SHERDOG MOVIE CLUB: Week 203 - The Magician (1958)

[Yotsuya]

"Vogler suffers profoundly, not because he is out of favor with the audience but because he wants to perform real miracles - just as, for Bergman, the magic of art lay in its promise of changing reality. The magician who reveals that his resurrection was only an illusion is finally Bergman himself, confessing that Frid's exultant cry at the end of Smiles of a Summer Night, the "meaningful deed" insuring continuance of hope in The Seventh Seal, and the absolution Isak seems to attain with his last vision in Wild Strawberries were, after all, only tricks. That he then ends this film with another Voglerian trick is anything but an expression of confidence in his artistic magic. Ironically, at the moment Bergman was being hailed as the one true genius the cinema had produced, he was entering a crisis."

This is something I was looking forward to discuss: What was the nature of the gift of Vogler bloodline? Was grandma just very observant judge of character and cunningly manipulative towards the passively hostile stableman or was she clairvoyrant? At least she was doing well-meaning spells when by herself, so she seemed to believe she had powers. How much Albert Vogler's art was about creating illusions and how much his animal magnetism was for real? The way he convinced Vergerus that the manlet corpse of the actor was his during the autopsy clearly requires some sort of mind control. I do realise these things are left unclear in purpose and that the movie is about how the artists are sometimes dealing with so faint and intuitive leads that some bullshit filler is needed to convince both the audience and partly themselves.

PTA's The Master is an extreme case of this where the filler has taken over and the gifted individual is totally buried underneath it. Now that I think of it, The Master has actually copied it's dynamic from The Magician! Quell (Phoenix) is the only person with real problems Dodd (Hoffman) has treated while most of his followers are middle to upperclass socialites looking bit of meaning or excitement for their lives. That's pretty similar to Albert Vogler trying to understand and relieve Spegel's anguish while performing stage acts for public hungry for sensationalism.

 

[moreorless87]

I'm not sure its inferred he has any supernatural powers but in the initial stare down it does seem to be suggested he's having some kind of success in hypnotic suggestion before the doctor breaks off. The difference in the bodies you could argue is evidence of the doctors over confidence, he's so sure its Vogler he doesn't think to look at it closely as he's working on it.

 

[Yotsuya]

I'm not sure its inferred he has any supernatural powers but in the initial stare down it does seem to be suggested he's having some kind of success in hypnotic suggestion before the doctor breaks off. The difference in the bodies you could argue is evidence of the doctors over confidence, he's so sure its Vogler he doesn't think to look at it closely as he's working on it.

Yeah, one can think of lots of far fetched scenarios on how things just happened to go to the way for the Voglers with stableman hanging himself like predicted and Vergerus not noticing anything during autopsy, but I find it more plausible, that they did have some extrasensory gifts.

 

[moreorless87]

The stableman was something I was left a bit unsure of, had he actually hung himself or was that some kind of setup with him in on the "con"?

 

[DC23]

The stableman was something I was left a bit unsure of, had he actually hung himself or was that some kind of setup with him in on the "con"?

Also wondered this. I assumed the first one but it was brushed over wasn't it.

 

[Yotsuya]

The stableman was something I was left a bit unsure of, had he actually hung himself or was that some kind of setup with him in on the "con"?

Hell no. That would be 100% deus ex machina as nothing implies he’s an accomplish.

 

[Bullitt68]

With how many people aren't working/aren't making money right now, I'm not complaining, but fuck, teaching is so time consuming that I can't even finish a fucking conversation on here anymore. My apologies @Yotsuya and @moreorless87. I'll hopefully be back in here in a couple of days. Until then, if you guys want a palatable non-religion and non-death yet superbly written and acted and intense Bergman film to jump start new rounds of Bergman viewing, I'd recommend his late film Autumn Sonata if you haven't seen it. I've never liked Fanny and Alexander, so, in my book, Autumn Sonata is his final masterwork. Liv Ullmann and Ingrid Bergman go head-to-head over regret and traumatic memories and it's amazing.

 

[Danger Dave]

aliens

 

[MusterX]

It's like they couldn't make a full 90 minutes movie so they just shoot rustic servants being jolly and horny for 45 minutes to have something to film. It really feels like we have two movies here and they clash pretty garishly. There is a good movie in here but it's buried under a ton of trash.

