Word: soderberg
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Adapted from a 1906 drama by Swedish Playwright Hjalmar Soderberg, Gertrud dawdles over the plight of an Ibsenish opera singer, a free and independent woman who regards love as unconditional surrender. "The man must belong to me completely," she says, and all intimations of psychological complexity stop right there. Having long since abandoned a famous erotic poet on grounds that he gave too much of himself to his stanzas, Gertrud is about to leave her husband (Bendt Rothe), a lawyer with Cabinet-level aspirations. Briefly, she tries a flighty playboy-pianist who decides that "the complete absorption of one another...
Even the Swedes were dismayed by Soderberg's grim-grey novel when it was published in 1910, but today it is recognized as a Scandinavian masterpiece. Dr. Glas has never made love because the act seems too gross. One day a local beauty comes to Glas with a problem: her clergyman husband keeps insisting on his connubial rights, even though her heart belongs to another. That other, she intimates, is Glas. The doctor sees his duty. He must rescue the lady from rape. One afternoon. Glas slips a potassium cyanide pill into the clergyman's Vichy water...