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Archive for the ‘Ingrid Bergman: SCREEN GODDESS’ Category

Adam Had Four Sons

31 Jul

Adam Had Four Sons – Directed by Gregory Ratoff. A governess raises four motherless sons happily until one of them marries a minx. 81 minutes Black and White 1941.

* * *

Fay Wray, who plays the mother who dies, said of Bergman, “Her heart was so in the film.  She treated the film as though it were the most important one ever done. I knew this was a girl who had to be an actress or her heart would surely break. She wasn’t working for the money, for fame, for success, even for fun, but because she had to be an actress.” And this Bergman said of herself, and it is certainly to her credit. But it is odd to contemplate how often she was seen as the same sort of actress, that of a stalwart milkmaid who is much put-upon. In role after role this is the character she plays. Ratoff directed her first American film; this is her second; the pattern is in place. And I wonder why? Why did people see only that in her? The role is not an inheritance of the females in film before that, for from Mary Pickford on most major female stars were powerhouses. Bergman, however, is always servile. Her endurance is there to carry her through many reels of her being abused. And her radiant smile is there to attest to her beauty. But just as she is almost always photographed three-quarters from the left, we only see her as hard-done-to, always only Joan of Arc. Here she is quite good in a film that is not. Two sets of four young males clutter up the screen with false exuberance and Warren William presents a stolid bourgeois father for romance. Bergman’s heartfelt relations with the boys is lovely to behold, but the story crumbles through too many of the same ingredients, the last being the introduction of Susan Hayward as a slatternly wife of one of them. She’s full of herself and very good. So is Bergman. You’ve got to hand it to her.  You may lament her casting, but her heart is in it.

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Under Capricorn

11 Jul

Under Capricorn – Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Costume Melodrama. An early 19th Century rake from Ireland is sent to Australia where he cleans up the marriage of a childhood friend and noblewoman now married to a rich peasant landholder. 117 minutes Color 1949.

* * * *

Not a suspense story, but rather one more along the lines of Rebecca, the story of a marriage threatened by a dark past, it is a film which rewards study. It was filmed, as was Rope, in long takes, looping through rooms and circling around and around, and it also involved the longest monologues you’ve ever heard, and it is good to hear them. The great Jack Cardiff filmed it, so it is velvet in motion. Looking wonderful in Regency costumes, Michael Wilding plays the playboy younger son out to make his fortune if he does not have to raise a sweat to do so. His long face moves so curiously that it’s rather hard to understand his craft as an actor, particularly when so many of his lines are rushed, as is the way with English actors of that era. It has five principal roles, three English, one Swedish, one American. Cecil Parker, Margaret Leighton, Wilding, Joseph Cotton and Ingrid Bergman as his drunken wife. And it becomes obvious what is wrong with that mélange. Joseph Cotton is what is wrong, and it throws the entire film. He is miscast. He is supposed to be an ex-Irish stable boy who has married a milady, Bergman, well above his station. In the film, he is the one who suffers most, because of this class difference. But we never believe for a minute that he is a peasant. His opening moment is wonderful, as he enters a bank with a well-earned ruthlessness that has given him character. But he looses that thereafter, and ends up being just a middle-class American. Neither he nor Bergman tries for an Irish accent. Bergman always felt the public liked her Swedish accent, and she was right, they did. And Cotton just speaks American. Class accents are enormously important in distinguishing caste; Margaret Leighton is the only one who knows this. But the problem is that Burt Lancaster is not playing the part. (Of course there were no Michael Caines or Sean Connerys at that time.) Bergman plays her usual put-upon dame. She has no fight, she has no moxie. She never evinces the dash attributed to her. Being a victim was also what she figured her public wanted. She brings her peerless complexion to the character and a world-class charm in scenes with Cecil Parker. But the rest of the time she is making pastry. She brings a steady emotionalism of the role to bear, but was she ever deeply engaged emotionally in any part she ever played? In a way, I’ve got to hand it to her. There was something in her limited artistic imagination that allowed her audiences’ imaginations to fill in the blank. However, I found the film fascinating as a study of Hitchcock’s story-telling devices. Under Capricorn has been much maligned: notorious for not being Notorious. Instead, think of Rebecca and enjoy.

