Ingrid Bergman Film Poll

Notorious forever.

I watched Autumn Sonata again last week -- not one of Ingmar's best, and rather suffocating, but Ingrid is marvelous, especially whenever she's ordering people or drinking wine.

Where's [i]Cries & Whispers</i?!?!

Oh.

as far as her performances go: Gaslight

Elena and Her Men is garbage

NOTORIOUS

would vote notorious in any number of polls. she is soooooo beautiful in it.

Elena and Her Men is NOT garbage.

Only 17 choices? What's wrong with you? Intermezzo, at least (both of them).

Would lean toward either Europa 51 or Notorious.

I never miss an opportunity to pronounce the words "party crasher(s)" like Ingrid in Notorious

My all-time wm (would marry). Probably Notorious or Gaslight.

notorious, for sure.

um wtf Viaggio in Italia ("journey to italy") you dummy

"A Woman Called Golda"
yeah some cheeseball made-for-tv movie deserves mention over rossellini

she plays the woman Nixon called that "kike dyke" -- worth a few points.

um wtf Viaggio in Italia ("journey to italy") you dummy

^^^^

Esp displaced by her stinko Oscar movies

Gaslight is a weakish remake too. Did you get these options from Rex Reed?

Europa 51 for old times' sake.

haha at Rex Reed joke.

She made so many movies I included only the obvious ones, so stop complaining.

Elena and Her Men isn't garbage but it's pretty bad. I can't figure out what happened to Renoir films after The River.

Anastasia's one of the worst Oscar winners.

Still haven't seen Joan of Arc.

I'm your biggest fan, soto, but Journey to Italy is an obvious oversight. It's a key Rossellini film, regularly shows up on ten best ever lists, was famously written about by Bazin, was the subject of a celebrated recent essay by Daniel Morgan, etc. Whereas I can't fault you for excluding Under Capricorn even if I'd like to (still think it's foolishly underrated).

Joan Crawford fans should check out Ingrid's earlier version of A Woman's Face.

I can't figure out what happened to Renoir films after The River.

They continued to be great culminating in one of his best, Le petit théatre de Jean Renoir. And Elena and Her Men is absolutely gorgeous.

Omitting JTI is an oversight, yes.

They continued to be great culminating in one of his best, Le petit théatre de Jean Renoir. And Elena and Her Men is absolutely gorgeous

I've watched French Can-Can and Elena twice each since the Criterion releases in 2004 and still find them soft and distracted. It's obvious Renoir and his casts adore each other, but it's like he's writing scripts and failing to direct the cast or filmed the script and let scenes drift long past the point at which tension has already dissolved.

What about The Golden Coach?

I like it.

Le Petit theatre is really really good, but it's not even in the same ballpark as any of the '30s ones I've seen.

Whatever films are included, the point is:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a5/IngridBergmanportrait.jpg/220px-IngridBergmanportrait.jpg

/swoon

having her play Golda Meir is like Clooney playing Assad or something

oh man -- the shit Ingrid has to endure in Autumn Sonata; I felt more sympathy for her than for the clingy, John Lennon-spec-wearing Ullmann.

What a creepy coincidence that in the same year Woody Allen released Interiors Ingmar Bergman created a character (Ullmann) who's an amalgam of Geraldine Page and Mary Beth Hurt. This movie plays like a Woody Allen imitation.

definitely 'notorious,' though it's tempting to vote for the bergman/bergman teamup. i might throw 'anastasia' a pity vote just because the ending makes me cry. i'm much more forgiving about shameless tear-jerkers pre-1960.

Besides looking sexier than any Hollywood star (did anyone besides Garbo play drunk scenes as free of sop?), she's alert and intelligent in a way she'd never be again in Notorious; it's a star turn in the best possible way. I mean, it's a tribute to her, Ben Hecht's script, and Hitch that we believe Alicia in her own way does love Sebastian.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

watched notorious tonight

She's actually very funny and touching in The Bells of St Mary's despite not looking like any Mother Superior, ever. She really shines in McCarey's long unbroken takes. (And it ends up being a celibate love story between her and Bing Crosby.)

Indeed.

http://www.palzoo.net/file/pic/gallery/10559_view.jpg

Stop it, please. I' m a friend of the wizard.

btw Bells was the 4th-highest box-office hit of the '40s. The top three were Disney cartoons.

