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Posted: |
Nov 11, 2009 - 1:44 PM
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By: |
Jim Phelps
(Member)
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There was a time-- until fairly recently-- that I despised Ingrid Bergman, even though she is widely considered one of the great actresses and beauties of all time. I certainly didn't see her that way. I found Bergman harsh, shrill, and melodramatic. Couldn't stand her for years--decades. Not her personally, of course, but as an actress she just ground me to a halt every time I watched her in anything. I could tolerate her fleeting presence in Casablanca, but that's mainly because Bogart carried that movie singlehandedly. Oh, Claude Rains gave the performance of a lifetime, too. Anyway, Bergman continued to grate on my nerves and sabotage every classic movie I saw her in.
Then, one day, I finally saw what the fuss was about.
So, forgive me Ingrid Bergman, wherever you may be, for doubting your talent, for dismissing your shining brilliance. I toyed with the idea of not thinking you a hack in Indiscreet (1958) but then you went ahead and captivated me, the Hemingway fan, in For Whom The Bell Tolls (1943) you were alongside the great Gary Cooper. You then smacked me with a tremendous performance in Gaslight (1944), which was directed by another highly-regarded artist, George Cukor. But it was your role in Notorious (1946) (for which you should have won an Oscar) that I was once and for all convinced of your brilliance.
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I'm surprised at your dislike of her. I always loved her. Our family was in Tunisia when I was 13 and we were at an outdoor bistro and saw her at a table alone having coffee. This was about 1970. There was no mistaking it was her.
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I'm surprised at your dislike of her. I always loved her. Our family was in Tunisia when I was 13 and we were at an outdoor bistro and saw her at a table alone having coffee. This was about 1970. There was no mistaking it was her.
Wow. That is a great story! Care to eloborate on it more?
Ingrid Bergman is terrific. A natural beauty and a tremendous talent. Great actress.
I thought she was stunningly beautiful in NOTORIOUS!
As to seeing her, my dad worked for Mobil Oil then and we had been living in Tripoli, Libya since about 1964- we would go back to the U.S. every summer for 2 months visiting much of Europe on the way back home and also when returning in late summer. We went to Egypt on Spring break one year, Tunisia another and Beirut, Lebanon one year.
Mom knew it was her instantly, but we didn't bother her. I came to appreciate and learn of her body of work in the next 10 years.
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I'll never forget Alfred Hitchcock's mournful observation of her- (she was one of several actresses he obsessed over)
"Ah Ingrid. So beautiful. So stupid."
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Too bad you ain't in Berkeley, 'cause you could see some of her non-American appearances in a series that is playing now.
http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/filmseries/ingrid_bergman_europe
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
7:00 p.m. Ingrid Bergman Rarities
(Sweden/Italy/U.S., 1940s–1978). Illustrated lecture by Jon Wengström. Rare films from the archives of the Swedish Film Institute offer behind-the-scenes glimpses of Bergman at work and in private life. (78 mins plus lecture)
Saturday, November 7, 2009
6:30 p.m. Intermezzo
Gustaf Molander (Sweden, 1936). In the Swedish romantic melodrama that landed her a Hollywood contract, Bergman plays a budding pianist swept off her feet by a renowned violinist. (93 mins)
Friday, November 13, 2009
7:00 p.m. The Count of the Old Town
Edvin Adolphson, Sigurd Wallén (Sweden, 1935). A freewheeling comedy about a gang of ruffians on an all-day bender in Stockholm’s Old Town, featuring a baby-faced eighteen-year-old Bergman. (83 mins)
Friday, November 20, 2009
7:00 p.m. Walpurgis Night
Gustaf Edgren (Sweden, 1935). Bergman lusts after her married boss while her father Victor Sjöström bemoans the passionlessness of Swedish youth in this surprising hybrid of erotic satire and anti-abortion tract. (80 mins)
Friday, November 20, 2009
8:40 p.m. A Woman’s Face
Gustaf Molander (Sweden, 1938). Bergman is cast very much against type as a disfigured, bitter blackmailer in this darkly atmospheric Swedish drama. (104 mins)
Saturday, November 21, 2009
6:30 p.m. June Night
Per Lindberg (Sweden, 1940). In this rare, inventively photographed Swedish film, Bergman beautifully plays a sensitive young woman attempting to rebuild her life in Stockholm after her romance with a sailor comes to a violent end. (90 mins)
Saturday, November 28, 2009
6:30 p.m. Stromboli
Roberto Rossellini (Italy, 1949). Roberto Rossellini sets the interior drama of Bergman’s character, a Lithuanian refugee married to an Italian fisherman, amid the drama of nature on a volcanic island. (107 mins)
Sunday, November 29, 2009
3:00 p.m. Europa ’51
Roberto Rossellini (Italy, 1952). Bergman plays a bourgeois wife called to an unconventional kind of sainthood in Rossellini’s moving study of postwar society and its ethical rootlessness. (110 mins)
Sunday, December 6, 2009
5:15 p.m. Voyage in Italy
Roberto Rossellini (Italy, 1953). Bergman and George Sanders are a quarrelling couple traveling through Italy to Naples in Rossellini’s extraordinary drama, a key link between neorealism and the subjective cinema of the early sixties. (83 mins)
Thursday, December 17, 2009
7:00 p.m. Autumn Sonata
Ingmar Bergman (Sweden, 1978). A Chopin prelude triggers a long-delayed confrontation between concert pianist Bergman and her aggrieved daughter Liv Ullmann in Ingmar Bergman’s intense and penetrating chamber piece. (93 mins)
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the first time i met INGRID BERGMAN was when she had just recieved her third OSCAR for MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS. she was appearing in THE CONSTANT WIFE on BROADWAY. even then she was radiant , full of zest , and extremely humble. she said she could not imagine why all the people were outside waiting for her. she then said it must be the OSCAR. she was like that , unassuming . we talked of her films , and which she liked , which she didnt like, she was brutally honest. she said she was too old to play JOAN OF ARC . and UNDER CAPRICORN she was just plain bad. i disagreed about that , to no avail. and then she we talked of the films she was fond of and to my surprise she said CACTUS FLOWER and VOYAGE TO ITALY . CACTUS FLOWER , she said gave her a chance to do real comedy , not the light comedy of say INDISCREET , but a full blown comedy. she loved every minute of filming. and VOYAGE TO ITALY , she was allowed to act naturally , like a person , sans all the color and makeup , that sometimes , she said people would notice more than the performance. when i said that was my favorite film of hers , i dont think she quite believed me , but it is ,bar none, it is such a simple love story with real situations and people that inhabit them. to me she was beautiful without all the makeup etc. we did meet again , but this was such a special time , with such a special person. i cherish it .
