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.

This short film would show up in Manhattan movie theaters every so often for ten years or more. We remember it so well because we treasured our first viewings of it, and were so flummoxed by trying to describe it to friends, that the subsequent viewings were often spent compiling mental notes. As the 70s wore on and Madeline Kahn's star brightly ascended, her big joke -- "phallica symbole?" -- became widely quoted. To be able to quote that line got used more than once to fake having actually seen this cool in-joke of cinemagoers. The more of us who saw it, the more we tormented our virgin friends over their having missed it yet again, while arming them with more details to fake their way through chuckling with the beaming cocktailers rather than in envy of them.

Kind of like an initiation rite, because the more pretentious the moviegoer -- those cocktailing cognoscenti -- the more humiliating the first viewing must have been, especially if one were not extra-attentive to the gibberishy narration/dialogue track (overstuffed with nature sounds, to further the verisimilitude).

Much as with actual Swedish, the first jokes detected were often squelched as inappropriate thoughts, distant Germanic echoes from a related tongue, so those who believed they were watching a meditation on memory had the hardest time catching on that they'd been slipped an unannounced comic short. Only well into the 70s did newspaper ads start billing when De Düva (The Dove) would be shown.

Even after realizing it's a comedy, what we took to be Swedishy gibberish revealed itself to be a pastiche of Scandinavianized English, Yiddishisms, and silly dirty jokes.

The climactic incest scene was the hottest screen action I'd ever seen to that point, satirizing the brief era when Swedish features showed more skin than US-released ones.

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.

Assuming you can find a copy, this is one of the greatest ambush films of all time. Have a few of your movie fanatic friends over for some serious film viewing, and sometime that evening, without warning, start playing "The Dove". It is so well done that when I first saw it I took it seriously... that is until I realized that the word "water" in the subtitles was translating a "Swedish" word pronounced "H2Oska". If you play it right, you can wait and see how long it takes for your friends to catch on.

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.