Cheap Sawdust and Tinsel (Video) (Åke Grönberg, Harriet Andersson) (Ingmar Bergman) Price

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Customer Reviews of Sawdust and Tinsel

A circus owner (Gronberg) arrives in his former hometown after an absence of seven years, when he left behind his wife and his two little boys. He hasn't seen them since, and has taken up a new lover: a young, coquettish, simple-minded girl who performs in his circus (Anderson). When the the circus owner decides to pay a visit to his former family, Anderson becomes intensely jealous, thinking that he is leaving her to return to his family. "Fear becomes what is feared" when, sensing abandonment, Anderson allows herself to be seduced by a young actor. Likewise, thinking that his new lover has run off, Gronberg makes a desperate attempt to reconcile with his family. A morbid and most pathetically depressing emotional climax is reached when all the cards are laid on the table at the circus's performance.

The acting/directing in this movie is Bergman at his finest; a 'spontaneous' (thoroughly coordinated) guttoral instinctiveness is pounded on like an out-of-tune piano chord: the emotional progress of the characters in the film is at once difficult to watch, for its ugliness, and strangely attractive. Thematically it probably falls into that category of films more finite in scope, examining love, marriage, and human relationships: but it shouldn't be discounted as small in its aims, for it is full of psychological insight, or at least interesting from that perspective.

I tend to agree with those that find this film a milestone in Bergman's career: essential.

AKA The Naked Night
Ingmar Bergman has called this his first true film, the first step into murky autobiographical terrain, and the coming together of his soul-searching about love, sex, faith and identity with his grasp of cinematic language. Using the metaphor of life as a travelling circus and in particular his legendary philandering, Bergman is the circus owner cuckolded by his mistress and the actor in a local theatre troupe who seduces her. The flashback which appears early in the film encapsulates Bergman's theme where the circus clown's wife strips for a legion of soldiers on the beach, while canonfire and the music of Karl-Birger Blomdahl explodes. This sequence has the starkness of a silent movie and the luridness of a peepshow flick, it's closeups as beautiful and evocative as Carl Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc. Although nothing that follows matches the brilliance of this flashback, some scenes come close - the seduction of the sensual Harriet Andersson, the circus owners visit to his wife who defines the life she is glad to be free of as one of "insecurity, misery, flight, lice and sickness", and a fight in the circus ring. Bergman's rambles when the circus owner gets drunk, in his resolution, and with the theatre scenes where his coverage of the director is too respectful - he gives him a ludicrous low angle introduction, perhaps out of his own feeling of being a director for the theatre. But the use of the circus animals, in particular the cat which lives in the owner's wagon in reaction to a gun is masterly. From the performance we see given by the clowns and the smallness of their working space, I presume we are to feel the way the circus wife does about this kind of life. However what we also see that she doesn't is the bacchanalian playfulness of the troupe, that which keeps them moving from town to town, where one person's escape is another's adventure. This film has been criticised by Pauline Kael in her 5001 Nights at the Movies collection as being bleak, where no one is saved from damnation, but I cannot agree. Perhaps that's the clown in me.

Caustic, Amazing. It leaves one breathless....
A new generation of Bergman viewers has begun to discover that many of the lesser-known films by the great Swedish director are among his very best, or, one should say, they speak to modern audiences in a more significant way than the "cannonical" Bergman films do. "Winter Light", "Hour of the Wolf", "Shame" and, yes, "Sawdust and Tinsel" are at LEAST as worth-watching as "Seventh Seal", "Cries and Whispers", etc. "Sawdust" is a harrowing film, even by Bergman's standards, and it's not for the faint hearted, but it is one of the most gripping films I have ever seen; it's filled with horror and humiliation (and more raw pain than a dozen other films) but it finally shows a sincere compassion for its characters, an attribute that ultimately makes it a true work of humanistic art.