Jezebel38 wrote:And then I saw WIld Strawberries, and got that same reaction I'd had to HWGS, and was so impressed with the elderly Sjostrom's performance. Then the Cinema Europe series by Brownlow introduced us to his contributions as a pioneering actor/director of the Swedish film industry, and tantalized us with clips from Outlaw and Phantom Carriage. So now we have DVD's and companies like Kino where we can access some of these films, and I did recently watch Outlaw & His WIfe and the documentary MichiganJ mentions.
There is another later Swedish film I've seen that Victor Sjostrom appears in which I enjoy quite a bit -Walpurgis Night (1934) with Ingrid Bergman and Lars Hanson. I was most interested to see this film to hear what Lars Hanson's speaking voice was like (dreamy!) and VS gives a wonderful performance as Ingrid Bergman's papa.
Tomorrow's broadcast of Phantom Carriage will be my first viewing and I am so looking forward to it - along with the earlier Lubitsch film you mentioned in your other thread, Broken Lullaby.
I've only seen
He Who Gets Slapped once a few years ago. I must admit that I was a bit distracted at the time, and think I should see it again.
Walpurgis Night (1934) (aka Valborgsmässoafton) is one of those early
Ingrid Bergman films I've not seen and I usually find it enlightening to see non-English speaking actors appearing in films in their native language. Though the print I saw had it's flaws,
A Woman's Face (1938) (aka En Kvinnas Ansikte) was fascinating to see how differently Ingrid acted in this film and to compare it to the American version, (which I liked too)> So glad that you mentioned the superb, enlightening
Cinema Europe series by
Brownlow, Jez. Btw, you can see parts of that series in a separate thread, found
here.
Synnove wrote:Right now one of the films I would like to see the most is Valborgsmässoafton (Walpurgis Night), it has a pretty daring subject matter and Lars Hanson, Ingrid Bergman and Victor Sjöström are in the cast. Where can I find it, I wonder?
Synnove, it appears to be available on Amazon as a VHS, but not as a dvd, though I'd keep looking around the internet.
Wild Strawberries is a movie that I've seen about once a decade since childhood. My reaction to it and understanding of each of the characters has changed each time. I'm looking forward to seeing it again to see how I react to
Ingrid Thulin,
Victor Sjöström,
Bibi Andersson and the others, each of whom gave touching performances as individual characters at different stages of their lives. Alison, I really think that you would get a great deal out of this film.
All your comments about
The Phantom Carriage are making me think I should stay up till midnight to see this one. Thanks very much for all your feedback.