The New Pictures

The Magician (Svensk Filmindustri; Janus) is the latest public fantasy of Sweden's famed Writer-Director Ingmar Bergman, whose last two exports to the U.S.. Wild Strawberries and The Seventh Seal, won hosannas in the art houses. Like them, The Magician pleases the eye and agitates the mind. But drifting with its phantasms is no easy matter, and many a moviegoer is likely, instead, to drift right out of the theater.

Bergman's magician (Max von Sydow) is a mid-19th century Mesmer whose touring Magnetic Health Theater is entirely composed of psychological castaways: the magician's wife (Ingrid Thulin), masquerading as a male helper; his witch-grandmother; an ailing, tosspot actor; and a silly, sex-ridden coachman. Headed for Stockholm by coach, the troupe is stopped by police at a tollgate, taken into the custody of three local notables and challenged to prove its supernatural powers. As the magician prepares for the performance, his associates get seduced by the kitchen help, the hostess has hysterics, and grandma hands out love potions brewed from rat poison.

In public the magician is both mute and masked; it is only when he climbs into bed with his wife that he strips off his satanic guise and lets the audience in on his secret: he is really a good man with a perfectly normal voice, forced by poverty into becoming a "ridiculous vagabond, living a lie." Inevitably, the charlatans' show ends in disaster, but the magician gets his revenge: he plays dead and, in a sequence eerie as a Kafka nightmare, torments a doctor who wants to dissect him. And at film's end, after numbing humiliations, the troupe is invited to perform for Sweden's king.

Just what this Gothic hoedown signifies is anybody's guess. Best bet is that Bergman intends it as a kind of spiritual autobiography, identifies himself both with the masked magician and the drunken actor, who dies with his battered top hat on, raving: "I always longed for a knife to free me ... Then what we call the spirit would rise up from the meaningless carcass." Cinemagician Bergman seems to see both men as despairing artists whose creative imaginations doom them to social obloquy and the distrust and disdain of hardheaded authority. What scant optimism there is in this fatalistic philosophy lies in the final triumph of the Magnetic Health Theater: the artist suffers, but art endures.

In illustrating this text, Bergman wobbles between drama and melodrama, alternates genuine horrors with sham tricks, comic sex with serious sex, and poetry with lampoon. Result is that The Magician is perhaps his least successful film so far. But for every murky symbol, there is a sharp physical image: footsteps become important, a thunderclap almost too real, and shafts of light through the mist startlingly beautiful. With the help of this brilliant graphic technique, a haunting guitar score, and the talented stock company of players who have turned up in all recent Bergman films. The Magician manages to fascinate as it confuses, demonstrates that even inferior Bergman is worth sampling.

The Blue Angel (20th Century-Fox). "Could a man have a better reason for throwing his life away?" ask the big ads for this glossy U.S. remake of a 1930 German classic. The answer the admen clearly expect from every red-blooded male is: No, not when the "reason" is long-limbed May (rhymes with thigh) Britt, Hollywood's newest sex goddess. This is not the answer they are likely to get from anyone who saw Marlene Dietrich in the original Blue Angel.

As Lola Lola, the hardhearted Lorelei whose siren song lures a respectable, middle-aging botany teacher (Curt Jurgens) into degradation, Swedish Actress Britt makes a stunning physical impression. She slithers among the cabaret chairs like an insolent incarnation of sin, and despite her tone-deafness, delivers the familiar Falling in Love Again and a new song, Lola Lola ("lives for love"), with throaty seductiveness. But she is never called upon to display even a modest range of emotion, never conveys anything of the sense of mystery and veiled secret that underlay Marlene's tough tart.

If Newcomer Britt's acting ability still remains to be proved, there is no question about the professional skill of longtime German Box Office Idol Jurgens. Though he is almost too handsome for the role of the petty-tyrannical high school teacher (played in the original by Emil Jannings), Jurgens subtly conveys the unavowed jealousy that flares up within him whenever he catches his students ogling Lola Lola. And at the film's climax, when he is persuaded to play the clown in Lola Lola's revue before an audience of old school cronies. Jurgens penetrates rare emotional depths. Crowing like a crazed cock as one raw egg after another is broken over his bald pate, he personifies the soul-destroying humiliation that is the inexorable companion of unbridled desire.

The flaws in Hollywood's Blue Angel, in fact, lie less in its cast than in its direction and production. Where the original was visually stark and grimy, the remake, splashed with incongruously cheery color, has the phony patina of Palm Springs. The sets and scenery (some of it filmed in Bavaria) suggest a Victor Herbert operetta rather than German bourgeois society. And the hardbitten, even morbid truths hammered home in the German version become soft and mawkish half-truths under the hand of Hollywood's Edward Dmytryk, who has consented to a happy ending that makes the teacher's tragedy merely pathetic.

Pretty to look at, pleasant to listen to, the new Blue Angel is a distinct cut above most summer film fare. But there was harsh truth in Marlene Dietrich's comment when she was asked what she expected of the remake of the film that put her into orbit. Said Marlene: "Hollywood people have delusions of grandeur. They just think they can make it."

The Tailor's Maid (Royal; Trans-Lux) presents Italy's suave Vittorio De Sica as a rich tailor who loves to wrap his charms around female customers. "A tailor," he suggestively tells a pretty matron, "is like a doctor, dear lady."

On the other hand, De Sica is unable to accept the fact that his 16-year-old daughter has, since her last fitting, developed a 35-inch bust herself, and is holding furtive assignations with a school chum in the ruins of ancient Rome. "We teach our children how to be children," reflects one of the characters in The Maid. "But has anyone taught us how to be fathers? We have to play it by ear." And that is how they play the whole picture.

To U.S. audiences who associate De Sica with some of Italy's greatest postwar protest films (The Bicycle Thief, Shoeshine, Umberto D. and The Roof), his participation in this featherweight import may come as something of a surprise. But since the films that earned him a place in cinema history have all been box-office laggards in Italy, De Sica is forced to direct and act in cream-puff romances in order to scrape up the financing for an occasional picture of his choice. In The Maid he almost seems to be describing his own professional plight--and that of the once brilliant Italian film industry--when he haltingly asks a doctor: "Isn't there something to--reinvigorate? Just once in a while."

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