Ingmar Bergman's THE SERPENT'S EGG (Das Schlangenei, 1977)

The cinema of Weimar Germany is inimitable. You scoff, recalling all the movies over the past eighty years or so that have imitated the style or sensibility of Fritz Lang, F. W. Murnau, and the other "German Expressionist" masters. The style is imitable, eminently so, Lang's especially. Two generations of Batman movies testify to Lang's lingering stylistic influence; The Dark Knight Rises is almost as much Metropolis as it is A Tale of Two Cities. So what did I just say? Basically that it's one thing to translate Lang's style and sensibility to different eras and subjects, and another thing altogether to make a movie inspired by Weimar Germany and set in the Weimar Republic. Consider Woody Allen. His homage to Weimar, Shadows and Fog, may be his worst movie. It'd be easy to say that Allen should have stuck to imitating Ingmar Bergman, until you realize that he had.

 

Bergman had exiled himself from Sweden after suffering a humiliating arrest on tax-evasion charges that were eventually dropped. He moved to Germany and got financing from Dino De Laurentis for an ambitious project that may have represented an expansion of his storytelling horizons. Not quite epic in scale, it still has the look of a prestige period piece with detailed recreations of Germany during the great inflation of 1923, the year of Hitler's failed Beer Hall Putsch in Munich. In Bergman's Weimar there seem to be three classes of people: those who go to cabarets, those who perform in them, and the wretched of the earth. One such wretch is a fish out of water, the American circus artist Abel Rosenberg, who drops in on his brother only to find him a suicide, his brains blown onto a bedroom wall. Abel (an odd name for the surviving brother) crashes with his sister-in-law Manuela, an emotionally needy cabaret performer, while the police question him, first about his brother's demise, and then about a series of mysterious deaths. Hovering nearby is the mysterious Dr. Vergerus, an obnoxious acquaintance of Abel's past who shows unsavory interest in Manuela. Abel is an alcoholic, aloof and slightly paranoid, and more so as the film progresses. Because he's packing dollars he has a privileged position in a country where paper money is eventually measured by weight rather than face value, but he drifts like the bum that he is in what becomes a paranoid picaresque, as much a film of the time of its making as it is of the time of its setting.

 

 

The Serpent's Egg should be a quintessential Seventies movie. Only in those years, you'd think, could you ever see Ingmar Bergman and David Carradine join forces. Maybe we should have expected such a volatile mix to have troubled results, but Das Schlangenei is sadly less a bad film in any interesting way than simply a lame one. Blame Carradine for much of the lameness. He was just coming off his greatest Hollywood triumph in Bound for Glory, but something closer to Kwai Chang Caine showed up in Germany. Don't get me wrong; I love the old Kung Fu show, but Carradine's impassivity, sometimes bordering on inertness, seems wrong for the role Bergman wrote for him, and it makes Abel's occasional outbursts of whining hysteria seem more forced and artificial. Not that Liv Ullmann does much better as Manuela. She's there mainly as a Bergman trademark, but the master seemed to have no good idea of what to do with her. That he wrote and she acted in a second language didn't help. Interviews prove Bergman a fluent English speaker, but that doesn't mean he can be Ingmar Bergman the cinematic auteur in that language. Serpent's Egg is actually his second feature in English, but since I haven't seen The Touch, an Elliot Gould picture, I can't tell you whether the later film is an advance or a regression. But it should be clear that a Swede making a homage to German cinema in English is a potentially toxic compound. As for the homage, Bergman easily out-nerds Woody Allen with the stunt-casting of Gert (Goldfinger) Froebe as a police inspector. Froebe had been the inspector in Fritz Lang's last picture, a Dr. Mabuse reboot from 1960, and his character in the Bergman picture references the Inspector Lohmann character from Lang's 1932 Testament of Dr. Mabuse, mentioning that Lohmann is working "on an even stranger case than mine." That tells you where Bergman's heart was, but where was his mind?

