De Düva: The Dove

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.

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.

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!

Seen in the fall of 1969 at a downtown Pittsburgh theater, it continues to be the funniest movie short I ever saw. Like the writer in the post above, no one knew what to expect. I had read a review of the film prior to attending. Having a hint of what to expect my friends and I began laughing early in the run, to the bemused confusion of the audience. Soon others began to understanding snippets of the fake Swedish dialog, causing trickles of laughter. By the end of the film the entire audience was howling.

I do remember the film that followed "Last Summer" with Barbara Hershey but it didn't come close to De Duva for entertainment.

The last time I checked,about 20 years ago, the University of Pittsburgh library had a copy. I'm not sure if its still there but would very much like to buy a reasonably priced CD or VHS copy.