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- Ingrid Bergman
-
-
- (August 2, 1943)
-
- Even without talent, Ingrid Bergman could bring something rare
- to U.S. films. To cite one single asset which is hers almost
- exclusively, her photographed flesh looks neither like a Crane
- fixtures ad nor sponge rubber nor the combined efforts of a
- rubber nor the combined efforts of a fashionable portraitist and
- a rural mortician; it looks like flesh. Many people, since life
- must go on, find this attractive, even when it surprises them
- to see it on the screen. THe same thing goes for her poise,
- sincerity, reticence, sensitiveness and charm.
-
- Also for talent, of which Miss Bergman has a lot. And she
- knows how to use it. Hollywood's talented people have developed
- marvelous skill in a tradition as rigid and elaborate as
- Japanese dancing, and almost as remote from life. Miss Bergman
- comes of a tradition in which an interest in realism, in the
- huge and various wealth of actual life, is a natural to a good
- actress as to a good novelist.
-
- The U.S. will always like its great dancers and ritualists
- with good reason. But its fondness for Miss Bergman indicates
- as well, an appetite for the sudden lights, edged shades and
- flexibilities of reality. As an actress, Miss Bergman has just
- one basic rule: "Never speak a line which does not make sense
- for the part." She is probably the best reader of lines in the
- business just now; and it appears to pay.
-
-