 

 

Two factors complicate any modern attempt at a Weimar pastiche: Hitler and Kafka. Bergman falls into both traps. The paranoid storyline that emerges during Abel's adventures is as much Kafkaesque as it is Seventies, and Abel's temporary employment as a file clerk shifting papers from one set of envelopes to another is all Kafka, in the shallowest way. As for Hitler, it's easy in retrospect to see foreshadowings of the Third Reich all over the place in a Germany where contemporaries did not. Bergman plays with expectations a little by having his actual menaces have nothing to do with Hitler -- Vergerus calls the future Fuehrer a "scatterbrain" who'll soon be forgotten -- but he's only having an ironic joke at his villain's expense. He can't help seeing the Third Reich as the inevitable sequel to Weimar, and in doing so he misrepresents the cinematic Weimar he may have meant to honor. Cinema itself comes in for some suspicion here in a way that suggests that Bergman may have been paying homage to Michael (Peeping Tom) Powell along with the auteurs of Weimar. He manages to make science fiction of it by giving his villain a Vitaphone style sound-film system several years ahead of time, so that the film maintains that Langian flavor, or would if Bergman could sustain any narrative momentum. The film picks up the pace in its last third as Abel moves through a visually dazzling contrast of settings, almost living up to its invocation of expressionist cinema, but my final impression was that Bergman had a kind of montage of episodes in his head without figuring out a narrative framework for them. While Serpent's Egg is a pictorial hit thanks to cinematographer Sven Nykvist and art director Erner Achmann, its closing narration of Abel Rosenberg's disappearance only underscores the film's essential emptiness. Watching it is a frustrating experience because the makings of a better film are mostly there in front of you, but you share Bergman's own bafflement over how to put them together properly. Should it have been so hard for such a master, with at least one masterpiece still to come? I leave that to the Bergman experts, who'd know better how this fails to be a proper Bergman film.

Mamma Mia, We've Both Lost: Now Playing: SEPT. 21, 1962

In Milwaukee, Ingmar Bergman reflects. Whether these reflections have anything to do with the film advertised, I can't say.

I can say that The Devil's Wanton was made back in 1949 and is now better known as Prison. It only reached the U.S. on July 4 of this year. Bergman was big enough now that distributors dug up his early stuff to sell here.

A Tuscaloosa, AL, exhibitor also reflects on life and death.

So playing roles on screen is how she really was. Some may agree.

In Youngstown, OH, one distributor decides that the way to put the Italian comedy star Alberto Sordi over with the American public is to deprive him of his first name.

You know, like Fernandel and Cantinflas. One name = a funny foreigner. Get it?

Here's this week's wide release, opening in Palm Beach.

And here's some beautiful B movie promotional art from Salt Lake City, though I apologize for the reproduction.

Convicts 4 was the second feature!

Devil's Handburgers: Now Playing, JULY 6, 1962

It may be new to Albany NY, but we've seen this double-bill before.

A few things are different, though. I don't recall the "Devils Handburgers" and related condiments (upper right) being offered in the last place that played these pictures. Talk about your incentives -- you can bring blood home with you! But let's not ignore the real difference: this is a triple bill of "3 Smash Hits." What's the third picture? What'd be the ideal follow-up to two Crown International schlockfests?

This would be.

Yes, it's Ingmar Bergman's classic, The Virgin Spring. The disclaimer reads: "Certain essential scenes in this film should be seen only by adults. They are not suitable for younger, more impressionable minds. We strongly recommend this film for adults only." More proof, I guess, of the fuzzy boundaries separating "art," "adult" and "exploitation" pictures at this time.

If this disturbs you, try repeating: "Det är bara en film, det är bara en film ..."

Now Playing: MARCH 13, 1962

Less than five months after its Swedish premiere, Ingmar Bergman's newest has its American premiere in New York City.

This film will go on to win that Best Foreign-Language Film Oscar -- and Bergman would get nominated again the following year for writing it. As Tino Balio noted in The Foreign Film Renaissance on American Screens, Janus Films did a brilliant job establishing Bergman as a brand name. We can see a sample of their salesmanship in this trailer, uploaded by MagicWorksofBergman.



The trailer's a historic artifact in its own right. Notice how it flaunts the good word of Bosley Crowther, the New York Times reviewer who was already a byword for philistinism in some quarters yet actually played an instrumental role, as Balio notes, in promoting the foreign-film boom starting back in the 1940s. Notice, too, how some reviewers were so well known that their first names could go unmentioned. It's either that, or the names didn't really matter at all, just the papers. But were they right? Only those who've seen this one can say.

Now Playing: JAN. 11, 1962

Charleston, SC: A local arthouse welcomes a comic fantasy by Ingmar Bergman.

And here's a "message from hell," courtesy of of luvgod on YouTube.



The line separating art from exploitation was often fuzzy in 1962, but this announcement from Franceville, IN may help illustrate the difference.

