The Serpent’s Egg (1977)

          Swedish director Ingmar Bergman had such a consistent and singular voice that, generally speaking, even his misfires feel like attempts at scaling the same thematic mountain atop which he made his most important discoveries. Proving there’s an exception to every rule is The Serpent’s Egg, one of two English-language pictures that Bergman directed and the closest thing to a Hollywood movie that Bergman ever made. Disjointed, meandering, and stiff, the picture seems like one of Bergman’s signature psychological dramas until it evolves (or devolves) into a conspiracy thriller with a hint of science fiction. Worse, The Serpent’s Egg has elements that are highly derivative of Bob Fosse’s extraordinary musical Cabaret (1972), even though Bergman was usually an artist whom others emulated, not the other way around.

          Reading about the circumstances surrounding The Serpent’s Egg provides some illumination, since Bergman was a tax exile from Sweden at the time he collaborated on this picture with American star David Carradine and Italian producer Dino Di Laurentiis. Sometimes, less-than-ideal situations push artists toward unexpected creative breakthroughs. In this case, it seems adversity bested Bergman.

          In 1923 Germany, American circus acrobat Abel Rosenberg (Carradine) reels from the suicide of his brother and performing partner, finding himself adrift and nearly penniless in a foreign land at a time of growing anti-Semitism. Abel finds comfort by spending time with his brother’s ex-wife, dancehall performer Manuela (Liv Ullman), but fate appears to have chosen Abel for a punching bag. As he wrestles with depression, looks for work, and half-heartedly investigates his brother’s life and death, Abel has a number of strange and/or violent encounters until discovering a conspiracy involving medical experimentation. As in Cabaret, the idea is to foreshadow the evil looming over Germany in the years preceding World War II. Yet while Cabaret found a perfect set of characters and metaphors to illustrate the means by which a society succumbs to tyranny, Bergman flails about while looking for something to ground his slapped-together storyline.

          At his best, Bergman created believably complicated individuals and drilled down into their psyches—so to say that he’s out of his element staging fist fights and mad-doctor scenes is to offer a considerable understatement. Nonetheless, The Serpent’s Egg looks as exquisite as any other Bergman production, mostly because Bergman’s regular cinematographer, Sven Nykvist, creates remarkable atmosphere and texture. Furthermore, Bergman’s muse, Ullman, renders a committed performance despite playing a role that borders on the nonsensical. As for Carradine, he seems lost, with the script’s contrived scenarios and stilted dialogue precluding him from manifesting his usual naturalism.

The Serpent’s Egg: FUNKY

Hurricane (1979)

          The romantic epic Hurricane received a poor reception from audiences and critics during its original release, and its stature has not grown during the intervening years. Yet while the picture definitely has major problems, it also has interesting virtues. Extensive location photography in the South Pacific, complete with onscreen appearances by natives from islands in the area, gives certain scenes the texture of a National Geographic documentary. The underlying storyline, extrapolated from a 1936 novel, dramatizes a culture clash that speaks to issues of imperialism and intolerance. The final 30 minutes of the picture, during which producer Dino De Laurentiis unleashes a massive storm by way of intricate special effects, is genuinely spectacular. And giving the whole piece an elegant patina that it may or may not deserve is luminous and naturalistic imagery generated by cinematographer Sven Nykvist.

          Previously filmed in 1937 by legendary director John Ford, the James Norman Hall-Charles Nordoff novel Hurricane tells the story of an island king who falls in love with an American woman but then runs afoul of the American legal system; the titular storm provides both an action-adventure climax and a tidy metaphor representing the whirl of events surrounding the characters. As interpreted by De Laurentiis, screenwriter Lorenzo Semple Jr., and original director Roman Polanski—who developed the project until legal troubles made his continued involvement impossible—the 1979 version of Hurricane unfolds as a melodrama about star-crossed lovers.
          In 1920s Pago Pago, U.S. Navy officer Captain Bruckner (Jason Robards) is the regional governor, overseeing natives under the control of the U.S. government. One stormy night, Bruckner’s adult daughter, Charlotte (Mia Farrow), arrives for a visit. She’s immediately taken with the Captain’s native servant, Matangi (Dayton Ka’ne), who is handsome, insolent, and proud. When Matangi becomes chief of his tribe through hereditary succession, he immediately asks Captain Bruckner to release several natives who are being held for infractions of American law. Meanwhile, Charlotte and Matangi become lovers even though he’s betrothed, by way of an arranged marriage, to a native woman. These and other plotlines converse during the film’s elaborate climax, which involves chases and fights and tragedies amid the monstrous storm.

