Posted 12:42 PM by Gene

Let me put it this way now: What Shakespeare is to the theater, Bergman is to cinema....

[S]ome benighted or uninformed souls think of him as merely a gloomy Scandinavian with no sense of humor. Wrong. A Lesson in Love and the brilliant elevator episode in Waiting Women are sheer comedy at its best; Smiles of a Summer Night, a great film, is serious comedy, and so even better. No less important is that, like Shakespeare, Bergman had bright moments in his darkest films, as dark ones in his lighter ones. And he never shied away from the great, tragic truths.

With all due respect, Mr. Simon, this is the worst possible defense for Bergman. We admit to ignorance of him, but we do know a little of Shakespeare, and when he attempted comedy it was uproariously unfunny. Who would laugh at a Shakespeare line without the stage prompting? One of his most annoying characters is Touchstone, who reminds us of an Elizabethan-era Mork. Likewise the infernal musicians who step on the coincidences in Romeo and Juliet; why couldn't they shut up and play -- or better still, shut up? And yes, we know all about the drunken lardbucket Falstaff. George Abbott thought highly enough of Shake that when he adapted The Comedy of Errors into the musical The Boys from Syracuse (Rodgers and Hart's tunes were far wittier than anything Shake ever did) he quoted all of one line -- and immediately had another character exclaim, "Shakespeare!" No, for our money, Shake's most amusing ditties are the mad scene in Hamlet and Troilus and Cressida, which contains the laughingest affair this side of Bogie and Betty in To Have and Have Not, and those insult contests involving Thersites, who invented the character of Oscar Levant. Please, we have enough critically-acclaimed "comedy."