Word: sydow
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Hawaii purports to be a saga of the ruin of a perfect, if primitive, society at the hands of imperialistic religious zealots, come from New England to bring Christianity to the heathens. The script focuses on Abner Hale (Max von Sydow), a dense Bible-thumping Reverend who blunders proudly into the Hawaiian islands with his wife Jerusha (Julie Andrews) and, in the course of a generation, corrupts the island he has come to save, wearing out his wife in the process.Hawaii, then, has pretensions toward huge themes: the conflict between love of God and love of women, the problem...
...appear in a state of nature and fill the giant screen with impressive outcroppings of what Hawaiians call papaia. What's more, the principals play with aplomb. Julie Andrews brings both sensuality and sensibility to a role that might easily have wallowed in sweetness and light. And Von Sydow is superb as the parson. He plays him larger than life: as a personification of the historic battle between the Puritan psychosis and the natural man, as a Parson Davidson who encounters, instead of Sadie Thompson, Mother Nature herself...
...page bestseller that has SOLD 4,000,000 copies, backed his investment with a wad that less than a century ago would have bought the island the picture is named after. For $14,000,000 he got Panavision, Color by Deluxe, top-chop talent (Julie Andrews, Max von Sydow, Richard Harris), two shrewd scripters (Dalton Trumbo and Daniel Taradash), and a director (George Roy Hill) whose dependability is warm milk to any producer's ulcer...
...hero (Von Sydow) is a prune-faced New England parson insuperably identified with deity. Blankly unable to perceive that the islanders are more Christian than the Christians, this religious imperialist with ruthless righteousness throws down their god of love and raises up in its stead a god of wrath. With their religion in ruins, the Hawaiians lie open to all the blessings of civilization: whisky, syphilis and economic exploitation. By film's end the native nation in only 50 years has withered from 400,000 to less than 150,000 souls, and the parson is forced to assume...
There is Max von Sydow, the moody, beautiful Swede who made his U.S. debut last winter as Christ in The Greatest Story Ever Told. Still speaking as though he had just finished the Sermon on the Mount, he plays Scott Swenson, a barnstorming crop duster who crashes his plane in northern Mexico and is held by the police for demolishing a water tower. To raise money, he tells the police captain of an old enemy he has seen a moment ago driving through town with a blonde; this fellow just happens to have a price...