Wait, hold up a sec. I loved the fact that there were Swedish women ready to bang. Like seriously, the entire castle of them were ready to go. I especially liked how Simson was talking shit about love potions and his worldliness and Sara pretty much calls him out and is ready to do the deed but Simson is exposed for his lack of experience with women. He tries to wiggle out of it by saying he's nauseous and doesn't feel well but that isn't enough to stop Sara.

But theme-wise, I think this movie is an old-case of legerdemain, an underhanded switcheroo if you will. From the get-go, we're told that it's going to be another classical slugfest between science and the supernatural. Is the phantom-realm real, and all that. The Magician and his troupe are invited into the aristocrats home solely to answer this question.

However, during the movie's run-time, it becomes more a film about callousness and inhumanity dished out by the upper-classes towards people like the protagonists.

Maybe, but the ones engaging in callousness sorta got what was coming to them didn't they? The rich man's wife wanted to bang Vogler but Vogler's wife was true to him. The police chief was outed and embarrassed by his own wife in front of everyone, which she found quite amusing. In fact, I first thought she may have been under the influence of the Magician when she did that. And of course we know what happened to Doctor Vergerus.

That scene where the Police Superintendents wife is hypnotized was pretty damn funny.

"He visits whorehouses to eat like a pig and farts at the table!"

"Dear! Think of the children!"

"Oh? I suppose some of them could be his. They're pretty fat and ugly!"

I believe she said, "He's a man that farts while he eats."

Really enjoyable movie. Not a bigtime classic like Wild Strawberries for example, but wonderful telling of the down-and-out chapter of magician’s troupe. Bergman changes styles with ease going from farce to naturalism to horror and so on as do the characters who he’s portraying. And that’s what it seems to take to make a living as an artist. Not everyone wants true miracles and some even deny them all together, so the magician needs to adapt to make a living. Better to dish out the love potions than take people to the true twilight zone where ugly truths could be revealed. But magicians have big egoes, so they won’t hold back forever...

I felt like the real magician was Granny. Tubal even told her at the beginning of the film not to do any real magic because it was too hard to explain and would get them in trouble. She also claimed to be a witch and accurately predicted the death of Antonsson by hanging. I loved he had a uni-brow by the way. Such a hilarious way to project someone as a brute. Unfortunately, I couldn't find a single pic of Antonsson and his uni-brow anywhere on Google or Bing.

Vogler all dressed up reminded me of Adam Driver but then took the wig and small beard off and bam, he'd mysteriously aged about 20 years!

I can't work out whether I loved the scene of Vogler in the bedroom with his wife and that other guy or whether I thought it was rubbish. I think I loved it.

Herr Vogler is my new, "Thanks Obama." Anytime something goes wrong I just clench my fists, tilt my head back, and yell, "HERR VOGLER!!!" I think I loved this film more than I should have. You wouldn't think that something from 1958 would get hold of your attention but I find some of these old films have a way better grasp of dialogue and story telling than many more modern films. Several times during my stay in this club I have been shocked by older films. These are some of my favorites the club has watched that surprised me how much I liked them.

The Magician (1958), I really liked this film. Here are a few others this club shocked me with that I ended up really falling in love with.

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1966)

Vertigo (1958)

North by Northwest (1959)

Persona (1966)

The Devil Rides Out (1968)

 

[MusterX]

To cite Frank Gado's excellent book The Passion of Ingmar Bergman, this dynamic is a recurrent structural motif throughout Bergman's work:

"The erotic revels among the servants [which seem like] irrelevant comic intrusion upon very serious themes [actually] operate as counterpoint to the tortured eroticism expressed in the upstairs bedrooms. The former, which implies an arc of life extending from the callow young lovers, through the middle-aged Tubal and the plump cook, to wise old Grandmother reassuring the youngest servant that she will experience the fullness of womanhood in her turn, is natural, uncomplicated, and joyous; the latter exhibits the suffering of sexually twisted lives. (A similar contrast, springing from the same psychological source, can be found in Smiles of a Summer Night.)"

