On Screen

...The Emigrants, choked up as I am with lage at Warner Brothers for cutting one hour from its running time A curse seems to hound the extraordinarily talented 41-year-old Swedish director in America Originally a schoolteacher, then a very fine cinematographer, Troell came to the forefront of younger European directors with his very first feature, Hete Is Yom Life It was based on part of a great, realistic, autobiographical tetralogy, Ey-vind Johnson's The Stoty of Olof The film was released here, late in 1968, two years after it was made, with 57 minutes cut from it, in my review ("On Screen," NL, February 17, 1969) I called it "a gemlike work," and noted that the missing hour "hurt me like an amputated limb of my very own " Troell's next feature was Eeny, Meeny, Minv, Moe, about a kindly schoolteacher harassed to death by his pupils, de spite winning the grand prize at the Berlin Festival and containing the superb Per Oscarsson's arguably greatest performance, it was never shown here Now Troell has made the film version of another major Swedish novehstic tetralogy, Vilhelm Mo-berg's epic about a group of Swedes who emigrate to the United States circa 1850, and again he is being cruelly shortchanged by his Amer ican distributors This time Troell filmed the entire tetralogy in two three-and-a-half-hour installments, The Emigrants and The Settleis European reviews and leports from friends tell me that they are magnificent and require-indeed, demand-no cutting The logical thing would have been for Warner Brothers to import both films and show them uncut on alternating days-at least in the bigger cities, whatever else might be done in smaller towns In stead, though it has prints of both films, the company is showing only the first, with about one hour's worth of cuts, and will decide whether to show the second at all on the basis of the box-office returns I realize what the problem is, of course Exhibitors are loath to get involved with a film so long it can be screened only three or four times a day, rather than a more lucrative five or six The alternative is turning the film into a road show," i e , treating it as a touring stage play one daily matinee, one evening performance, and jacked-up prices But whereas this might work handily for the filmization of some long-run Broadway musical the masses are yearning to see, it is risky business with an untouted foreign-language picture starring no sure-fire box-office names and dealing with a serious subject So we reach for that perennial Hollywood panacea the scissors Is this necessary' The Sonow and the Pity runs four-and a-half hours, and is nicely recouping its outlay True, it cost only $135,000 to make, and was probably acquired quite inexpensively by its distributor Yet Warners could surely afford to pay a little more for The Emigrants and could sustain a smaller immediate profit, moreover, aside from prestige, there would be steady long-range returns from reruns, college film societies, all kmds of special showings, and TV sales (I wonder why the New York Film Festival did not select this film rather than, say, Jacques Rivette's dreary, four-hour Mad Love, but knowing who the Festival judges are, I do not really wonder ) If a publishing house can bring out numerous books for prestige purposes, so, once m a while, could a film company But among American film companies, greed and bemghtedness predominate As a result, they end up cutting their own throats Vincent Canby's all-impoitant New York Times review-imperceptive and barely lukewaim-accuses The Emigiants of being only a succession of short, cryptic, high point scenes which have the effect of tableaus that evoke the look of events instead of the emotion ' With the Times' facilities at his disposal, Canby must, or certainly ought to, know how truncated the American version is How many of the films he admires could sur vive at all after having almost a third cut out of them'' It is a supreme proof of Troell's artistry that The Emigiants is still a lovely and remarkable film, even though a certarn roughness and depletion can, regrettably, be felt m it Under the circumstances, I can not write my usual critique, I will not do an artist like Troell the injustice of reviewing a film of his that I have not really seen But there are some things I can affirm nevertheless I can say that the struggles of a bunch of Swedish peasants to survive-first on their own and soil, amid a harsh climate and social conditions, then through an inhumanly hard trek across land and sea, and, finally, on foreign ground against linguistic and other handicaps-are compassionately, stirringly, and even humorously evoked I can say that Troell's direction, and his and Bengt Forslund's script, avoid both sentimentality and gimmickiness, and are patient, sympathetic and incisive Further, the large cast, headed