Max Von Sydow (1929-2020)

by Nathaniel R

It is with great sadness we must announce the passing of Max von Sydow. The international acting legend had worked steadily since his big screen debut in Sweden in 1949. Multiple Swedish classics followed including Miss Julie, Wild Strawberries, and The Virgin Spring. International fame happened quickly through his mutli-film collaboration with Sweden's most celebrated auteur Ingmar Bergman. By the mid 60s he began headlining international productions, first as Jesus in The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965) and by the 1970s he was a mandatory for prestige all star productions (Voyage of the Damned, The Exorcist). He's been a mainstay of cinema for 70 years, that exceedingly memorable long face flipping from sweet to sinister to authoritative to wise (and everything inbetween) on command for the demands of any role.

Before his death he completed a lead role in an as yet unreleased WW II drama Echoes of the Past which is currently in post-production. Let's pray it's a fitting swansong for one of the inarguable greats.

We had the privilege of interviewing him over coffee when he was making the awards rounds for The Diving Bell and Butterfly and he was sweet, humble, and talkative about his career and the cinema. We've begged the Academy to give him an Honorary Oscar quite frequently but, tragically, they didn't listen and they've missed their long long window to do so.

After the jump the first 10 Max von Sydow roles that jumped to mind in no particular order when we heard the news...

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Reader's Choice: Voyage of the Damned (1976)

Last week by popular vote you selected this streaming film for screening & discussion...

by Nathaniel R

It lasted 30 days... You will remember it as long as you live."

So went one of the chief taglines for the Oscar hopeful Voyage of the Damned (1976). It reads like a threat -- when taglines attack! -- this promise of a long unforgettable sit. Having only viewed The Voyage of the Damned for the very first time this weekend, it's too soon to say if we'll remember it for as long as we live, but the other part of the statement is accurate. We won't make a snarky comment about the running time (too easy!) but the titular passage was indeed a month long moment of intensely shameful global history. 

For those unfamilar with the history it goes, very briefly, like this...

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Who should receive an Honorary Oscar?

Liv Ullmann and Max von Sydow in "Shame"Pete Hammond at Deadline revealed this morning that with all the dates moving earlier next Oscar season, the Academy is actually choosing the next Honorary Oscar winners THIS WEEKEND. It's too late then for an FYC but we feel the need to do one anyway. In the past we've made great suggestions like Albert Finney, Doris Day, Neil Simon, Michael Ballhaus, and Marni Nixon but they let all those people die without honoring them which is such bad form. At least they heard us on Maureen O'Hara, Harry Belafonte, and Angela Lansbury!

I have a suspicion that Caleb Deschanel, obviously a well-loved cinematographer given that surprise sixth nomination for the German film Never Look Away last season, will be named this year. He's 74 years old. For some reason I don't think they'll go with Glenn Close quite yet though she's a common prediction. She's 72 but working a lot right now and still in her prime.

TWELVE SUGGESTIONS...

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1972: The Emigrants

Editor's Note: We will now resume our intermittent investigation into 1972 films for the impending smackdown -- though it will not be this weekend due to unfortunate delays. Here's Eric Blume on the Oscar favored foreign epic The Emigrants, available to rent on Amazon or iTunes.

It’s fun (and by fun, I mean zero actual fun) to watch Jan Troell’s 3 hour and 20 minute epic film The Emigrants and try to figure out how this slow-burn, where nothing good happens to any of the characters for the entire running time, made it into the Oscar race, not in one year but in two!  Due to different rules than we have currently, The Emigrants was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film in 1971, and then for the 1972 Oscars was nominated for a whopping four of the big eight categories:  Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress (Liv Ullman), and Best Adapted Screenplay.

The Emigrants mostly follows a peasant family in rural Sweden in the mid-19th century. Despite back-breaking work, the father (Max von Sydow) and mother (Liv Ullman), realize that they cannot survive on their farm.  A series of horrible events befall them before they decide to leave for a 10-week boat journey to America in hope of a better life. Another family, who leave for the promise of religious freedom, joins them for the grueling ordeal...

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Bergman Centennial: In "Shame" Love is a Battlefield

Any passing visitor who’s toiled amongst the weeds of Ingmar Bergman’s vast garden of emotional entanglements will surely recognize the same familiar seeds of chaos, conflict, and spiritual carnage sown between the damned pistel and stamen of whichever variety of lovers feature into a particular film – but in Shame (1968), his scabbed and battered masterwork of wartime wreckage, the Swedish auteur lays fire to the roses. Incendiary combat between dueling psyches in intimate locations fuels much of his filmography – the mother-daughter melee of Autumn Sonata and frosty schoolhouse rejection in Winter Light immediately jump to mind – but Shame ignites a maximalist fuse within its scope that quite literally drops a bomb on the long-suffering couple at the broken heart of its story. By contrasting the domestic drama of Eva and Jan Rosenberg’s (Liv Ullmann and Max von Sydow) decomposing marriage against a backdrop of military destruction and societal decay, Bergman turns the canvas of the soul inside out and externalizes the conflict of a toxic relationship into the very warzone that is exacerbating its decline.

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