The professor’s looking at the photographs indicates how the past is both present for but also distant from him.) Clearly, Professor Borg’s public life seems to have been a greater success than his private life. (The photographs, which are a kind of memory, give the past form and they are also, being a visual medium, a connection to the moving pictures of the cinema.
The black-and-white film begins with Professor Isak Borg (Victor Sjostrom) looking at family photographs, and thinking about his long life, as he prepares to leave to attend a ceremony at which he’ll get an award for his life’s work. (The most recent film of Bergman, who was born in Sweden in July 1918, is the strong and satisfying Saraband.) In Wild Strawberries, a man considers his past and makes a few subtle but important changes. Wild Strawberries, along with Smiles of a Summer Night, The Seventh Seal, Through a Glass Darkly, Persona, Cries and Whispers, Scenes from a Marriage, The Magic Flute, Autumn Sonata, and Fanny and Alexander, is one of the films that made and sustained Bergman’s international reputation. In a different way, Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries is also about fears and nerves and I liked Wild Strawberries very much. (In the book on which the movie is based, Before the Fact, the character Grant plays has murderous intentions regarding his wife and the novel was unique in portraying a potential victim’s point of view.) Hitchcock works our fears and our nerves and that is balanced against Grant’s charm and his charm is not weakened by the anger and impatience, and even secrecy, his performance contains. The great film critic Pauline Kael celebrated Cary Grant’s modern urbanity, his companionable confidence and bravado, in the essay “The Man From Dream City,” and the proof of her assertions is that even when Grant plays a man whose wife has reason to doubt him, as in Suspicion, one can see why his appeal is strong enough that his wife finds it hard to walk away from him. Summers in New York offer a wide range of free activities such as concerts and films, and I attended two free screenings, catching Cary Grant in some of Alfred Hitchcock’s Suspicion (1941) in Bryant Park and all of Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries (1957) in an East Village restaurant, Telephone Bar and Grill. Wild Strawberries: A Brief Note about Ingmar Bergman and Pauline Kael Appreciating Kaelīy Daniel Garrett Volume 9, Issue 9 / September 2005 8 minutes (1972 words)
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