          Hurricane looks great from start to finish, because Nykvist eschews the glossy look usually associated with romantic epics. However, tonal dissonance is a recurring problem. Ka’ne gives a terrible performance, since he was obviously cast for his looks, and Farrow isn’t much better—the lack of chemistry between the stars is stupefying. Screenwriter Semple doesn’t do them any favors by periodically lapsing into his signature jokey style. During the most cringe-inducing scene, a wide-eyed Charlotte and a shirtless Matangi stand in the rain, staring at each other. “I see you are getting very wet,” he says. “No wetter than you,” she replies. In another scene, Farrow has to spit out the awful line, “Don’t ask me to marry you—just love me!” Director Jan Troell, who replaced Polanski late in the development process, fails to pull performance styles together, and while composer Nino Rota contributes many regal themes, the work of regular De Laurentiis composer John Barry is badly missed. Too often, the movie strives for operatic intensity and instead achieves soap-opera silliness.

Hurricane: FUNKY

King of the Gypsies (1978)

          Clearly imagined as a Godfather-style epic set in the colorful subculture of modern-day gypsies, this Dino De Laurentiis production features an impressive cast, splashy production values, and a vivid storyline filled with betrayal and violence. Yet as with many of De Laurentiis’ pulpier offerings, a general atmosphere of tackiness pervades King of the Gypsies—instead of treating its characters with respect, as Francis Ford Coppola did with the Corleone family in the Godfather movies, writer-director Frank Pierson presents gypsies as one-dimensional primitives. King of the Gypsies is filled with arranged marriages, incessant shouting, quasi-Biblical domestic strife, physical abuse, and willful ignorance. Very much like Pierson’s directorial debut, the much-maligned A Star Is Born (1976), King of the Gypsies occupies a queasy middle ground between legitimate cinema and outright exploitation—both movies are too campy to take seriously, and yet both are made with meticulous craftsmanship. (Oddly, most other highlights in Pierson’s career feature greater nuance, from 1975’s Dog Day Afternoon, for which he wrote the Oscar-winning script, to various telefilms Pierson directed, including 1992’s Citizen Cohn.)

          Adapted from a book by Peter Maas, King of the Gypsies tells the life story of Dave Stepanowicz, a young man who inherits a position of power in the gypsy community but rebels against inhumane gypsy traditions. The narrative begins with an elaborate prologue that explains how Dave’s parents became involved with each other. Dave’s grandfather, Zharko (Sterling Hayden), is the king of an East Coast gypsy empire circa the 1950s. He arranges to buy a gypsy teenager, Rose, as a bride for his ne’er-do-well son, Groffo. When Rose’s family tries to back out of the deal, Zharko abducts Rose at gunpoint. Years later, Rose (played as an adult by Susan Sarandon) and Groffo (played as an adult by Judd Hirsch), give birth to children including Dave (played as an adult by Eric Roberts, in his cinematic debut). During episodes that depict Dave’s childhood and adolescence, friction grows between Dave and his abusive father, so once he’s in his 20s, Dave leaves home—thereby shunning his role as a prince in Zharko’s monarchy. Dave tries to make it on his own, even dating a non-gypsy (Annette O’Toole), but when Zharko’s health declines, Zharko summons Dave back into the family fold. A struggle for control then emerges between Dave, Zharko’s choice as the next king, and Groffo, who resents being pushed aside.

