A Conquering Role for Max von Sydow

Along with their power to give you a glossary of emotions from Angst to zeal, the really good actors can run their IQs up and down the scale like a sliding whistle.

The cool international assassin of “Three Days of the Condor” seems to be all mind, with no feelings at all except a terrible world-weariness. The elderly and illiterate farmer in “Pelle the Conqueror” is all feelings: basic and genuine (and heartbreaking to experience as well as to watch), but his mind perceives not much beyond the basic need to survive in a hard world.

Both men are Max von Sydow, who is one of the best actors in the world and who, as he believes and many critics agree, has never given a finer, richer performance than as Lasse Karlsson, the old farmer in Bille August’s drama set in 19th-Century Denmark.

Von Sydow, who is 59, first caught the world’s eye playing chess with the devil in Ingmar Bergman’s “The Seventh Seal” in 1957. It was the first of his 11 memorable films with Bergman, including many of what are now considered the Bergman classics: “Wild Strawberries,” “The Virgin Spring,” “Through a Glass Darkly,” “Winter Light,” “The Hour of the Wolf” and “Shame.”

He has also become the model of the international actor (“Have passport, will act”). He lived in Rome for much of the ‘70s, doing a few Italian films, notably Francesco Rosi’s superior political melodrama “Illustrious Corpses,” but more often venturing forth to do work in several countries in several languages.

For the last three years he has lived in Paris. “I was hoping to improve my French,” Von Sydow said at lunch in Los Angeles a few days ago, “but I’ve spent most of the time in Denmark.”

He lately finished a limited run as Prospero in Jonathan Miller’s production of “The Tempest” at the Old Vic in London. He has also been doing stage work in repertory in Stockholm, including an early Strindberg play at the National theater, where his old colleague Bergman did a production of “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” which opened last May.

Bergman has indeed abandoned films, Von Sydow says, and is in indifferent health and must use a cane but still directs one or two stage productions a year.

Von Sydow himself has just directed his first and what may be, he says, his only film. It is called “Katinka” and, like “Pelle the Conqueror,” it is based on a Danish novel, written a century ago by Herman Bang. Also like “Pelle,” it is about rural people.

“I read the book 25 years ago and fell in love with it,” Von Sydow says. “It’s a love story, a simple triangle and a love that never takes place because of the social codes out in the country.”

He initially wanted simply to be in it but could find no one to produce the film. “The Swedes are very lazy about reading Danish,” he says. Eventually, he met a Danish producer in New York who liked the project and proposed that Von Sydow direct it.

“I couldn’t very well turn down the suggestion and in fact I was sorry I hadn’t done it before. I never had any plans to direct. But how often every actor has been in the situation where he says, ‘By God, if I were the director, I’d know what to do and this is the way I’d do it.’ ”

After a quarter-century Von Sydow felt he was too old to play in the film so he contented himself with the direction. “I don’t know if I’d do it again. I have some ideas but I haven’t had time to sit down and think them out.”

He had not read Martin Andersen Nexo’s novel “Pelle the Conqueror,” but 25 pages of August’s script were sufficient to persuade him it was film he wanted to do. “I knew the man,” Von Sydow says.

The old farmer in the book, Lasse, was from the same part southern Sweden where Von Sydow himself grew up. “I was able to speak my childhood dialect, and just that made the film fun to do. It’s a tool I’ve used rarely, linguistically speaking,” he says, with a self-mocking smile. The film is essentially in Danish, but the character and his son (confidently played by Pelle Hvenegaard) being Swedish, speak Swedish (a logic infrequently observed in the movies).

The part, he says, “was the best I’ve ever been offered. There was a chance to show so much of this man. The actor rarely gets an opportunity to do something like that in a major leading role. The good stuff simply doesn’t come along that often.”

Von Sydow, who is a slim, urbane 6-feet-5 and would be comfortably at home in the toniest salon, becomes gritty-fingered, weather-and drink-reddened, unwashed, unbright, a loving and decent lump of a man who would die for his son, but--weak and all too aware of his low status--stops short.

Each critic will have a favorite moment. For me there is one early in the film when Lasse, newly arrived at the Danish seaport, leaves the boy and ducks inside a tavern for a little nerve-steadier. He emerges when a prospective employer shows up, and his walk from the tavern is wordlessly wonderful. It is the super-cautious stride of a man who knows he is slightly drunk but must not show it and who stands perfectly, stiffly erect, but about 15 degrees off true vertical. It is comedy and tragedy marching arm in arm.

Von Sydow was a late child whose father was a professor at the University of Lund. There was no theater in the town they lived in, and the parents were not much for going out anyway. Von Sydow remembers being taken to the pictures by his father only twice.

He did get to see a production of “Midsummer Night’s Dream” in the next town and it was life-changing. He started a drama group in his high school. “We did Strindberg, everything,” Von Sydow says. After compulsory military service he applied to the Royal Academy in Stockholm and was accepted.

He made his debut in a small part as the Prince of Orange in Goethe’s “Egmont.” “It was almost a disaster,” he remembers. “I had to come on stage and give a terrible tongue-lashing to an older actor. Unfortunately, he was one of my idols, a man I worshiped. And I had a hellish time making myself do it.” But he did, and although the whole production indeed proved to be a disaster, Von Sydow got good reviews as a promising newcomer.

Years in provincial theater followed. At the last of three repertory companies the director was Ingmar Bergman. Von Sydow had made two films before Bergman cast him in “The Seventh Seal.”

“Little did we know how important that film would be,” he says. “We knew it was important, because it was so different from everything else that was being done. But we had no idea it would find such audiences abroad. Now so many people tell me it was the first foreign film they ever saw.”

Thirty-seven years ago, as now, it was rare for the academy voters to nominate a foreign-language performance in the best actor or actress category. But this could be Max von Sydow’s year, and high time.