Comments on: Smiles of a Summer Night (The Criterion Collection) [Blu-ray]

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sat, 09 Mar 2013 06:30:26 +0000

Not there yet….but miles away from everybody else Smiles of a Summer Night it’s not one of my Top 10 Bergmans,but it’s a fine example of 50′s European cinema.Bergman said : “a mixture of operetta and comedy”.Pauline Keal said : “One of the few classics of carnal comedy.” Woody Allen said :”Even Smiles of a Summer Night, which some consider his ‘comic masterpiece’, is a very charming film, it has a warmth to it..” Enough said.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sat, 09 Mar 2013 06:21:36 +0000

Send In The Clowns This was director Ingmar Bergman’s break-through film, the winner of the 1956 Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival, the first of his many internationally acclaimed films. The story is a time honored one, referrencing the same tradition of romantic complications found in Shakespeare’s A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM and Rostand’s LA RONDE: every one is either in love with or married to the wrong person.

By: Gary F. Taylor "GFT"

Gary F. Taylor "GFT" — Sat, 09 Mar 2013 06:06:07 +0000

Don’t look back it from Bergman’s “second period”…. If you’re a fan of Bergman’s works about psychological abuse, personal disaster and disintegrating relationships, this film is definitely not for you. But it reaches a hand across to his late work, sharing a kind of sunlit-but-shadowed atmosphere that’s both in the physical environment, and in the people he displays. Less stiff than Bergman’s other early attempts at humor (The Devil’s Stye, for example), the storyline is engaging, the characters interesting and all-too-human; and the outdoors scenes really bring some life to a director who was all too easily stagebound. There are few outright laughs in this film, but a great many smiles and a warm willingness to embrace humanity with all its flaws.