De Düva: The Dove

This film first smashed its way into film goers mass consciousness in the late Sixties when it was tagged unannounced into art houses all over the country. I caught it at the Art Theatre in Akron, Ohio, as a prelude to the main feature, Putney Swope(also recommended for anyone who liked this). Or maybe it preceded Greetings, same location with direction by Brian De Palma and starring Robert Deniro in their first movie, another highly recommended film of frivolous fun. At any rate, it had to be one of the two back in those Ripple years. The Dove even has a young Madaline Kahn and set the stage for the advent of Mel Brooks and Woody Allen to entertain us with feature length nonsense that makes a sabered point. If you think Bill and Ted's wrestling with Death was original and funny, here, in fact, is where the entire battle gestated from. No point outlining the plot and purpose, others have done so very well here, but I do have to urge anyone and everyone to catch this under whatever opportunities they have. Beyond Classic.

I worked with a man who was quite serious. After a weekend, I asked what he'd done, and he'd gone to the same movie I had. Along with the main feature, De Duva was shown.

I asked him how he liked it. He said, "It was O.K., but the audience was so disrespectful." He and his wife had sat through the whole film, not realizing it was a parody in, as one of the other people put it, macaroni English. He had taken the whole thing straight, and hadn't caught on it was a parody.

When I had seen it, I was interested at first because I am a first, second, and third generation Swedish American, and while I don't speak Swedish, I do understand a word or phrase here or there in Swedish films. I sat there, for a couple of minutes, trying to reconcile the English subtitles to words in some Swedish dialect that wasn't making sense to me, until I realized it was not Swedish at all.

Years ago, long before DVD's, video tapes, cable TV, etc. the only was to see films like "The Dove" except at an art house movie theater was to rent a 16 mm print of it, a projector, a screen and get a large room to set up. We used to do this at college and held screenings once a month. There were companies that

supplied the college circuit with independent and underground films. It was a good way for new filmmakers to have their works seen. Most films were

forgettable but not this one. I remember it as the most enjoyable and funniest too.

Years later when I was working with Sven Nykvist on "Only You" I mentioned to him that I had seen "The Dove" and asked him if he had. He smiled and told me that he had and that Ingmar Bergman had seen it too and loved it!

It stands as a tribute to this hilarious film short that people have been leaving stellar reviews of it here for over 10 years; everybody wants to chime in and I am no different in that respect.

The key difference in my exposure to this film, though, is that I first saw it on HBO. We had HBO relatively early, around 1975, and along with movies (that had been in the theaters ONLY 9 MONTHS AGO!!) there were some special little treats and one of them was "De Duva." I had never seen a Bergman film in my life; I was only 12 years old. My brothers were 11 and 10, yet we LOVED this movie. Of course the jokes about dove crap were our favorites, but we totally "got it." So while there is a contingent that is nostalgic for this classic after seeing it in art houses (I'd have been 6 years old and no art house patron), there are those of us who look back fondly on "De Duva" from 1975.

I saw this when it came out in '68, and like everyone else in the theater I initially assumed it was a legitimate Bergman film. The look and feel of the picture was perfect, down to the lingering silences, pregnant with meaning. Or so we thought. About two minutes into it, I began to hear a few people giggling, then a few more as slowly it dawned on the audience that this wasn't the Master Himself after all. Soon everyone was roaring, and by the time it was over most of us were ruined for the feature film (No, I have no idea what it was). You don't have to be familiar with Bergman to enjoy this, but it helps. This is an inspired masterpiece that I rate up there with such untouchable classics as "Bambi Meets Godzilla". When is someone going to put these old shorts on video or DVD? The world could use the laughter these days.