A Little Night Music - 1978 Film Version

Yet again a major work sheds some of its distinction through successive adaptations. What began as one of Ingmar Bergman's finest films, Smiles of a Summer Night, became the Broadway musical A Little Night Music (good score by Stephen Sondheim, poor book by Hugh Wheeler), and was turned into an execrable movie (screenplay by Wheeler, pitiful performance by Liz Taylor), newly released on DVD.

The Broadway musical had its assets: decent direction of a strong cast by Harold Prince, poetic scenery by Boris Aronson, Patricia Birch's ingratiating choreography and Sondheim's period-evocative waltzes with cutting-edge lyrics. No asset was the book, which borrowed all too little from Bergman's screenplay and substituted way too much of Wheeler's mush.

In the Bergman film, Lawyer Fredrik Egerman has for second wife the very young, virginal Anne (consummation deferred), an earnest, theological-student son, Henrik, and a sassy, saucy maid, Petra. His ex-mistress, the glamorous actress Desiree Armfeldt, is guesting at the town theater. Her current lover, the ferocious officer Count Malcolm, catches her in flagrante with Egerman, whom he chases out into the night in a nightgown.

Malcolm's neglected wife, Charlotte, both loves and hates her husband, and plans revenge. Having enlightened Anne about their spouses' infidelities, she proposes to seduce Egerman during a country weekend at the lavish mansion and estate of Desiree's feisty mother, old Mrs. Armfeldt, to which both the Egermans and the Malcolms, complete with servants, have been invited. Petra, who tried to seduce Henrik (he flubbed it), now gets involved in a romp with the lusty valet, Frid. Strange, funny and melancholy peripeties ensue.

A trick bed that, through a sliding panel in the wall, accidentally moves Anne from Fredrik's bedroom into Henrik's; the sad and symbolic veil that Anne, eloping with Henrik, drops from the escaping coach; the comically humiliating, face-blackening outcome of the Russian-roulette duel between Count and Lawyer; the bucolic frolicking of Frid and Petra; the charmingly profound concept of the three smiles of the summer night—all these are among Wheeler's many excisions.

Equally inept are Wheeler's inventions, especially painful in the screen adaptation. Starting the movie as a theater performance with a curtain going up, though the rest of the film ignores this device—which, by the way, is old hat. Turning the Malcolm residence into an immense, regal palace, complete with sentries at the entrance. Replacing much of Bergman's pungent or poetic dialogue with platitudes or trivia. Transgendering Desiree's illegitimate son by Fredrik into a daughter, who becomes a major, heavily sentimentalized character. Bitter old Mrs.Armfeldt being similarly sentimentalized into a doting grandma. Supporting actresses in Desiree's play vulgarized into whores. And so, dumbingly and numbingly, on.

Prince, inexperienced as a film director, does the best he can. The actors who repeat from the stage version—Len Cariou (Egerman, bad teeth in close-up notwithstanding), Laurence Guittard (Malcolm, renamed Carl-Magnus) and Hermione Gingold (Mrs. Armfeldt, even as bowdlerizingly Wheelerized)—come off well enough. Inconsistently, most of the newcomers have British accents clashing with the Americans'. Still, Diana Rigg (Charlotte) and Lesley-Anne Down (Anne) hold their own; Christopher Guard (Henrik, renamed Erich) and Lesley Dunlop (Petra) do not.

Curiously, the veteran cameraman Arthur Ibbetson lights Elizabeth Taylor (Desiree) unflatteringly, but it may be that Liz's by then puffy face was unredeemable. So, certainly, was her performance. Bergman's powerful portrait of the Eternal Feminine, superbly embodied by Eva Dahlbeck, was reduced to a cutesy, thin-voiced, baby-talking, over-the-hill ingénue.

Finally and pathetically, two of Sondheim's best songs—Mrs. Armfeldt's "Liaisons" and Petra's "The Miller's Son"—have been cut from the movie. It would have been better to cut the master print into shreds and obviate further reproduction.