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So, forgive me Ingrid Bergman, wherever you may be, for doubting your talent, for dismissing your shining brilliance. I toyed with the idea of not thinking you a hack in Indiscreet (1958) but then you went ahead and captivated me, the Hemingway fan, in For Whom The Bell Tolls (1943) you were alongside the great Gary Cooper. You then smacked me with a tremendous performance in Gaslight (1944), which was directed by another highly-regarded artist, George Cukor. But it was your role in Notorious (1946) (for which you should have won an Oscar) that I was once and for all convinced of your brilliance.
When I was 11 years old, I saw "Indiscreet" and loved her so much that I kept returning to see it over and over until I could come home and recite her angry monologue (much to the delight of my elders). As a result, I can still (50 years later) remember the monologue.
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An Appreciation by Liv Ullmann Department:
[ “Who she was is part of what I understand about life – about being a woman, a mother, an actress –
about the sorrows and the joys and the choices.
Who she was is part of what I know about strength and courage and, thus- for me - she is still alive. We spent a wonderful and creative fall in Sweden and Norway shooting “Autumn Sonata”, a film about a famous pianist and her daughter. And I used to sit and watch her – feeling such pride over who she was …
An actress’ life is in many ways unlike that of other women. An actress is the product around which others negotiate, bargain, sell or reject. Despite that, Ingrid believed that she had the right to love as she felt, live as she did, see what she chose, hate when she had to and love again if she could.
Surely she had doubts, as well all have, but there was never a question of ‘Why didn’t things work out differently?” She showed full acceptance of her days, both the good and the bad days. I used to sit and watch her, remembering her face in
And then I looked at the woman of
Age had left its mark. But it was life that had written the real story
on Ingrid’s face: everything that she had experienced and given and lost.
Ingrid Bergman became myth, but not in the same way as
whose entire life is surrounded by secrets.
Ingrid became a myth exactly because she dared to live. Openly. Because she accepted what the movies, what the husbands and the children and the audiences and the critics gave her. She never yielded and never became an enigma. Ingrid’s choices were always for independence …
To know Ingrid was to learn to understand a woman. Not the best, the holiest, the wisest, the most beautiful. But then it is not necessarily the amount of our virtues that makes us human, understood, obtainable and identifiable.
And life – how many of us can look back on our own and know that we really have lived by our own choices –
that it is our life?
As Ingrid lived a life of courage, she also approached death with courage. Even her most wrenching moments were inspired by love and, thus, were not solemn alone, but spurred by a joy of love. ]
… 
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There was a time-- until fairly recently-- that I despised Ingrid Bergman, even though she is widely considered one of the great actresses and beauties of all time. I certainly didn't see her that way. I found Bergman harsh, shrill, and melodramatic. Couldn't stand her for years--decades. Not her personally, of course, but as an actress she just ground me to a halt every time I watched her in anything. I could tolerate her fleeting presence in Casablanca, but that's mainly because Bogart carried that movie singlehandedly. Oh, Claude Rains gave the performance of a lifetime, too. Anyway, Bergman continued to grate on my nerves and sabotage every classic movie I saw her in.
Had I seen Casablanca, Gaslight or Under Capricorn, three films I intensely dislike, prior to seeing Spellbound, Goodbye Again and Notorious, three films I absolutely love, I might feel the same was as you did. But I didn't. It's not possible for me to love her more in Spellbound and Goodbye Again. Just not possible.
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I was lucky enough to see her in "The Constant Wife" in Boston, before it went to Broadway.
A much better play than I had expected, and she we was wonderful in it, very funny at the appropriate moments, and even sad as well. The story is still ahead of its time, about a married woman who learns her husband is having an affair, and she decides to do the same, and tells him about it.
(Of course, I would have paid to see her read from the telephone book...)
I never met her, though my older brother once interviewed her. He shared with her a phrase our mother taught him in Swedish, which she enjoyed.
Actually, there are a number of her films I haven't seen, while others I've seen over and over again.
Such is the way of cinema, always there, always the same; it's us who are doing the changing, in our age, our attitudes, as we re-view these films again and again. I am not the same man today who saw CASABLANCA in the late 60's; today it remains the same; it's I who have changed since in the way I see it.
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"When she was in all that trouble with Rossellini, I called her and said 'I don't want to ask you any questions but could I read your mail?' says columnist Art Buchwald.
"Oh, that mail was bad, ten, twelve, fourteen huge mail bags. 'Dirty wh***.'B****.' 'Son of a b****'.'"
from "Round Up the Usual Suspects" by Aljean Harmetz
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