Kael was fond of this and Bergman's other big budget Oscar nod For Whom the Bell Tolls but it's those qualities that have kept me from watching them (I liked Going My Way fine).

What qualities? The sensibility is a continuation of Going. McCarey and the two stars and McCarey won Oscars the night before they started shooting, which led Bergman to quip she thought they wouldn't speak to her if she didn't have one.

Bells on Blu this week: I hadn't seen it in 30+ years, it's not at all bad.

http://acertaincinema.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/bergman-mccarey-crosby-oscar.jpg

half-awake typos, too many Leos

I used to love the Father O'Malley films as a kid for reasons I could never quite articulate, particularly seeing as how my family wasn't the least bit religious and I had no personal interest in any kind of religion whatsoever. Possibly I appreciated the gentleness of these films in contrast to more cynical entertainments that I otherwise absorbed at the time. There is a kindness even to the humour in the films that felt completely alien to me in a way that I really responded to.

Watched both again a while back and found that I still quite like Going My Way, though Bells struck me as kind of sappy now. Perhaps I should give it another shot.

No way is Notorious 5 times better than Casablanca.

no one's saying it is.

There is certainly surface sap in Bells, but McCarey (he wrote the story as a tribute to his aunt, a nun who died of typhoid) keeps finding ways to inject real emotion into the formula.... while not showing any nuns like the one who disfigured my uncle's hand with a ruler (he didn't write an "8" the right way).

You're saying it is only maybe three times as good?

No way is Notorious 5 times better than Casablanca.

― I wish to incorporate disco into my small business

Yeah. It's six times better.

we'll never have Paris

I prefer Casablanca.

You were misinformed

This debate comes up frequently, I find. For me, there's enough room in my heart for both Casablanca and Notorious.

You know what this is making me think of? The Peter Lorre character in the Firesign Theatre's "Nick Danger, Third Eye" whose is name Rocky Rococo.

Casasblanca is OK and all, but not really my thing.

A milkshake?

Slow curtain. The end.

if Rick's lines had more Addison DeWitt zing to them, Eric would be on board.

acc to Isabella, I.B. didn't understand the elevation of Casablanca to deathless classic either. "They always want to talk about the one with Bogart!"

She's dazed and soft in Casablanca (I know, I know -- script being written on set, etc).

yes, she's all icon and very shaky character in it, sure.

dissing 'casablanca' is such a bloody auteurist thing to do.

Oh, Michael Curtiz >>>>>>>>>> Brian De Palma, Michael Mann and that lot

centennial of her birth on 8/29

need a re-poll including both versions of Intermezzo (or two polls: pre-Roberto, and the rest)

Sept NY retro:

http://www.bam.org/film/2015/ingrid-bergman

oh Isabella is doing a "theatrical tribute" to mom. With Jeremy Irons.

http://www.bam.org/theater/2015/the-ingrid-bergman-tribute

interviewing her daughters, amid centennial tributes

“She was so original and independent, but in a gentle, natural way,” says Ingrid. “She would always say, ‘People have to make sense.’ She would immediately detect if a person she was talking to was in any way artificial, and she didn’t like that. She was honest and authentic. And so people watch her on the screen and they are touched by her, because she doesn’t seem aware of her beauty.”

“My mother was not theatrical in her home life,” Lindstrom says. “She was strong-willed, which is maybe partly theatrical. I found her fun, she was fun to be around, and playful, and demanding. Maybe that was the Scandinavian in her. There were rules that she followed, and you needed to follow them if you were with her. For instance, I would always let her walk ahead of me through a door. You know, you wouldn’t cry or yell, ‘I want some ice cream!’ with her, you just wouldn’t do that. That was not her role in life, maternity. That was not her forte.”

But Isabella has a different perspective, perhaps because she saw her mother through the eyes of her father Roberto. “Father always said she was so loud that she didn’t need a telephone!” says Isabella. “And yes, she was like that at home. It wasn’t so much that she spoke loudly, but her voice had a certain pitch, so that she could be heard in the back of the theater, and yes, she was like that at home, too.”

http://www.rogerebert.com/interviews/you-must-remember-this

That new documentary Ingrid Bergman: In Her Own Words is quite good, though it doesn't really tell the story from her perspective. At all. It's a weird title, but all biodocs have to seem so personal these days. It's much better and more interesting for contrasting her stories with those of her children.