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Joan Of Arc

11 Jul

Joan of Arc – Directed by Victor Fleming. A teenage country girl is inspired to save France, does it, and is punished for her trouble. Two and a half hours Color 1947.

*

One wonders what Ingrid Bergman saw in this story. She had always wanted to play it; she had done it on the New York stage; she was to make an Italian movie of it later; she was to perform Claudel and Honegger’s version of it on the European stage. The illiterate lass had the spirit of a brazen adolescent (as in G.B. Shaw) and at 17 bent her steps for King Louis’ court to win back the key city of Orleans from the Burgundians and to crown Louis at Rheims Cathedral, which she did. Not content to sit out her fame at his court, she defied Louis, raised an army of her own, and in battle after battle never won another, and only stopped when she was captured, sold by the british, tried by the Burgundians in an ecclesiastical court under Bishop Cauchon as a heretic, and handed back to the British to be burned at the stake, which extinguished her bold life aged 19. Why would Bergman want to play a part which went against so much that she had done in films? In films she played the hard-done-to one, the put-upon lady who was shuffled about or abused, as in Intermezzo, Notorious, For Whom The Bell Tolls, Gaslight, Casablanca. But Joan of Arc was a go-getter, a careerist par excellence. Julie Harris’s Lark made her feisty and Uta Hagen made her sturdy. Maybe Bergman wanted to do something entirely different from her usual way. And so, huge star that she was, aged 33, an enormous movie is mounted for her. Victor Fleming, used to the difficulties of massive movies and munchkins, directs it, and the action sequences are pretty good all right. For supporting players we have the massive Francis L. Sullivan as Bishop Cauchon, and he moves about the room like a room in a room. Jose Ferrer plays the Dauphin Louis. Yet, with all of this, the only thing you can look at are the costumes, which are sensational, and which won an Oscar that year. As did the cinemaphotography, which is glorious, particularly as it deals with Ingrid Bergman’s face which had to be carefully lit, and is, and could only successfully be photographed on the left side, which it, for the most part, is. And what sort of Joan emerges from these luxuries? The same put-upon lady she had played so many times before.  Her emotionalization of the role crashes against the story of Joan like a cannonball of custard. That weeping girl  could no more have saved France than a cow could polka. I saw the longer version. There is a shorter version. I recommend no version at all.

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Casablanca

07 Jun

Casablanca – Directed by Michael Curtiz. Escape Drama. A husband and wife seeking to escape fall into the hands of the wife’s former lover. 102 minutes Black and White 1942.

* * * * *

As everyone knows, none of the stars wanted to do it. There was no script when it started. Paul Henreid turned it down; his pal Bette Davis had to convinced him to perform it. When Bogart and Bergman met for a meal, they didn’t like one another. The director had a violent temper. The set was afire with arguments with the writers. They did not know how to end it, and so wrote two endings, shot the first, and when they saw it, knew it was right, and threw away the other one. The movie is a masterpiece of the balance of forces, particularly in the handling and placement of the supporting players. And it is also a masterpiece of Warner Brothers professionalism. Max Steiner wrote a big score which is fortunately suppressed by the inclusion of a good many songs. The lighting and photography by Arthur Edeson and the editing by Owen Marks are first class. But Bogart’s apparent character, sharp tongued and defiant, is countermanded by the affection and respect of his staff and what others will put up from him, how Peter Lorre sees him, how Sydney Greenstreet sees him, how S.J. Skall sees him, how Dooley Wilson and how Claude Raines see him. They create half of Bogey’s character. The drama is carried by these relations, all created by the dialogue, which won an Oscar, and not by the acting, which is plain, flat, direct, Hollywood crisp. All this gives Bogart a center from which his terrified eyes seek danger and give him a latitude wider than his staff, his night club, Casablanca itself. He seethes with supressed power. He is not a good actor, but he is a most effective one. Knocked over glasses prevail throughout the film as over and over again life threatens to be empty of wine. Bogart is introduced playing chess without a partner. Ingrid Bergman walks in with a partner, and Bogart does not resume the chess. Bergman is a good actor and brings variety and roundness and liquidity to balance Bogey’s Easter Island visage and Henreid’s Teutonic stone. Set off against them all is the glittering Conrad Veidt determined to eliminate them all. All these forces are held in perfect suspense as the escape works itself out. As we wait to see who will be on that plane and who will not. Nothing could be better.

