Something to Tell

Two foreign films last week were embroiled in sizzling moral controversy--not in the supposedly Puritan-minded U.S., but on their own home ground.

P: Jungfrukallan (The Virgin Spring), latest film by Sweden's brilliant Writer-Director Ingmar (The Magician) Bergman, begins with the shockingly explicit rape and murder of a young girl by two goatherds. Two vengeful murders later, the goatherds are also dead on the screen, butchered by the girl's father. More than a dozen people at the first-showing fled the Stockholm theater before the brilliantly acted movie was finished. Some newspaper critics suggested that the state censor had spared the scissors only because of Bergman's great reputation. Others were enthusiastic in their praise. "Bergman's best," wrote the critic for Dagens Nyheter, Sweden's largest daily. As for Director Bergman, he pointed out calmly that the movie is based on a 9th century Provenc,al ballad, and the fact that a spring gushes from the ground where the young girl has been slain is symbolic of God's pity for all. "After all," said Bergman, "the ballad answers its own questions. It has something to tell me and gives me courage."

P: La Dolce Vita (The Sweet Life), Italian Director Federico Fellini's intimate report on Roman high society, moved a first-night audience to boos, hisses and cries of "Shame!" Fellini presented whores, perverts and nymphomaniacs of amateur standing. Impromptu orgies in Roman villas. Actress Anita Ekberg dunking in the Fountain of Trevi--scene after scene added up to a movie that seemed to have no time to do more than record the sins it was recounting. One spectator spat on Fellini. A Roman nobleman challenged him to a duel. The conservative Vatican City daily, L'Osservatore Romano, demanded that authorities act to "protect public morals." But Communist L'Unita hailed Dolce Vita for unmasking a "corrupt society." Moved by one view point or the other, so many fans flocked to Fellini's new production that it has already grossed more than $500,000--a singular financial success for the man who 14 years ago earned $16 for writing a script for Roberto Rossellini's prizewinning Open City.

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