Just as I was interested in seeing Smiles of a Summer Night because of the Stephen Sondheim musical which used it as its basis, I was more interested in seeing this Bergman movie because of the 70s horror movie it inspired, one of my all-time favourites Last House on the Left. I was pleasantly surprised and would recommend it even to those fans of the Wes Craven movie who wouldn’t normally watch “subtitled arthouse stuff”.

Aside from a fairly massive deviation in the ending of the story, and heavy religious input in Bergman’s version of the story, the movies are incredibly similar. And yet, in a way, they’re completely different because of these little differences. It’s going to be a repeat case of the two Lolita movies – I’ll likely never decide between which is the better movie. Bergman’s has an incredibly beautiful, transcendent ending, and it holds back on the sensationalism. There are, for obvious reasons (this was 1960, Hitchcock was making a big deal about flushing a toilet onscreen in Psycho), no controversial scenes of violence or sex. Yet there’s still sex and violence, and the way the initial rape scene is presented is still just as powerful as the extreme one Craven delivered a decade later. Craven’s movie, on the other hand, has the terrifying performance contrasted with the beautiful songs of David Hess.

There’s a lot more to write about this movie. But this viewing for me was really about seeing “the original Last House on the Left” while continuing my Bergman season … I think I can definitely call it a season now, lol. I’ll leave it here.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 28th, 2005 at 7:56 pm in 4 hearts, Movie Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.