Yes, thank you. I knew there was a reason why I enjoyed the long scenes in the kitchen so much. There is a mix in those scenes of seriousness, and comedy, of sex, and the denial of sex, of wanting and not having, and also the fear of the unknown because the women are afraid of the Magicians troupe who have come to dine and the stableman Antonsson and his servant friend Rustan are afraid the troupe will steal their women, which they do, so Antonsson and his friend drown their sorrows in alcohol. This problem is compounded when the alcoholic actor that wants to die steals their fine Brandy and runs away.

I also loved the interactions because Simson, the driver, and Sara or is it Sanna, I can't get the girls names straight but she pretty much called him out on all his worldly knowledge of love and as it turns out he was shitting his pants when she was ready to do the deed. Meanwhile, during all this drinking and sexual innuendo, Granny Vogler, is being the witch that she claims to be by telling Antonsson of his impending doom. It is the very kitchen scenes that @europe1 seemed to not like that made me fall in love with this film.

 

[Yotsuya]

I felt like the real magician was Granny. Tubal even told her at the beginning of the film not to do any real magic because it was too hard to explain and would get them in trouble. She also claimed to be a witch and accurately predicted the death of Antonsson by hanging. I loved he had a uni-brow by the way. Such a hilarious way to project someone as a brute. Unfortunately, I couldn't find a single pic of Antonsson and his uni-brow anywhere on Google or Bing.

I think they both had the gift, but grandma was probably more powerful. I loved the plot that they’d need to convince these civil servants that they are harmless so they could get by them and blow everyone away at the court, but that Vogler just could not contain his anger and pride after Vergerus tried to hit on his wife. First they downplayed their skill and did that shabby levitation act and caught everyone totally unaware with the rest of the show and finally also Vergerus at the attic.

Funny thing btw: I watched Herchel Gordon Lewis’ Wizard of Gore (one of my other nominations) yesterday. It’s about Montag the Magnificent who performs extremely violent stage magic like sawing a woman in half with chainsaw or piercing someoned skull with steel spike. He actually does it for real, but uses some sort of mass hypnosis to convince everyone in the end, that it was just an illusion. He used pretty much the same diversion as Volger. He always opened his show with really lame and obvious trick/illusion and only after lulling the audiense and establishing himself as a harmless sham artist did he do his real thing. Wizard of Gore also had very obvious influence from the wonderful 1954 Vincent Price movie The Mad Magician, so I wouldn’t be surprised if Lewis had taken influenced from Bergman too.

 

[Yotsuya]

The Magician (1958), I really liked this film. Here are a few others this club shocked me with that I ended up really falling in love with.

Great to hear that! The Magician was the most memorable Bergman movie I saw in my late teens and I was both really happy and relieved that I still loved it.

 

[moreorless87]

It certainly was interesting to see Bergman almost half making a genre film, I have been tempted to try The Serpents Egg despite the bad reviews simply to see how he'd do more overt horror.

I almost wrote rant mode about my contempt for this movie, but contained myself not to get distracted from the excellence of Bergman.

I can definitely see why someone would loath it as the nadir of new wave self importance but I do think it works well as a tone piece, looks and especially sounds great with that classic theme. I could say though that for a serious Bardot film La Verite is clearly superior and much weightier, la papa actually had more to say than the son.

 

[Yotsuya]

I can definitely see why someone would loath it as the nadir of new wave self importance but I do think it works well as a tone piece, looks and especially sounds great with that classic theme. I could say though that for a serious Bardot film La Verite is clearly superior and much weightier, la papa actually had more to say than the son.

Heh, I just realised that the dynamic in Contempt and The Magician are very similar. The writer in Contempt has self-loathing because he needs to do a commercial script for the producer who's on a superficial rich man's power trip just like the magician needs to hold back and do as mundane show as possible. The writer ( just like the magician) kind on crumbles under the circumstances leaving the producer (just like the inspector) sensing weakness and feeling very alpha. I've read the Moravia's excellent book the movie is based on. It came out 1954 and The Magician only few years later.

 

[europe1]

Volgers are not the starving poor.

Well... the fact that he's begging and stating that he's absolutely penniless confirms that he is poor. The fact that he used to own a mansion doesn't change that.