          Because the story covers so much tawdry narrative terrain, King of the Gypsies is never boring. The movie also looks great, with crisp images by master cinematographer Sven Nykvist, and the soundtrack features vibrant acoustic music by David Grisman. In fact, much of the movie works. Roberts is strong, delivering a James Dean-style performance as an angry young man, while Hirsch and Sarandon complement him well (despite playing underwritten characters). Hayden is a joy to watch, as always, even though he’s hilariously miscast, and Pierson wisely keeps the screen time of scenery-chewing Shelley Winters (playing Zharko’s wife) to a minimum. (Rounding out the flashy cast, Annie Potts plays a gypsy woman who gets a crush on Dave, and Brooke Shields plays Dave’s little sister—a poignant role that far exceeds her dramatic powers.) The intensity of King of the Gypsies rises steadily from start to finish, especially since the story concludes with a suite of violent scenes. Furthermore, the research Maas did for his book provides Pierson with abundant colorful details, such as the rituals of gypsy life. King of the Gypsies is overwrought and silly, but within its lowbrow limitations, the movie is also an entertaining ride.

King of the Gypsies: FUNKY

The Tenant (1976)

          Roman Polanski’s most perverse movie—and that’s saying a lot—is almost certainly his 1976 psychological thriller The Tenant, which features such provocative signifiers as cross-dressing, duplicity, psychological torture, and suicide. Taken solely at face value, the picture is bewildering and nasty. Embraced as satire, however, The Tenant represents a wicked commentary on the madness of contemporary life and the toxic influence that inhumane social structures can have on individuals. Yet while many other Polanski movies lend themselves to straight analysis, with narrative symbols clearly representing specific psychological and/or sociopolitical concepts, The Tenant is deliberately ambiguous. Whether the movie feels playful or pretentious depends on the individual viewer’s perspective, of course, but as with all of Polanski’s work, elegant visuals and peerless technical aspects demand attention. In other words, The Tenant can’t be dismissed as a lark, even though it’s entirely possible that’s how Polanski approached the project.

          The auteur himself stars as Trelkovsky, an everyman who rents an apartment in an old Paris building. The unit became vacant when the previous tenant, Simone, jumped from one of the room’s windows and nearly died. Trelkovsky’s motivations are murky from start to finish. He visits Simone in the hospital, where she’s bandaged from head to toe, then meets Simone’s beautiful friend, Stella (Isabelle Adjani). The duo bond—if that’s the right word, given the morbid circumstances—by witnessing Simone’s death after a sudden emotional outburst. Later, as Trelkovsky explores his peculiar relationship with Stella—for instance, he never dispels her incorrect assumption that Trekovsky and Simone were friends—the protagonist experiences an even weirder dynamic with his new neighbors. Eventually, our “hero” comes to believe that building residents including Monsieur Zy (Melvyn Douglas) and the never-named concierge (Shelley Winters) are scheming to transform Trelkovsky into a replica of Simone. Hence the aforementioned cross-dressing and, inevitably, Trelkovsky’s own suicide attempt—or, if the climax is interpreted differently, his victimization by would-be murderers.

          The Tenant has a muted, dreamy look courtesy of genius European cinematographer Sven Nykvist, and composer Philippe Sarde lends an appropriate degree of menace to the soundtrack. Plus, as always, Polanski’s sly camerawork, distinguished by cleverly hidden cuts and moves, brings viewers into the action with seductive ease. The singular mood of The Tenant has undeniable power, an effect accentuated by the opacity of the performances. Polanski’s acting is strangely charming, although he’s got an impenetrable quality, while supporting players including Adjani, Douglas, and Winters merely represent colors in the movie’s surreal tapestry. As written by Polanski and frequent collaborator Gerard Brach (working from a novel by Roland Topor), The Tenant is unrelentingly odd in every aspect except its storytelling. And that, perhaps, is the most devious aspect of the picture; instead of delivering a cryptogram of a narrative via wild style, Polanski serves this peculiar dish on a bed of classicism. This has the effect of suggesting that, on some level, the real world provides such inherently insane context that the weird events of The Tenant make perfect sense.