by Max von Sydow and Liv Ullmann, is superb almost without exception Again acting as his own cinemato-grapher, Troell has, without any recognizable camera trickery, toned down his colors to the point where the Swedish landscapes look like undernourished pastels, beautiful but coldly misted over The interiors, on the other hand, have a good, country glow to them, as m Dutch genre pamtmgs an aura of cleanliness and decency rather than warmth, but that too, what with all those comforting russets and trusty browns When America, the promised land, is reached, the palette runs well-nigh wild by comparison, the brilliant greens, blues and oranges are jubilant without being overwhelming This is accomplished through mastery, not just luck Although some of the American scenes were shot on location m Minnesota and elsewhere, others were filmed back m Sweden As a fine finishing touch, there is the intelligent, laconic, always musicianly score of Erik Nordgren, best remembered here for his spanng, graceful score for Smiles of a Summer Night The film, like the Parthenon, is still a noble rum T hough considerably less artistic than Troell's film, Martin Ritt's Sounder is a rare honest movie about people who work the soil under conditions of extreme rigor, and m this respect can stand honorable com panson with The Emigrants Sounder is also a rare honest Hollywood movie about blacks, making it virtually unique Based on a novel by William H Armstrong, with a screenplay by Lonne Elder III, the film concerns a family of Louisiana sharecroppers in the '30s, exploited by their white boss When hunger for meat becomes overwhelming, Nathan Lee Morgan, the father, steals a ham For this, he is sentenced to a year of hard labor in a camp whose location is kept from his family His wife, Rebecca, and older son, David Lee (10 or 11), carry on without him-working the farm and raising the two tiny kids Later, David Lee goes off m a vain search for his father and is discovered along the way by a kindly black schoolteacher who promises to educate him When the father, partly crippled, finally returns, David no longer wants to leave home His courageous mother and far-sighted father make him go, for the betterment of all their futures So abridged, the story sounds banal, crude and tear-jerking The film is none of these things It is simple, forthright and moving by its restraint There are weaknesses, to be sure Ritt is not a particularly imaginative director, and the screenplay (probably following the novel) does not explore character in depth But how could it' The characters are people who have not been per mitted to explore the depths of their thoughts and feelings Still, they manage to say a good deal with a look, a sdence, an understatement, or a bit of indirection In fact, the film's title is an indirection Sounder is the name of the boy's beagle, which the sheriff shoots and almost kills The dog disappears and does not return until its tongue and time have licked the wounds away The Morgans and their fellows are in hiding, too, wounded but slowly licking themselves into health and strength Although Carmen Matthews is unconvincing as a decent white woman, the acting is generally good Young Kevin Hooks is marvelously straightforward as David Lee But the shattermg performance is that of Cicely Tyson as Rebecca Her strong emotions, deeply repressed, must register from behind layers and layers of imposed imperturbability Miss Tyson does not indulge herself in a smidgen of histrionics-not even that kind of fake underplaying that Brando, for instance, capitalizes on m The Godfather-but her essential sentiments can be exhilarahngly ghmpsed beneath the repressions, like bright pebbles at the bottom of a very limpid pond A Separate Peace, by John Know-les, struck me as a vastly overrated, artificial, dishonest novel, and the film Larry Peerce has made of it from Fred Segal's screenplay succeeds in being incomparably worse Seldom have I seen script, camera and direction churning away with such elephantine determination to create sensitivity and significance, to probe into the individual psyche while at the same time offering large, meaningful statements The film thus achieves failure m two directions, both at once-something akin to falling flat simultaneously on your arse and face In this context, Frank Stanley's unlovely color photography unfortunately can not go unnoticed The one interesting thing about this pretentious and unbelievable film is the badness of the acting, despite its being done on the book's actual location, Exeter Academy, by a cast appropriately recruited from the students and staff Consider what English, French or Italian kids could have done playing themselves' Then see how stilted and lifeless these amateurs are, revealing something awkward and hidebound about the upper-crust American personality...