Death in a Tin Canister

...The youngest of their band, cross-eyed and freckle-faced Miki (Reno), is especially taken with the American and volunteers to help him journey across the countryside to safety in Italy...

...The movie is not without virtues—his work never is—but its unremitting close-ups and overall static quality probably held up better on the tube than they do on the big screen...

...He manages to simultaneously project Vogler's easily flattered masculine vanity and the director's commitment to his craft...

...Anna, an ingenue thrown into her first major role (Lena Olin...

...and an older leading lady, Rakel (Ingrid Thulin), a former mistress of Vogler...

...The two female characters seem to exist purely to give Vogler/ Bergman an opportunity to proclaim his mushy and vague apologia pro vita sua: "Wives and ex-wives, lovers and ex-lovers, and even geniuses are human," he seems to be saying...

...That's entertainment, surely, albeit of a minor sort...

...That has been the early resting place as well of Brady's Escape, another summer offering I sampled before it got lost in the shuffle...

...She and her son live with her own mother (played, con brio, by Maureen Stapleton) in a small, pinkish house that is apparently located in Florida, though I could never determine exactly where this sunlit, slightly passe spot was supposed to be...

...He seems to approach every role with an almost Shakespearean intensity, as if to rattle the rafters with the excellence that lies dormant in the most mediocre of his projects...

...I caught the movie at the end of May, just after it opened, and fully expected it to stay around for at least a few months...

...The mise en scene is an almost-bare set where Vogler has been rehearsing his umpteenth production of Strindberg's A Dream Play...

...Sarandon and Dreyfuss meet and instantly dislike each other...

...Best Friends had a pleasant way of taking the problems and tics of its characters to heart, instead of merely setting them up to be guffawed at or miraculously rescued—the usual strategy, as in The Woman in Red, of recent vintage...

...the theatrical metaphor never attains urgency, never spreads more than the smallest circle of light...

...It would be interesting to see what would have happened if this picture had come to us adorned with praise from an Old World lover of Americana, a Wim Wenders, perhaps...

...Arty movies are automatically "films...

...When Annade-parts, he equably redirects these observations on his intertwined professional and personal passions to Rakel, who continues to long for the assurance of his romantic interest...

...Dreyfuss, as a school janitor who invents gadgets and writes novels, strutted his usual hyperkinetic stuff, which I, for one, always enjoy...

...Yet some quite average movies (Purple Rain and The Neverending Story, for instance) are still there come September...

...For me, this reflects little self-understanding...

...Nonetheless, after an hour's worth of kicking and angling, he and Sarandon don't quite fall but stumble into love...

...Eventually, thanks mostly to the proddings of the son, they become "best friends...

...Most of his speculations are directed at the glowing Anna, who returns to the theater on pretext of having forgotten something but really means to seduce the director, a former lover of her mother...

...Directed with a lyrical yet unsentimental touch by Pal Gabor, Brady's Escape suggests the brief shining moments of communion possible between people of wholly different backgrounds and ages...

...Erland Josephson, always an engaging performer, portrays Vogler as a man torn by wisdom and self-delusion, half satyr and half disengaged artiste...

...They either have to be relentlessly commercial—Best Friends was a little too nuanced, too aware of its own slim place in the world for that—or obviously arty—Brady's Escape wasn't sufficiently alienated to qualify, and in any case hit the pro-American pedal too often for the taste of hardened film fans...

...Nevertheless, the piece plays as a monologue with interruptions...

...On Screen DEATH IN A TIN CANISTER BY DAPHNE MERKIN I doubt that anyone has figured out why one piece of summer fluff manages to stick around for ages, while another floats off into the ether, gone and forgotten within days...

...Mind you, I am not claiming great things for Best Friends or Brady's Escape: I am wondering at the way movies nowadays must apparently take one of two routes to survive...

...I guess it has to do with luck, or an equally ineffable quality Take Best Friends...

...Clearly, if it has any fate besides death in a tin canister on some back shelf, it is destined for the home screen...

...It veers schizophren-ically from the jaded and polished war-horses it is so good at turning out {An Unmarried Woman, Kramer Vs...

...It is Bergman working out one of his preoccupations—and not the most complex of them...

...Despite exceptions—an occasional oddball success, like Tender Mercies—our own moviemaking is drawn to extremes...

...I liked her better in this film than in Woody Allen's Interiors...