The Tenant: FREAKY

Pretty Baby (1978)

          A peculiar film that attracted a fair measure of controversy during its original release, Pretty Baby is somewhat difficult to appraise, because even though it’s beautifully crafted and thoughtfully written, it’s also inherently sleazy. After all, the storyline is about a teenaged prostitute in 1917 New Orleans, complete with nude scenes by leading lady Brooke Shields, who was 12 years old when she made the picture. It’s impossible to fully justify the eroticizing of a child by saying that it’s germane to the story, because director/co-writer Louis Malle could have exercised more restraint and conveyed the same narrative. Therefore, one must ask whether Malle photographed Shields so lasciviously in service of a high purpose (challenging the audience to regard erotic images without experiencing an erotic reaction) or in service of a low purpose (pandering to the worst kind of male gaze). It’s not as if Pretty Baby approaches pornography in any way, but the film’s content is troubling.

          Anyway, the story is primarily set in a high-end brothel run by the aging but formidable Madame Nell (Frances Fay), who treats her working girls and support staff like family members. Because every woman in the house is expected to earn her keep, however, the prostitutes’ daughters are groomed to become working girls themselves. One such mother-daughter duo is Hattie (Susan Sarandon), an experienced whore anxious to quit the game, and Violet (Shields), who has just come of age. As the story progresses, Hattie becomes engaged to a client and agrees to move with him to St. Louis, while Violet is “sold” to her first client, a middle-aged man who pays $400 for the privilege of deflowering her. Meanwhile, a lanky photographer named Bellocq (Keith Carradines) starts hanging around the brothel to take pictures of the women, and he becomes infatuated with the beguiling but petulant Violet. Thus, after Hattie leaves for St. Louis with a promise to return for Violet someday, Bellocq takes Violet into his home as a live-in lover. All of this is set against a backdrop of social turmoil, because the New Orleans of this movie is rattled by protests that lead to prostitution becoming illegal.

          Demonstrating his signatures of a curious mind and an eye for detail, Malle tells the story clinically, as if it’s a re-creation of a historical event. (In fact, the story is wholly fictional, although the milieu it depicts certainly existed.) Pretty Baby is on some levels a survival story about young women in an era when people born into shameful circumstances had few social options, so it has some resonance as a feminist parable. The movie also has copious amounts of atmosphere, thanks to glorious costuming and production design, to say nothing of subtly textured cinematography by Sven Nykvist. (His images capture everything from the deceptively elegant interiors of the brothel to the sweltering humidity of New Orleans’ tree-choked suburbs.)

          As for the acting, it’s a bit uneven. Carradine and Sarandon are strong, as always, and supporting players including Antonio Fargas and Diana Scarwid add saucy flavors to the mix. Faye’s performance is stiff, but her physical presentation is so perfect for the role that her weak acting is easily overlooked. And then there’s Shields. It’s hard to say whether she’s genuinely performing or merely affecting a precocious attitude, but the combination of her delicate features and Violet’s gritty persona is potent. Ultimately, Pretty Baby is far too serious an endeavor to dismiss, though it’s a mystery why the film was made.

Pretty Baby: GROOVY

Autumn Sonata (1978)

          Although Autumn Sonata borders on self-parody because writer-director Ingmar Bergman indulges his pain-freak sensibilities to an excessive degree, the innate humanism and sophistication of his style—combined with two extraordinary performances—give the picture resonance. A tough drama about the ways parents and children hurt each other when they’re unable to connect, the film is particularly noteworthy as the only project on which cinema’s two most famous Bergmans collaborated: Swedish-born Hollywood star Ingrid Bergman returned to her native land (and her native tongue) to give one of the most affecting performances of her career.

          Swedish-cinema icon Liv Ullmann plays Eva, a middle-aged woman living in a remote part of Sweden with her husband, meek pastor Viktor (Halvar Björk). Eva excitedly prepares for a rare visit by her mother, Charlotte (Bergman), a world-famous concert pianist. Immediately upon Charlotte’s arrival, however, myriad complications in the mother/daughter dynamic become evident. For instance, Charlotte is supremely chilly and withholding. Accordingly, while Eva was growing up, Charlotte was an absentee parent who expected her domestic existence life to be sunny and undemanding; by shunning family-oriented stress, Charlotte made real emotional connection with her daughter impossible. As a result, Eva became bitter, insecure, and needy. Thus, upon reuniting with her mother, Eva can’t stop herself from dumping loads of resentment onto Charlotte given the slightest opportunity. Furthermore, Eva surprises Charlotte by revealing that Charlotte’s other daughter, Eva’s sister Helena (Lena Nyman), is living in Eva’s house. Helena is severely disabled, and Charlotte finds time spent in Helena’s company excruciating—Helena radiates emotional thirst that Charlotte cannot quench.