The lead feature is the pre-gore debut film of Herschell Gordon Lewis.The second feature is a 1958 portrait of a nymphomaniac -- and for that, Something Weird Video provides a clip.



Is there no family-friendly fare anywhere? Do not fret:Nevada, MO is your refuge tonight.

What we have here is a 1956 West German biopic, predating even the stage version of The Sound of Music, though it didn't reach the U.S. until after the Rodgers & Hammerstein show had hit Broadway. Here's some unexpected Americana from the film, provided by Jairdan.



No disrespect to Canada, but calling a film  The Canadians does not raise expectations. On the other hand, Burt Kennedy directed it and Robert Ryan stars, so I'd probably give that second feature a look if given a chance. And that's all for today ... but there's more tomorrow!

THE MAGICIAN (Ansiktet, 1958)

For someone dedicated to exploring the wild world of cinema I've been shamefully neglectful of the work of Ingmar Bergman. Maybe I've never thought him wild enough. I think of the Swedish writer-director as a cinematic chamber artist when my ideal of cinema is spectacle. His concerns often didn't strike me as necessarily cinematic, and indeed, Bergman seemed to do just as well on television and the stage. I freely admit to speaking from ignorance here, but these were my impressions of Bergman based on his reputation as an austere student of human psychology. Since starting this blog two years ago, I've occasionally promised to get around to Bergman, but only now, with Criterion's release of Ansiktet, have I taken the plunge.

I remember having plenty of opportunities to see The Magician on TV back in the early days of cable. It seemed to be on pretty frequently on one of the arts-and-entertainment channels (though not necessarily the lamented A&E itself) that proliferated in the innocent Eighties, but I never felt motivated to give it a look back then. A sense of regret helped compel me to summon the DVD fron Netflix, but I was also inspired by what Tino Balio had written about Bergman in The Foreign Film Renaissance on American Screens, 1946-1975. Balio devotes an entire chapter to Janus Film's brilliant marketing of Bergman in the late 1950s, which climaxed in 1959, when five of the director's films, including Ansiktet, were playing in New York art houses and the Bergman "brand" had been identified with cutting-edge cinema. Balio sees the Janus buildup as a high-toned alternative to the exploitative ballyhoo with which, like many European films, Bergman's earlier work had been promoted in the U.S. Yet the superior sexual frankness of European film remained a strong part of its appeal throughout the "renaissance," and it remained an exploitable element of Bergman's work. The affinity between art and exploitation on the common ground of "frankness" is best illustrated by the well-known influence Bergman's Virgin Spring had on the creation of Wes Craven's Last House on the Left, but Ansiktet has a bit of exploitation flavor as well. Janus helped things along by calling it The Magician rather than translating the title literally as The Face. While Bergman's title is more meaningful once you see the movie, The Magician doesn't exactly do the film a disservice.

Somewhere in Sweden in 1846, Vogler's Magnetic Health Theater arrives in town. On the way the troupe has found an alky actor dying of exposure by the side of the road. Satisfied that he's expired, Vogler and Co. move on. They have to apply for a permit to perform in the community. To win it, they must give a command performance for the local notables: the consul and his wife, the chief of police and his wife, and Dr. Vergerus. Among the elite, skepticism seems to prevail. Chief Starbeck seems inclined to dismiss the mute Vogler (Max Von Sydow) as a crank, while the empiricist Vergerus wants to see the performance and draw his own conclusions. The consul's wife is haunted by the recent loss of a child and has greater hope for Vogler's supernatural powers. "You're here to explain why my child died," she confides in the Christ-like magician.

The Magician (Max von Sydow, right, with "apprentice" Ingrid Thulin) and the Skeptics (below)

The troupe is allowed to stay overnight at the consul's residence before the command performance, but they must dine and board with the servants. And can you blame the consul? Vogler's is a motley bunch: the weirdly intense mute himself; his apprentice "Mr. Aman" (Ingrid Thulin is fooling no one); the mountebank mouthpiece Tubal; Granny Vogler the herbalist and potions dealer; and their coachman Simson.

"Read my palm!" Bibi Andersson demands. It's definitely worth a closer look.

The servants prove a more credulous, appreciative audience, especially the maid Sara (Bibi Andersson) who falls almost instantly for Simson. Some of the servants come in for a scare when an all-too-real apparition invades the estate. It's the old actor from the road, who has failed to die and still craves drink. Though he's not dead yet, he boasts to Vogler that he's already better as a ghost than he was as an actor. When he finally passes out again, Vogler puts him in a box, as if for future reference.

