Word: magician
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Magician (Svensk Filmindustri; Janus) is the latest public fantasy of Sweden's famed Writer-Director Ingmar Bergman, whose last two exports to the U.S.. Wild Strawberries and The Seventh Seal, won hosannas in the art houses. Like them, The Magician pleases the eye and agitates the mind. But drifting with its phantasms is no easy matter, and many a moviegoer is likely, instead, to drift right out of the theater...
Bergman's magician (Max von Sydow) is a mid-19th century Mesmer whose touring Magnetic Health Theater is entirely composed of psychological castaways: the magician's wife (Ingrid Thulin), masquerading as a male helper; his witch-grandmother; an ailing, tosspot actor; and a silly, sex-ridden coachman. Headed for Stockholm by coach, the troupe is stopped by police at a tollgate, taken into the custody of three local notables and challenged to prove its supernatural powers. As the magician prepares for the performance, his associates get seduced by the kitchen help, the hostess has hysterics, and grandma hands...
...public the magician is both mute and masked; it is only when he climbs into bed with his wife that he strips off his satanic guise and lets the audience in on his secret: he is really a good man with a perfectly normal voice, forced by poverty into becoming a "ridiculous vagabond, living a lie." Inevitably, the charlatans' show ends in disaster, but the magician gets his revenge: he plays dead and, in a sequence eerie as a Kafka nightmare, torments a doctor who wants to dissect him. And at film's end, after numbing humiliations...
Just what this Gothic hoedown signifies is anybody's guess. Best bet is that Bergman intends it as a kind of spiritual autobiography, identifies himself both with the masked magician and the drunken actor, who dies with his battered top hat on, raving: "I always longed for a knife to free me ... Then what we call the spirit would rise up from the meaningless carcass." Cinemagician Bergman seems to see both men as despairing artists whose creative imaginations doom them to social obloquy and the distrust and disdain of hardheaded authority. What scant optimism there is in this fatalistic...
Died. Jean Hugard, 86, the magician who first performed the risky bullet-catching act that later cost twelve imitators their lives, founded (1943) Hugard's Magic Monthly, a magician's trade magazine, which he continued to publish after going blind seven years ago; in Brooklyn...