          Filmed in extremely close quarters (the story rarely leaves Viktor’s humble house), Autumn Sonata is suffocatingly bleak. Writer-director Bergman almost never leavens the intense psychodrama with brightness or humor, so viewers are smothered by the dysfunction and pain of two complex women caught in an abusive cycle. At one point, the picture gets so heavy that Eva muses, via voice-over, how much she wishes she could simplify her existence by committing suicide. It is a testament to both leading actors that neither Charlotte nor Eva comes across as caricatured or contrived; these people seem agonizingly real.

          Adding to the grim quality of the experience is Ingmar Bergman’s choice to treat the piece more like a novel or play than pure cinema; actors speak in long, unbroken monologues and, on many occasions, speak directly to the camera or in theatrical soliloquies. Were it not for the amber-tinged beauty of Sven Nykvist’s cinematography and the consummate skill of the leading performances, the film’s arty flourishes would be fatal flaws. But with writer-director Bergman’s masterful hand pulling the strings, Autumn Sonata feels less like indulgence and more like an experiment—it’s as if the filmmaker deliberately discarded arbitrary storytelling conventions and used whatever tools he could in order to push as deeply into the anguished souls of his characters as possible.

Autumn Sonata: GROOVY

The Terrorists (1974)

While it’s fun to see a thriller in which Sean Connery uses his brains to outwit bad guys, rather than his fists or 007 gadgets, The Terrorists isn’t clever enough to justify the genteel approach. Despite naturalistic location photography by the great Sven Nykvist and a muscular score by the reliable Jerry Goldsmith, the storyline is too ordinary, and the storytelling is too clunky. For no particular reason, the narrative takes place in a fictional country called Scandinavia, even though nearly all of the actors use their own British accents. After a group of terrorists take the British ambassador to Scandinavia hostage, the country’s top cop, Nils Tahlvik (Connery), is tasked with defusing the situation. Then, when a second group of terrorists—led by British gunman Ray Petrie (Ian McShane)—hijacks a passenger jet just as the plane is landing in a Scandinavian airport, things get complicated. Petrie’s group plans to use the plane as a getaway vehicle for the group holding the ambassador hostage, threatening to blow up the plane (and its passengers) if they’re not allowed to do so. For much of the picture, Connery paces around the exterior of the British embassy and the halls of the airport, trying to figure out attack routes and exit strategies; he also fends off political pressure from British authorities and local heavyweights, since the two countries involved have vastly different agendas. Some of this stuff is interesting, in a procedural sort of way, and McShane invests his underwritten role with a bit of suave menace. Additionally, the movie’s pulse rises during the second half of the picture, as the story winds toward a far-fetched twist ending, and the lack of gunplay throughout much of the film forces theater-trained Finnish director Caspar Wrede—here directing the last of his five feature films—to conjure tension from circumstance instead of pyrotechnics. (Like Connery, he does what he can with limited resources.) Still, one need merely look at the following year’s Dog Day Afternoon to see how many terrific opportunities for hostage-situation suspense the makers of The Terrorists missed.

The Terrorists: FUNKY

Siddhartha (1972)

          Originally published in 1922, German author Hermann Hesse’s novel Siddhartha later became a touchstone for the counterculture generation. A poetic exploration of one man’s lifelong search for meaning, the story offers a simple but deep parable about looking past the pleasures of the flesh to find fulfillment in oneness with the universe, a theme that resounded mightily with seekers in the ’60s and ’70s. One such seeker, filmmaker Conrad Rooks, tackled the thankless task of bringing Siddhartha to the screen, even though the project was doomed from the start, commercially speaking; exacerbating the fact that spiritual journeys rarely sell popcorn, the book is so beloved that no movie could live up to impossible expectations.

