Word: sydow
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...island off the coast of Sweden live a cadaverous, obsessed painter (Max von Sydow) and his pregnant wife (Liv Ullman). The time is summer, and Von Sydow is slowly going mad. He is terrified by demons, people whom he sees and fears. One is a homosexual, another a 216-year-old woman who keeps threatening to take off her hat-and her face. Gradually infected with her husband's aberrations, Ullman looks up from her yard one day and sees the ancient crone. Soon the artist and his wife are invited to a haunted castle where the Draculalike Baron...
Shattered Shards. As he traces the history of Von Sydow's agonies, Bergman draws almost too straight a line: as a boy, the painter was chastised by his parents, locked in a dark closet, then caned repeatedly by his father until he begged forgiveness from his mother. As Von Sydow descends into insanity, he keeps re-enacting that scene in the closet. His dread of the dark, his punishment and redemption, are constantly replayed; the characters who destroy him are shards of his shattered personality that, by direct transference, come to obsess his wife...
Bergman does not mean his story to be taken solely on the literal level. Von Sydow is also the Creative Artist beset by the bourgeoisie; the island is a metaphor of man's tragic isolation from :he mainland of humanity. Though he has glaring faults as a scenarist, Director Bergman is supreme in handling us troupe; the actors, like Sven Nykvist's phosphorescent photography can ender reality and surreality without missing a heartbeat. Von Sydow is gothically brilliant as the madman; Ullman's ragedienne reinforces her position-already secured by Persona-as one of Scandmavia...
SUNDAY NIGHT MOVIE (ABC, 9-11 p.m.). ABC presents its own production of The Diary of Anne Frank, with Diane Davila as Anne, supported by Max von Sydow, Lilli Palmer, Viveca Lindfors, Donald Pleasence, Theodore Bikel, Marisa Pavan...
...Daniel Taradash and Dalton Trumbo's script manages to establish any characterization at all, it does so by repetition rather than incisive writing. The Reverend Hale, played Swedishly by von Sydow, is so unswervingly dogmatic about his job that he soon exhausts the audience, which watches his predictable life-story with bovine good nature, groaning "Oh no, not again!" at his every line. Julie Andrews stoically survives the pangs of sexual frustration, the pain of childbirth, and the ravages of time, until the make-up department decides she can't take any more, at which point she is allowed...