To cite Frank Gado's excellent book The Passion of Ingmar Bergman, this dynamic is a recurrent structural motif throughout Bergman's work:

"The erotic revels among the servants [which seem like] irrelevant comic intrusion upon very serious themes [actually] operate as counterpoint to the tortured eroticism expressed in the upstairs bedrooms. The former, which implies an arc of life extending from the callow young lovers, through the middle-aged Tubal and the plump cook, to wise old Grandmother reassuring the youngest servant that she will experience the fullness of womanhood in her turn, is natural, uncomplicated, and joyous; the latter exhibits the suffering of sexually twisted lives. (A similar contrast, springing from the same psychological source, can be found in Smiles of a Summer Night.)"

I was thinking of making some comment about the film having a dynamic between the rustic servent-folk with their zest-for-life vs the aristocratic coldness of the upstairs people, but...

It's sort of like John Ford movies. He would often contrast the rusticness and familiarity of his "home-scenes" vs the inhumanity of his action moments (think The Searchers). So there is definitively a dynamic present here that has some purpose. However, the problem is that one of these dynamics are so cringy in comparison to the other that dramatically, it doesn't work.

In line with Yotsuya's point that this was directed by Bergman and not Marx

Nope, it was both a stylistic and a thematic choice giving the movie it's upstairs, downstairs -dynamic. You simply seem to cherrypick the sections that support your read and dismiss the rest.

Maybe I went too hard on the upper-class/underclass terminology, but I do think there are themes to extrapolate here. Vogler being penniless and having to beg for pocket-change due to having vexed his cold-hearted superiors isn't really a situation unique to Bergman.

As for the whole "relationship with callous aristocrats" angle that seems to be a bit of a mini-theme in Bergman's oeuvre, I think this whole movie handled it a thousand-times better than Wolf Hour, where the whole "They're cannibals because they own my art so they own a piece of my soul" just made me roll my eyes.

Both folks upstairs and downstairs are portrayed individuals. They don't act on unified on class front. Egermans for example are clearly more drawn to the supernatural and want to believe.

Yeah, the Egermans want to believe. But they're still acting exploitative towards the Magician troupe, even though they don't display the outwards hostility of Vergerus and the Superintendant.

My take on the dynamic was more that it revolved around callousness (hatred, indifference, what have you), ie: human-to-human interactions, rather than if they're drawn to the supernatural or not.

Seeing no solution to his personal dilemma, [Bergman] cannot bring his fiction to a satisfactory close, [so] he invents a preposterous happy ending that mocks his despair as a man and his failure as an artist."

I think that earns the BJ head nod of the day.

The way he convinced Vergerus that the manlet corpse of the actor was his during the autopsy clearly requires some sort of mind control

I was wondering about that. Vergerus is a trained surgeon. How does he NOT notice the duplicate?

I'm thinking:

1: It's just a storytelling nicety. A way of getting from A to B. We're just supposed to ignore it for the storytelling to work.

2: He was so enthusiastic to cut Vogler open that he got utter tunnel-vision and didn't notice stuff he otherwise would. After all, Vergerus does believe that people like Vogler's peculiarities are biological in nature, that is to say, if you cut open the cranium then you could spot abnormalities in the brain which explains him.

You wouldn't think that something from 1958 would get hold of your attention but I find some of these old films have a way better grasp of dialogue and story telling than many more modern films.

I was going to mention this, but didn't due to the Swedish-to-English translation perhaps having dulled the effect. But the dialogue here really is good. Even down to little things like Granny calling that young girl "tiny ant"<45>

It even sounds good in Swedish. There is a certain sense of lyricism too it. That's not often something you notice or think about.

. I loved the fact that there were Swedish women ready to bang

Dude, it's Bergman, Bergman films are ALL about Swedish women ready to bang. <45>

Seriously though, some of Bergman's movies made it big at the box-office pretty much solely due to them having sex-scenes in them (like Silence). Back then, you couldn't have nudity in any normal movie. But Berman was an artist making artsy flicks, so the censors were a lot more lenient on him.

This is something I was looking forward to discuss: What was the nature of the gift of Vogler bloodline? Was grandma just very observant judge of character and cunningly manipulative towards the passively hostile stableman or was she clairvoyrant? At least she was doing well-meaning spells when by herself, so she seemed to believe she had powers. How much Albert Vogler's art was about creating illusions and how much his animal magnetism was for real? The way he convinced Vergerus that the manlet corpse of the actor was his during the autopsy clearly requires some sort of mind control. I do realise these things are left unclear in purpose and that the movie is about how the artists are sometimes dealing with so faint and intuitive leads that some bullshit filler is needed to convince both the audience and partly themselves.