Bengt Ekerot played Death in Bergman's Seventh Seal. In Ansiktet he plays Death Warmed Over.

Later in the evening, Vergerus finds Aman, a.k.a. Manda, out of costume in her true identity as Mrs. Vogler. She admits that Vogler can talk and is a fugitive, and Vergerus makes a vague proposition to her while noticing Vogler in the doorway. The magician throws the doctor out, tears off his fake hair and beard and utters his first words of the film, "I hate them!"

The next day's performance starts badly when the wirework behind Vogler's levitation trick is revealed behind a curtain. Tubal assures the audience that all the obvious trickery was done on purpose, as a joke to preface displays of Vogler's real power. The magician is a student of Mesmer's principles of animal magnetism, which he demonstrates by mesmerizing Chief Starbeck's wife, who promptly tells embarrassing tales about her husband but claims to remember nothing afterward. For his next trick, Vogler will bind the consul's thuggish coachman in the "Invisible Chains," applied in pantomime by Aman. The coachman sells it like a madman, thrashing about in an increasingly desperate effort to free himself. Finally he falls on Vogler and throttles him before bolting out of the room. Vogler is declared dead, but the skeptical Vergerus decides to perform an immediate autopsy on the magician, though his objectivity is shaken when he finds himself locked in an attic with a "corpse" whose behavior proves unpredictable....

Ansiktet finds Bergman working in the same mode as in his most famous movie, The Seventh Seal. The characters are types and archetypes, and they exist so Bergman can make points about high and low class, science and superstition. This isn't the sort of intense psychological study that the Swedish director became known for in his creative maturity. Instead, The Magician is a classical spookshow that wouldn't necessarily look out of place in Val Lewton's roster of RKO horror programmers. It has crisp, eerie black and white cinematography by Gunnar Fischer that really rises to the occasion when Bergman wants to scare us but also impresses on location as the Vogler coach rolls through the forest.

In The Magician Bergman explores a continuum of skepticism, superstition and cynicism. Granny Vogler unashamedly exploits the credulity of simple folk. Temporarily short on love potion, she tells Tubal to give a customer a bunion cure, since "what matters is how the bottle looks and how the potion tastes." On at least one level she's right; appearances help make the sale. But belief in the power of love potions also seems to prove their power, though that may only mean that the desire for a love potion proves that love already exists. Magic is only our attempt to make tangible those things that really do haunt us, like the dead child of the consul's wife, or those powers that seem to make us fall in love. Faith in magic can make it real despite the mercenary cynicism of those who'd exploit that faith. Skepticism, meanwhile, isn't invulnerable. Vergerus should have reason to expect that Vogler is trying to fake him out in some way. He should probably expect the supposed corpse to come to life if he assumes Vogler is faking. But he feels fear anyway, because he knows Vogler is an enemy who has already been violent with him. That fear may give Vogler a real power over the skeptic. That power might not be magic, but it's still something real. Magic (or "animal magnetism") is just a label that mystifies reality.

The Swedish title refers to the false face that Vogler wears, one that obviously inspired George Stevens to cast von Sydow as Jesus in The Greatest Story Ever Told. Stevens was on to something, since I'm sure Bergman meant Vogler's marks to be inspired or awed by the magician's Christlike visage and his somewhat otherworldly manner. Max's own clean-shaven, close-cropped mug is shocking by comparison in its plainness, a blank to be filled in by his own imposture just as people invest the stage figure of Vogler with their dreams and fears of supernatural power. There's something abject in his blankness, and once the show is finally, truly over he comes across as a pathetic beggar, even as he's appeared to demonstrate real power. But was it his power or was it all in the minds of his audience, believers and antagonists alike? That's a question that Bergman doesn't need to answer; it's yours to take home with you.

Ansiktet is the sort of story that requires people in close quarters to fall in love or feel strong emotions; it's a fable with a point to make. In that sense it's too neat, too blatant by certain standards, but there are definitely times and places for such stories. With its genre trappings and melodramatic story, The Magician might make a good starter Bergman for the curious, though I don't know how much it prepares you for his major works of the Sixties and Seventies. On its own terms it's pretty entertaining and proves Bergman as much a showman as an artist. He has a forbidding reputation, but Ansiktet is quite accessible and even a little hokey. Genre fans will leave it believing, if only for a moment, that Bergman was one of us after all.