Word: vicars
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Certainly Bergman has the makings of an excellent comedy. Working from the Irish proverb, "A woman's chastity is a sty in the eye of the Devil," he develops the story of a devil plagued with a sore eye, which his advisors attribute to a Swedish vicar's careful daughter. The arch fiend considers his resources and finally decides Don Juan is the man to remedy the situation...
...devil dispatches him to the surface to relieve the girl of her virtue. The don is accompanied by his manservant, Pablo, and an assistant demon to keep everyone in line. They contrive to meet the vicar, who introduces them to his wife and daughter. Pablo immediately seduces the vicar's wife, and Don Juan begins on the daughter. The great lover--whom Bergman has made the personification of the "greasy, plastered-down look"--finds, however, that the girl will not be seduced. Instead she offers to give herself to him out of pity. In the end he falls hopelessly...
...done it in a way that only Bergman could. He has overemphasized the character of the vicar, and used him as a vehicle to examine some very un-comic but typically Bergman questions. The vicar is naive; he is also a man of god. The problem of whether or not the vicar's naivete in some way protects him from the world in which he lives, or the question of how much of his faith is the result of his blindness to the facts of his own existence, are not fit topics for comedy. They may be of immense interest...
...skill. He makes the most of Martin's charm, the least of Hayward's flim-flamboyance. And in Ralph Meeker he viciously personifies the police power in a native Fascist regime. But it is Actor White-a British trouper usually cast as a potty colonel, a flaccid vicar, or a dear old rose fiend in Sussex-who domi nates the audience as a waving cobra fascinates a mouse. With his small, reptilian grin and oily suppleness, he conveys the immemorial image of the big political snake, the everlasting reason why you can't fight city hall...
...intolerance got reinforcements too. When a former Congregational chapel on Smethwick's main street was converted into a temple to serve the Indian Sikhs who have recently settled in the town, there were fresh mutterings of alien influences. The Anglican vicar of St. Michael's and All Angels Church lamented in his parish magazine that a building which had long been used for Christian worship was now "being renovated, decorated and adapted as a temple for black people to preach what we have always spoken of as heathen rites...