I felt like the real magician was Granny. Tubal even told her at the beginning of the film not to do any real magic because it was too hard to explain and would get them in trouble. She also claimed to be a witch and accurately predicted the death of Antonsson by hanging. I loved he had a uni-brow by the way. Such a hilarious way to project someone as a brute. Unfortunately, I couldn't find a single pic of Antonsson and his uni-brow anywhere on Google or Bing.

Random thought about this...

Granny is the potion-maker of the group. She knows how to mix her herbs and spices so to create potent elixirs.

Back in the olden days, Magicians weren't the kind of people who threw thunderbolts from their finger-tips. A lot of people who were accused of witchcraft were people who had been creating potions. They basically thought of potion-making as one aspect of witchcraft. Unlike spellcraft, potion-making is actually something that people back then could perform, so it was liable to get you burned.

So maybe that's where Granny's witchery comes in? It's an antiquated notion of the word?

 

[moreorless87]

Seems like she views a lot of her potions as essentially interchangeable which doesn't put forward a great deal of faith in them although I pose the "love potion" is easy fake as its really just an excuse for relaxing inhibitions.

I suspect what you would get in such troupes is peoples roles changing with age to match audience expectations, as an old woman she's well suited to the witch role.

 

[MusterX]

Random thought about this...

Granny is the potion-maker of the group. She knows how to mix her herbs and spices so to create potent elixirs.

Back in the olden days, Magicians weren't the kind of people who threw thunderbolts from their finger-tips. A lot of people who were accused of witchcraft were people who had been creating potions. They basically thought of potion-making as one aspect of witchcraft. Unlike spellcraft, potion-making is actually something that people back then could perform, so it was liable to get you burned.

So maybe that's where Granny's witchery comes in? It's an antiquated notion of the word?

Random thought...about your random thought.

In the old days, potion makers were called alchemists. One of the most famous alchemists of all time was a man who has remained a mystery to this day by the name of Fulcanelli. We simply don't know his true identity. The "art" of Alchemy later led to the modern day science that we now enjoy called Chemistry.

 

[Yotsuya]

Granny's potion business was 100% scam and she knew it and was open about it with her companions who were in on it. It was her way of making a living by giving people an illusion of what they wanted similar to Albert's sensationalist stage shows, but neither respected the customers. Granny had no trouble selling rat poison as aphrodisiac. Her tragedy was, that she probably mostly foresaw misery and tragedy with her clairvoyance and nobody wanted to hear about such things. Was stableman's death fate or was it self-fulfilling prophecy that could have been avoided if she had kept her mouth shut? Was she after all like The Furies in Macbeth? I bet she wasn't sure herself and it bothered her a lot. Way better for her conscience and for her purse to sell love potions to these fools.

 

[Yotsuya]

Well... the fact that he's begging and stating that he's absolutely penniless confirms that he is poor. The fact that he used to own a mansion doesn't change that.

I don’t know if it was intentional, but your argumentation leaned heavy on Marxist class warfare jargon, so I was using expression "the starving poor", which refers to oppressed/exploited people living in poverty. It does not apply to the Volgers who were not poor because they never had a chance, but because they had risked and lost.

Maybe I went too hard on the upper-class/underclass terminology,

Yeah, the Egermans want to believe. But they're still acting exploitative towards the Magician troupe

Please lay off the red sauce.

 

[Yotsuya]

Heh, I just realised that the dynamic in Contempt and The Magician are very similar. The writer in Contempt has self-loathing because he needs to do a commercial script for the producer who's on a superficial rich man's power trip just like the magician needs to hold back and do as mundane show as possible. The writer ( just like the magician) kind on crumbles under the circumstances leaving the producer (just like the inspector) sensing weakness and feeling very alpha. I've read the Moravia's excellent book the movie is based on. It came out 1954 and The Magician only few years later.

I forgot to mention, that the producer is hitting on the writers wife just like Vergerus is hitting on Vogler's wife because of the situation on hand.