THE DEVIL'S EYE Movie Review

Djavulens Oga

“A woman's chastity is a sty in the devil's eye,” or so goes a legend as related in an old Danish radio play called Don Juan Returns. In 1960, fresh from the worldwide acclaim he received for The Virgin Spring, Sweden's Ingmar Bergman decided on an adaptation of the play for his next project. The Devil's Eye was conceived as a grand comedy about bourgeois hypocrisy in which the Devil (Stig Järrel) tries to cure his ocular irritation by sending Don Juan (Jarl Kulle) back to Earth from Hell in order to take care of business with a pastor's chaste daughter (Bibi Andersson). Despite what must have sounded like prime material for an elegant, archly theatrical comedy on the order of his Smiles of a Summer Night, The Devil's Eye turned out to be not so much theatrical as merely stagy. There's a tired and uninspired feel to the sexual satire as well as to most of the performances, betraying, perhaps, some of the tensions that existed between the director and his cast. By one report, Bergman was calling The Devil's Eye “a bad film” while he was shooting it, and the all-around anxiety level on the set wasn't helped by a reporter/photographer team from Life magazine hanging around and eavesdropping on all the squabbles. Hardly a disgrace, but by no means one of Bergman's best.

NEXT STOP … Smiles of a Summer Night, The Magic Flute, Sunday's Children

1960 90m/B SW Stig Jarrel, Bibi Andersson, Jarl Kulle; D: Ingmar Bergman; W: Ingmar Bergman; C: Gunnar Fischer; M: Erik Nordgren, Domenico Scarletti. VHS NLC