You sit with Max von Sydow and you find yourself thinking, "So this is what Jesus would look like at 60." It's not the world's prettiest picture. This is a face that has experienced, and survived. His weathered skin is Scandinavian-pale, almost ashen. His blonde hair looks windblown, even when it's not. His full lower lip suggests a man eternally pouting over life's difficult puzzles.
But then there are the eyes: cool blue, perfect spheres. It is those eyes that have the young waitresses at the hotel restaurant waving goodbye, giggling with the same excitement they might accord Tom Cruise. Those eyes have been the essence of many a great von Sydow performance. In 1988's Pelle the Conqueror, von Sydow barely spoke, but he made speeches with his eyes, and came away with an Oscar nomination. For Ingmar Bergman, a filmmaker obsessed with faces as living sculptures, landscapes on which his haunting stories were to be played out, von Sydow's face--familiar, serene, yet powerful--was the perfect tableau. In a remarkable series of films it is the focus of Bergman's drama; you can't look away from the eyes as they cut through the bleak Scandinavian settings and stark black and white photography. Is it any wonder these eyes can also intimidate?
And von Sydow's eyes can unnerve you. He has a remarkable stare--there seem to be minutes between blinks. But when I admit to him I'm uneasy, he backs up in his chair and says, "Oh, please. I find it very hard to take myself seriously."
You can tell von Sydow is used to adulation. But he's sick of it too. After all, Bergman himself may be deeply allied with the form and content of his films, but von Sydow is just an actor--a brilliant vehicle for Bergman's dark investigations, but a vehicle as well for other, lesser visions and for absolute piffle on many occasions. And he actually likes to talk about his non-Bergman oeuvre. Perhaps he's worn out by 30 years of reliving the doppelgangers of The Seventh Seal with art-minded reporters. In any case, he's happy to show people the von Sydow who makes movies just for the hell of it, and, he'll concede, because the money's so good, even if the movies aren't. Great actor that von Sydow is, he's taken some preposterous roles just for the money (an honorable tradition that includes actors like Olivier, Burton, Caine, O'Toole). Back-to-back with his sharp, uncompromising turn as Barbara Hershey's artist-lover in Hannah and Her Sisters he actually did an episode of "Kojak." If Hollywood has largely failed to understand von Sydow, von Sydow has perhaps had a fix on Hollywood from early on.
Von Sydow says he doesn't know if it's true, but Hollywood legend has it that George Stevens chose him to play Jesus, his first American role, in The Greatest Story Ever Told, solely on the basis of a photograph. The resulting film became the Ishtar of its time (at $20 million 1965 dollars). "George Stevens was caught in something he really couldn't handle," says von Sydow. "There were too many interests he was afraid of offending." But even in disaster, the film opened Hollywood's doors for its foreign star.
Therein began the rather bizarre string of American films that almost invariably managed to misuse the Swedish actor in a new way each time. Von Sydow was probably thought a natural for The Exorcist in 1973. These days it's difficult to think of the film in artistic terms, but it was taken very seriously indeed by reviewers when it opened. It made sense to cast the estimable von Sydow as Father Merrin, mystic matador to Satan's bullshit. No matter that his most memorable scene had him slimed by Linda Blair's Technicolor vomit. He was the film's legitimizing class act. And he had his first Hollywood blockbuster: audiences made it the biggest moneymaker of its day.
"Nobody told me there was any idea for a sequel to The Exorcist," von Sydow says. "But my agent called me to tell me they were going to do it, and there was a part for me. I said, 'But I died in the first film.' 'Well,' he told me, 'this is from the early days of Father Merrin's life.' I told him I just didn't want to do it again. Then the producers doubled the price. I still said no. But I agreed to meet with [director] John Boorman. He was very sweet and asked me to read the script. So I read it and I said, 'Sorry, it's not for me.' Well, I think they doubled the price again. But this time they also gave me the script to another film which I found very interesting. My agent told me that for doing two weeks' work on Exorcist 11, I'd get paid more than I've ever made and I'd have this other thing. I said O.K."
Exorcist II: The Heretic turned out to be a major embarrassment. (John Simon, only one of many critics who had their fun with it, noted that, "There is the very strong possibility that Exorcist II is the stupidest movie ever made.") And the role used to lure von Sydow to The Heretic was given to Nicol Williamson--that of Merlin in Boorman's magical Excalibur. Von Sydow tells me ironically that he is often asked to sign autographs from people who think he is Nicol Williamson.
Von Sydow is philosophical about the vagaries of Hollywood and the film business. He offers brief comments on some of his pictures as I reel them off one by one:
Hawaii (1966): "The film lost when the producers made George Roy Hill cut it down. In fact, in doing that he made the film less rich, therefore longer."
The Kremlin Letter (1970): "It was great to watch Orson Welles, not only as an actor but as a director. As soon as he appeared on camera he took over. He rearranged the scenery, rewrote the dialogue. John Huston was very amused."
The Exorcist (1973): "An extremely well done film, but maybe not my cup of tea."
The Emigrants (1971) and The New Land (1972): "The roles were very inspiring for me to do. It was so close to my own background. A long and intense period of work."
Voyage of the Damned (1976): "The writer and director got lost showing so much suffering. Too much feeling. One family tragedy after another."
