Sweden drama
1958
bw min.
Director: Ingmar Bergman
CLV: $49.95 - available
1 disc, catalog # CC1455L
When he made The Magician in 1958, Ingmar Bergman stood at the peak of his international fame. Art houses screened Smiles of a Summer Night, The Seventh Seal, and Wild Strawberries with the regularity of rotation crops. Bergman dominated intellectual cocktail chatter as Tarantino would in the wake of Pulp Fiction.
Yet he knew better than his adoring fans that he faced a crossroads. Throughout the 1950s, Bergman had worked with a small troupe of actors and technicians, making a film each summer and staging plays throughout the long Swedish winter season. Now he wanted to pause, and reflect. The result was The Magician, with its unsettling blend of comedy and melodrama, repartee and suspense.
The original Swedish title, The Face (Ansiktet), provides the key to the film's riches. Albert Emanuel Vogler (Max Von Sydow) is accused of being a charlatan by the Swedish authorities in 1846, just as his predecessor in hypnotic arts, Friedrich Anton Mesmer, had been denounced at the end of the 18th century. His tormentors represent three professions that Bergman has always loathed: the police (Commissioner Starbeck in the film), medicine (Dr. Vergerus), and state officials (Consul Egerman). None of these sneering, condescending individuals can accept the prospect of anything so subversive as magic and, by extension, art. "You represent what I hate most," says Vergerus to Vogler's wife, "the inexplicable."
In close-ups of extraordinary power, Bergman shows how the human face betrays character and emotion. With his black wig and beard, Vogler takes on Messianic proportions for some and sinister intensity for others. "Are you a swindler who has to conceal his real face?" asks a dying actor whom Vogler encounters on his journey through the forest at the film's outset. Without his disguise, lying in bed beside his wife, or unmasked after the brilliant climax to the picture, Vogler is devoid of magnetism‹an impoverished performer seeking pennies from the rich he has so memorably "entertained."
Bergman had found himself extremely sensitive to the audience's reaction to his work at Malmo Municipal Theater, and to the often hysterical criticism his films had stirred at home. So The Magician becomes an act of revenge, its sardonic wit tempered with a poignant recognition of the entertainer's total dependence upon his public. His little "family" of mountebanks love nothing so much as to romp with the serving wenches below stairs, to live for the day, and to amuse their bourgeois patrons as best they can with sleight-of-hand and hocus-pocus.
The Magician was the last major film shot for Bergman by the great cinematographer Gunnar Fischer, and his mastery of expressionist lighting enhances every scene. The acting, by Gunnar Björnstrand as Vergerus in particular, remains extraordinarily assured, and Erik Nordgren's spare, haunting score exerts a mesmeric hold without ever being obtrusive.
With the hindsight of almost forty years, The Magician may be seen as a significant peak in Bergman's career, flicking from one mood and tone to the next with mischievous glee. "You're a swindler, Mr. Tubal," says the housekeeper as she succumbs to the patter of Vogler's manager. "Yes, but I have something special, you must agree," grins Tubal without a moment's hesitation. Now that is Bergman talking.
-- Peter Cowie
Peter Cowie is editor of the annual International Film Guide, and author of several books on the cinema, including studies of Welles, Bergman, and Coppola. He is International Publishing Director of Variety.