...That may not be a tragic predicament, but it does help explain why at present it is mostly Europeans and South Americans who succeed in balancing the demands of art and entertainment...

...Would Sarandon conquer her fears...

...As usual, Bergman's language is almost hectoringly literary—is this true in the Swedish?—but some of Vogler's asides, notably his last, have the bittersweet clarity of Chekhov...

...The last was said by almost every critic to be uniquely good for its genre...

...Ma Stapleton, who has been holding down one office job for most of her days, sniffily subverts her daughter's efforts to Get Ahead with Life...

...course, personalized visions are not immune from vices—specifically, self-indulgence...

...I quickly realized just how wrong I was when I saw Best Friends again within 10 days—as the inflight offering on my way to Israel...

...Much of the fare released during the months of June, July and August is meant, like cotton candy, to be consumed even before it is tasted—in a few cases, before it is spun...

...Sarandon, here an alternately harried and loving single mother, works as a secretary and keeps trying to move up the ladder to legal secretary, if only she can pass the test...

...In her own way, however, she is quite a loyal mum, baking chocolate chip cookies and doting on her grandchild...

...A transparent stand-in for Bergman, he muses on a lifetime of involvement with the stage and its people: the actresses he has loved and the egos, including his own, he has seen massaged and bruised...

...Still, I found A fter the Rehearsal fatally involuted...

...Admittedly, he has all the best lines too...

...What genre...

...The acting had a uniformly credible feel, with Stapleton in particular bringing resonance to a part that might easily have been a caricature of all the obstructive mothers one has ever seen...

...Interestingly, the small-scale venture was made for Swedish television, and without doubt only Bergman's blinding reputation on these shores won it a theater engagement...

...Which brings me to another summer film, although this one actually managed to hang on for awhile: Ingmar Bergman's After the Rehearsal...

...From the almost Argentinian disappearance of the two releases I deduce that American audiences do not respond positively to anything they can't categorize: Nichelessness kills...

...As the plot unfolded, I came to care about all the characters: Would Nancy Allen get her come uppance...

...No masterpiece, but it wasn't terrible, either...

...others, no worse, aren't in the listings next time you check...

...Would Dreyfuss realize that his novels stank...

...flyer shot down over Hungary during World War II, is given refuge from the Nazis hunting him by a close-knit group of young native horsemen...

...Fine...

...The Hungarians and the Wyoming-born Brady, an avid rider himself, are soon full of mutual confidence and admiration...

...It depends, I suppose, on whether you like your confessions soft- or hard-boiled...

...In the end, running through an imaginary scenario with the eager Anna of the course their proposed affair would take—the initial rapture leading inevitably to disappointment and final rupture—Vogler persuades her that it is in both their interests to abstain...

...Several months after seeing Best Friends I can recall more of it than I can of Beat Street or Electric Dreams or, God save me, Sixteen Candles...

...Besides his inventions and books, you see, Dreyfuss has a sexy boutique-owner girlfriend (Nancy Allen...

...I certainly can't...

...But who' s to know...

...Kramer, TheBigChill, Terms of Endearment) to sudden plunges into direct and raw experience (Claudia Weill's Girlfriends, Coppola's misfired yet not uninteresting Rumblefish, John Sayles' work, all of Cassavetes, including his latest, Love Streams...

...Based on a stage play of the same name, it had Richard Dreyfuss, Susan Sarandon and a rather endearing child actor who played her anxious 11-year-old son...

...Bergman presents us with three characters: Vogler, a famous and fatigued director (Erland Josephson...

...Captain Brady (John Savage), aU.S...

...in fact, it hit a few nice notes...

...A less ornate, less publicized and, it is to be presumed, less well-financed version of the "a-man-and-his-horse" theme that also inspired Par Lap, Brady's Escape is a standard adventure with an extra dimension provided by two assets: Its spirit of gentleness and the extraordinary acting of Kelly Reno...

...Somewhere along the horizon of Filmland, it seems, there are directors and producers—often, but not exclusively, the younger ones—yearning to bypass the gloss, the idee fixe of the industry and to capture a genuinely individual vision: that of the Lone Ranger or Rangeress...

...With his odd mixture of cuddly teddy bear looks and unexpectedly discerning eyes, Josephson is uncommonly suited (as he was in Scenes from a Marriage) to conveying the conflict between his characters' strengths and vulnerabilities...