Hurricane (1979): "Sometimes you remember more about the location where you shot the film than the film itself. I was just not right for the part."
Flash Gordon (1980): "I was tired of playing tight-lipped people."
Conan the Barbarian (1982): "Schwarzenegger's a very intelligent man. Real charm and presence."
Strange Brew (1983): "Not even a brewery wanted to have any¬thing to do with it."
Dune (1984): "It should have been a series of three films. Then, it would've paid off."
Victory (1981): "Ah, the football game..."
In short, most of von Sydow's American efforts clash kitschily with the gems of his Swedish oeuvre--The Seventh Seal Through a Glass Darkly, The Magician, Winter Light, The Virgin Spring, Shame, Wild Strawberries.
To put von Sydow's career in perspective, you have to travel back over four decades to a day when Max was not Max, but Carl Adolf. He was onstage at the Royal Academy of Drama where his assigned task was to put on an imaginary flea circus. He pulled out a make-believe flea named Max from a make-believe box and played with him onstage. So popular was the act that von Sydow's classmates began calling him Max. He liked the ring of it, and felt it sounded dignified. Besides, in this post-World War II era there were better names to have than Adolf.
Von Sydow had gotten to the Academy over the protests of his parents. "My parents never thought about me being an actor at all. Acting did not belong in their world. They both came from very strict religious homes. Very orthodox, Protestant. Theater and all that had a sinful touch. My parents became proud of me when I was accepted at the Academy at the first attempt. That was proof I had something."
Just what von Sydow had was not clear at first: "All through my first years it seems that directors wanted to typecast me as a farmhand. That was O.K. for a time, but then I got a bit fed up with it. So, when suddenly I was offered this noble knight from the Crusades [in The Seventh Seal] it was a very exciting task.
"But when I made the film I was very tense. I was so tight-lipped. We used an acting style in Sweden that was very theatrical. We spoke as if we had an audience of 700 people. That disturbs me a great deal today." He stands up and thumps his chest. "I TALKED LIKE THIS. If I had to do it again I'd be different." (He concedes it might be fun to play Death in a remake.)
The Seventh Seal was the beginning of a collaboration between actor and director that makes the De Niro/Scorsese relationship pale by comparison. It was in Bergman's personal, radical films that the great actor in von Sydow emerged in the late fifties, sixties and seventies. And paradoxically, it is only Bergman's von Sydow that Hollywood seems to recognize. For despite how Hollywood has employed the actor over the years, it didn't appreciate him or reward him for the quality of his performances, until he made a somber Scandinavian film called Pelle the Conqueror. In 1988, he became only the fifth actor in history-- the second in this decade--to be nominated for a foreign language performance. "I was very, very moved that the actors of the Academy nominated me," he says. "I knew Dustin was going to win. I was absolutely convinced. I was nervous just that Pelle would not get the foreign film Oscar. I thought Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown would win. When Pelle won, it made me very happy."
And now von Sydow has directed his first film, a small piece titled Katinka, about a married woman in love with a mysterious stranger who has moved into her village and whom she can't have. "Katinka has a very warm and ironic sense of humor in many ways," von Sydow says. "It's a sad story about unfulfilled love. It has a lot of supporting characters that are quite funny. It has a lot of good spirit and humor in it. There are tears at the end. It is one of those stories where there is no drama. On the surface everything is fine, but underneath is where all the action is. I thought of Chekhov a lot when I did it." It's hardly surprising that von Sydow cites Bergman as the director who has most influenced him. "That's quite obvious, I suppose," he says. "But I really didn't follow anybody's example." There is a pause. "That's not quite true. I have been influenced in what not to do. I have been in films when the director was never able to make up his mind or communicate with his actors. He had no sense of practical arrangements, no overall view, no general concept. It's very frustrating. You have to tell him what he thinks."
What was remarkable about Bergman's directorial style? "He had a way of directing which worked very well. When we were about to shoot a very tense, tough scene--when everybody was uptight, including Mr. Bergman--he usually rehearsed everything. When he felt that everything was going well, he would break down and make fun of it all. Bergman can be a very funny man. When everybody forgot about all the difficulties and the tenseness," von Sydow claps his hands, "then he called us to attention and started shooting."
Katinka notwithstanding, von Sydow has no plans to make directing his second career. It took him thirty years to move from in front of the camera to behind it--a clear indication of where he feels most comfortable. And while he's indicated a desire to return to his roots and the Swedish stage in the near future, we can be certain that von Sydow, unlike Bergman, will not choose to remain there long. His desire to act seems commensurate with his need to travel. After finishing Katinka, he was on the boards at London's Old Vic, doing Shakespeare, and he followed that with a trip to Budapest where he played a KGB agent in an HBO movie, Red King, White Knight, as well as filming Dr. Grassier, in the role of an opera singer. He has since journeyed to Australia to star as a German accused of Nazi war crimes in Father. After that he'll portray yet another German--a missionary in NBC's upcoming "Hiroshima." Priests and Nazis--certainly, he's played these roles before. Perhaps such familiar territory is comforting to someone who spends so much time away from his native land. But in an era when most stars are so hyper-selective about their roles that they only appear on-screen once every five years, von Sydow is a throwback to the time when actors kept busy doing their very best in whatever came their way.
____________
Rod Lurie is a freelance writer based in Los Angeles.