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The Inn Of The Sixth Happiness

05 Jun

The Inn Of The Sixth Happiness – Directed by Mark Robson. Pious Drama. An English woman unqualified to be a missionary in China makes her way there and become a great one. 158 minutes Color 1958.

* * * *

The studio asked Mildred Dunnock to tutor Ingrid Bergman in the accents of the Great Women Of History, characters she was to play on a radio show, but when Bergman came to her, Bergman resisted learning them, and wouldn’t, saying that people liked her own accent, and she left. Bergman spoke Swedish and Summer Vacation German, and thought and spoke in English. Her Italian was highly inflected and her French was also. People said to her Roberto Rossellini ruined her career, but she always said, “No, I ruined his,” and she was right, that is to say she could never play an Italian. She was always the stalwart Swedish lass. In Jean Renoir’s film she is certainly not French. In Hollywood films she is certainly not American. Playing a Russian she is a Swede. In very few films did her accent suit her character; Casablanca is one of them. Of course, in one way she was right: her accent was always charming. She loved to act, because she said she liked to be other people, but it’s not quite true. What she liked to be was the other person inside herself that other people loved. That person was remarkably real, though – loving, happy, sensual, and kind – and also a person who could express her feelings freely, just as she had with her father who reared her and who died when she was young. She married three highly controlling men. Around them, she was permitted to be only partly natural, the part they liked. In ordinary life and on the set, everyone found her beautiful, light spirited, down to earth, and accessible. All this she also brought to the screen, along with a radiance which she was aware of and which made her the super-star saint of film of her era. There was a certain kind of actress she was, and there was a certain kind of actress she was not. She was as stubborn as Saint Joan, just as driven, just as martyred, and almost just as graced with the light of God. This is one of her saint roles, and no one else could have been so good in it. She plays a young woman; she is 41 and looks it; it doesn’t matter. She is both competent in the part and brings to it 25 years of stardom in just such roles, so we accept the tale and its outcome long before it is told. In it the German actor Kurt Jurgens plays a Chinese colonel; Robert Donat, in his last film role, plays a mandarin. And a wonderful actress named Althene Sayler plays the missionary Bergman replaces. The film is beautifully produced. The music is great and is by Malcolm Arnold. In it Ingrid Bergman speaks Chinese with a Swedish accent.

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The Bells Of Saint Mary’s

05 Jun

The Bells Of Saint Mary’s – Directed by Leon McCarey. Pious Comedy. A new priest comes to a school run by a long entrenched nun. 126 minutes Black and White 1945.

* * * *

This widely popular film delivered two superstars into vestments. The story which surrounds them is an Irish stew into which a liter of treacle has been dumped. It is supported by marvelous performances by certain character actors, namely Henry Travers who is richly internalized as the greedy landlord, and by Una O’Connor who is the wily and knowing rectory housekeeper, very funny in the opening scene. Ingrid Bergman’s husband did not want her to do it, because it was a sequel to Going My Way, but she hoped to learn something from McCarey and to work in comedy. One wonders what she learned. She brings to it an impeccable complexion and a wonderful glow, but seeing how little she is called upon to do, it is no wonder she steered towards Roberto Rossellini just as soon as her contract with Selznick expired. She has a brilliantly played exposition scene, in which the camera mercifully never takes its eye off her as she receives bad news that gets worse, and from the actors’ point of view the film is worth sitting through for this alone. The imperturbable Bing Crosby plays opposite her, but the trouble is that there is no temperamental or even philosophical difference between the two to make up a drama, for both of them are too inherently nice to present an opposition, so the “conflict” between them we must take on faith. Crosby is really a marvelous actor, and well suited to Bergman because she like he is naturalness incarnate. He has large eyes, a fine endowment for an actor, and the ability to play small. The entire film shines with the artificiality of the sound stage, and whole bunches of Hollywood children, who in that era, all play their parts as if they were drunk. Ya just can’t buy it. Bergman sings a song in Swedish and plays the piano, which she knew how to do, and Crosby does several renditions, which, of course, he knew how to do. It won some Oscars. Watch it at a risk to your waistline. So much sweetening will make you look like one of the bells.

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