ScottyDoesn'tKnow2 said: "Didn't a film critic say Hal Prince directed this as if he had never seen a movie before? Ouch."
"You know what you're in for near the beginning, when the hero (Len Cariou) is greeted with "Good afternoon, Lawyer Egerman." This film is a cut above Song of Norway and The Blue Bird, but it's in that general sylvan-settings category. It's an adaptation of the Broadway show, which was a reworking, with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and a book by Hugh Wheeler, of Ingmar Bergman's Smiles of a Summer Night. What was lyrical farce in the Bergman film has now become clodhopping operetta. This picture has been made as if the director (Harold Prince) had never seen a movie. With Diana Rigg and Lesley-Anne Down, who manage to get a performance rhythm going in some of their scenes, and with Elizabeth Taylor. New World. Color."
Pauline Kael
Kael's suggestion here might be that Wheeler's libretto and Sondheim's songs make for a clodhopping match even on stage. Obviously, many would profoundly disagree.
But if her implication is that for A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC to work better on screen, even with much better direction than Prince brought to his film, the "book" would have to be very different than Wheeler's and a whole lot more like Bergman's, I completely agree.
Smiles of a Summer Night is a cinematic triumph and, along with All About Eve, quite likely one of the two best sophisticated comedies ever originally drafted for the screen. It's a great shame Bergman didn't write and direct more comedies. And that with the exception of Magic Flute, he didn't make musicals. There was once talk of him teaming with Streisand on a movie of The Merry Widow. That project then seemed very exciting. Now it seems like a might-have-been might-have-masterpiece.
By far the best scene in Prince's movie was the new version of Glamorous Life. Prince's direction of that number shows much of what distinguished him as a stage director: passion for bringing new material to life, a singular understanding of character, narrative, exposition, and musicality and an unparalleled bag of magic tricks to energize a song. Perhaps the song is more right for the movies because it was written for the movies. But I wonder if Prince only believed in his powers as a movie director and owned that in his direction of that scene. And whether, because this new song was the only new song for the film, it was the only time during the film's preparation and filming that he truly caught his stride and felt in the element of his livelihood.
Because the energy he brought to that scene is AWOL from the rest of the movie.
Updated On: 10/6/17 at 10:13 AM