I read an Isabella interview in the late eighties in which she called Ingrid an uninvolved and bored mom.

At times she basically abandoned them, while she went somewhere else to live and work. She was very very busy with her career, and worked all over the world. But I mean, she wasn't worse than any number of male artists or CEO's or whatever. Roberto Rossellini abandoned them as well. The main story in the treatment of her personal life is the insanely misogynistic attacks on her in the fifties, for me.

It took the reissues of those Rossellini movies for me to appreciate the risk, which is easy, but that even when they're uneven and don't register their points they're still pretty good.

This documentary really made me appreciate just how revolutionary that partnership was. The way she is almost more a presence than an actress, a vessel to take in all these powerful sights, volcanoes or processions. It's completely central to film history. Like Antonioni and Monica Vitti, Tsai Ming-liang and Lee Kang-sheng or Petzold and Nina Hoss. Except much more so. She is one of the most important presences in film (and has been treated like such in French film history, ie. there's a bunch of clips of her in Godard's collages, etc).

Also, like, she made Casablanca as well as films with Hitchcock, Rossellini, Renoir and Bergman. How many actors has that resumé? I've really underestimated her, I think.

Sorry, might be slightly hyperbolic, sketching out my review at the moment.

100

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZpVZRfqHnQY

roundup

https://www.fandor.com/keyframe/daily-ingrid-bergman-100

so good as ivy in the 1941 dr jekyll & mr hyde
such a complex performance, the heart of the film, by far best thing in it

Which retro to go to?

MoMA's ends Thursday.

The documentary Frederik posted about opens here in a few weeks:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TEh5Nh4a9WE

A couple of interviews in the documentary I liked: Sigourney Weaver talking about working with Bergman on the stage, when she was just starting out, and how Bergman helped her (just in the way she carried herself) come to terms with her height; and Liv Ullmann's Autumn Sonata story, which didn't turn out how I thought it would. The highlight, though, was Bergman's screen test for Selznick. (It's on YouTube, but the poster added music and gums it up in other ways.) For the whole 45 seconds or so, the theatre I was in (about 80% full) was absolutely silent, and I had this weird feeling that I was sitting in a movie house 70 years ago. A couple of times Bergman flashes a toothy grin, but mostly she's in repose and looking away. In the last few seconds, she looks directly into the camera, so therefore directly at you. It's really something to see. (Extra timely for me, as I'll be seeing a program of Warhol's Screen Tests in a couple of weeks.)

Cactus Flower is one of those DOA swinging comedies of the late '60s, usually French-based, with middle-aged stars (plus Oscar-winning saucer-eyed ingenue Hawn) and talent sweating to seem "with it." Ingrid Bergman is certainly game, and has a breakthrough moment erotically smothering herself in a black mink. (A stage hit for Billy Wilder's frequent coscribe Izzy Diamond... BW sorely missed, esp the touch of vulgar class supplied later in Avanti!.

She can handle badinage, of course, but she can't do comedy, light or otherwise.

I thought she had a couple good snippy scenes w/ Jack Weston in the Bourgeois '60s Disco (altho he gets off most of the shots, like "you look like a giant Band-Aid in the office"}. But yeah it's pretty grievous. She's funny in Orient Express if you choose to view it that way.

She's game in the otherwise (very) minor Elena and Her Men, but the mugging in MOTOE is hard to take.

In the filming of Autumn Sonata, Ingmar Bergman said Ingrid kept trying to insert jokes in her dialogue, to which Ingmar said NO JOKES. A wise man.

but she can't do comedy, light or otherwise.

a lot of ppl find Ingmar at his straightest funny already

anyway the thing about Cactus Flower et al is they were about the squares, who bought the tickets.

I love Goldie Hawn, but she seemed to make nothing but bad films up till Sugarland Express. (Never seen Cactus Flower for some reason, but There's a Girl in My Soup and Butterflies are Free are pretty dismal, from what I remember.)

Checked the Goldie Hawn thread I started, and I say there I have seen Cactus Flower. Don't remember so much as an image.

I don’t think I ever saw that or Butterflies Are Free, just vaguely remember the posters/ads.