          However, viewed by someone who isn’t a member of the novel’s fan base, Siddhartha is an earnest and quite beautiful film. Rooks’ screenplay (to which Paul Mayersberg and Natasha Ullman contributed) doesn’t try to communicate the depth and nuance of the source material. Rather, the script merely catalogs things that happen to the lead character, Siddhartha. Building from this base, Rooks uses intoxicating cinematography and music to create a ruminative atmosphere that contextualizes narrative events. So, while devoted fans of the novel might scoff that Rooks’ adaptation is oversimplified, another way to look at the movie is to say that Rooks’ adaptation is purified: He whittled the book down to an essence even casual viewers can grasp. Whether this approach honors Hesse’s book is for others to say, but there’s no disputing the film’s strongest virtues.

          First and foremost, the cinematography by frequent Woody Allen/Ingmar Bergman collaborator Sven Nykvist is rapturous. Shooting at vibrant locations throughout India, Nykvist captures subtle textures of light, from the way sunbeams dance across the surface of a river at dusk to the way a canopy of trees dilutes morning sunlight in a dense forest. The film’s atmosphere is so evocative that viewers can almost feel branches crunching underfoot while characters walk. Few movies offer such a potent sense of place, and for this particular story, which involves a man learning how to escape the mortal plane, intense physicality is essential. The music, by an assortment of Indian musicians, is equally involving, with pulsing rhythms and undulating melodies working their way into viewers’ brains like welcome guests. At its best moments, Siddhartha is hypnotic.

          That said, the performances have a perfunctory quality. Leading man Shashi Kapoor is handsome and sincere, just as leading lady Simi Garewal is overpoweringly seductive. However, the actors mostly read their lines in monotones, delivering such flat performances that Kapoor’s lone crying scene, which occurs toward the end of the picture, is a startling disruption of the emotional status quo. An argument could be made that quiet acting suits this story about characters learning to hear inner voices, but that’s a stretch. Still, Siddhartha is compelling despite its imperfections.

Siddhartha: GROOVY

Black Moon (1975)

          French director Louis Malle’s only feature-length venture into surrealism, Black Moon is among the strangest movies released in the ’70s, even though it’s quite tame, in terms of content and style, when compared to the boldest sex-and-violence freakouts of the era. Instead of shock value, Malle opts for the weirdness usually found in the world of dreams, juxtaposing doomsday scenarios, mother fixations, paranoia, talking animals, and other loaded psychological signifiers. Viewers inclined to parse Black Moon for deeper meanings could write epic dissertations trying to analyze all of the aural and visual messages, and stoners could presumably groove on the wall-to-wall oddity. For viewers seeking narrative coherence, however, only consternation awaits.

          British actress Cathryn Harrison stars as Lily, a young woman driving through the French countryside and trying to avoid the warring parties in a violent armed conflict between men and women. Eventually abandoning her car, Lily spots a unicorn and follows the animal to an old estate, where she encounters several bizarre beings: an elderly woman (Therese Giehse) who conspires with mysterious colleagues via radio; a young handyman (Joe Dallesandro) and his beautiful sister (Alexandra Stewart), who barely ever speak; and a slew of animals, some of whom speak.

          While ostensibly trying to find the unicorn, and thereby prove she’s not crazy to think she saw the mythical animal, Lily slips into the peculiar life cycle of the estate. After watching Stewart’s character breast-feed the elderly woman, for instance, Lily helps out by breast-feeding the elderly woman when Stewart’s character is away. Black Moon is filled with images that might mean something, like the bit in which Lily berates the unicorn, which she eventually finds, for being overweight and ungraceful. The question is whether Black Moon actually generates enough excitement and interest to warrant investigation of its mysteries.

          On the plus side, the movie has a beautifully overcast look; revered cinematographer Sven Nykvist shot the picture in and around Malle’s real-life family estate, so there’s a palpable sense of old Europe’s earthiness and splendor. On the minus side, the lack of a strong narrative line makes the episodes comprising the picture feel random, as if Malle (who also produced and co-wrote the picture) transcribed a stream of consciousness instead of crafting a story. Still, for many viewers, anything out of the ordinary is noteworthy, and if there’s one thing Black Moon is not, that is ordinary. Moreover, the frequent critical parallels between this film and Alice in Wonderland are justified, so if you’re game for another trip down the rabbit hole, Black Moon will certainly take you there.

Black Moon: FREAKY