austrian Anton Mesmer, who gave his name (mesmerism) to a technique now called hypnotism, has been called a faker. More likely, some modern psychiatrists think, he was a stupid man who blundered into an idea too big for him: the phenomena of suggestion and suggestibility. A Frenchman, Jean Martin Charcot, demonstrated that hypnotism could both arouse and quiet symptoms of hysteria. Charcot also bid for fame as the teacher of a Viennese neurologist named Sigmund Freud (rhymes with overjoyed...