Word: otto
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...with such vivid realism that they could be sold today as luxury condominiums. Eisenstein's residence comes equipped with a spacious sun porch; Prince Orlofsky's pleasure palace boasts both a grand foyer and a palm-court refectory that make Maxim's look understated. When it comes to grandeur, Otto Schenk and Gunther Schneider-Siemssen's magnum of a production has popped its cork...
Anyone who reads has toured parts of this fun house before. Budd Schulberg and Nathanael West spurned it in novels. Elderly actresses and directors have told gaudy lies to their tape recorders. What Author Otto Friedrich contributes in City of Nets (Harper & Row; 512 pages; $25) is a lucid, darkly funny recounting that threads the loopy stories and the titanic egos into a coherent narrative. Friedrich, a TIME senior writer, clearly cherishes the surreal nuttiness of Hollywood's great days...
SENIOR WRITERS: Ezra Bowen, George J. Church, Gerald Clarke, Richard Corliss, Otto Friedrich, Paul Gray, Robert Hughes, Gregory Jaynes, John Leo, Ed Magnuson, Lance Morrow, Frederick Painton, Roger Rosenblatt, R. Z. Sheppard, William E. Smith, Frank Trippett...
...that plague Alexander (Erland Josephson), a former actor and disaffected professor. He has retired to his Swedish summer home to celebrate his birthday, and as the film opens we see him planting a tree on the beach with his son, Little Man (Tommy Kjellqvist), attended by the local postman, Otto (Allan Edwall). The opening shot is awesome--10 minutes long, sustained and uncut, the camera moving with snail-like fury closer and closer toward the central characters. By the time we see their faces, we're desperate to, hungry to; Tarkovsky knows how to engage his audience...
...clown-angel, Otto, terrified by Leonardo Da Vinci and forever mussing his unkempt hair, Edwall gives the performance of a career. Too often in Bergman's films has he been relegated to the position of sideline eccentric; here, as the holy fool, he takes center stage. Edwall seems to take unending delight at sticking his rear at the camera; it's the least of his magic tricks in a role that has him walking through glass walls, pirouetting on a bicycle, and taking rabbit punches from passing evil angels. The only problem is that Edwall's Otto forever upstages...