TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE

I sometimes wonder about the phrase “too good to be true.” Latterly because in a review of Bruce Jay Friedman’s memoir, “Lucky Bruce,” the reviewer cites a Long Island lunch group of writers as successful as Friedman, Mario Puzo, Joseph Heller and a few others as rejecting “James Salter from the clique because he is too good a writer.”

Is there such a thing as being too good or too true a writer, and being rejected for it by a group of published, established fellow writers? Can you imagine Proust or Kafka or Joyce being rejected by a literary coterie—or worse yet, by a publisher—for such a reason? “Sorry, Monsieur Proust, we cannot publish your book because you are too true, too good a writer”? Can someone be too good a writer for anything or anyone—a clique, a publisher, a readership?

I wouldn’t think so. I can think, however, of other reasons to be thus rejected. Take the case of James Salter. He is indeed a good—but surely not too good—writer, which could be resented and rejected by writers conspicuously less good, envious and exclusionary. Bernard Shaw wittily entitled one of his plays with the reversal of that formula, Too True to Be Good. So Salter may be too true a writer, or even too truthful a person, to be tolerated by lesser writers afraid of his calling their bluff, questioning their exaggerated self-esteem.

True enough. If I were Friedman, Puzo or Heller, I might be leery of regular lunches with the likes of Proust, Kafka and Joyce, or Thomas Mann, Faulkner and Borges. This even if they were willing to join my group, which they might decline, and which unpleasantness to forestall I would not ask them to join. Their mere presence, however collegial, might be a thorn in my ego.

So there is no such thing as too good a writer, only other writers not feeling good enough. Is there, however, too good an anything? Is there too good a medicine, a building, a soup, a companion, an automobile, a gardener, a tailor, an actor? There may well be too good a suit or dress, but not for an excess of goodness, merely too steep a price.

But let’s get back to the phrase “too good to be true.” You would think it included in Nigel Rees’s Dictionary of Cliches, or in Eric Partridge’s Dictionary of Cliches or in his A Dictionary of Catch Phrases. Why is it missing from such worthy compilations, none of them too bad to be true. Is it that Rees and Partridge have never come across it? Seems highly unlikely.

Maybe, though, it is considered a maxim by the powerful writer Anonymous that has attained proverbial status and is listed in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations along with such other gems as “A fool and his money are soon parted” or “An apple a day keeps the doctor away” or “Time is of the essence,” all of which make it into that great dictionary of quotations. So why not “too good to be true,” surely as frequent and famous as the included? Yet in no such dictionary (I own quite a few) does it appear, not even as a proverb, if that’s what it is, an inclusion that would conveniently excuse a dictionarist from tracking it down its source.

If the saying were slightly different, say, “too good to be desirable, “ I might guardedly find some justification. To be told that you are too ill to be cured, too stupid to be tolerated, too unsightly to be looked at, this may be all too true, but not desirable to utter or to hear. But neither would it be as euphonious, as effective, as memorable. “Too good to be true” is catchy for several reasons.

Take first the assonance in four out of its five components, all but “be.” Then take the pleasing progression from an iamb to an anapest. They go harmoniously together, each accentuated on its final syllable. Lastly, the very fact that each of the five words is a monosyllable of the kind English abounds in, and that rolls easily off the most untutored tongue. Such things readily ensconce themselves in the memory.

So can we agree that nothing is really too good to be true, except perhaps your winning the grand prize in a lottery for which you bought only a single ticket? That might justly elicit the swift, spontaneous exclamation. It is evidently true, but hold on, is it also too good? Would not winning have been better? But perhaps too good for all those others, the envious losers? Still, why should we enshrine envy as a maxim, as something too good?

True, the gloriously surprised lottery winner might in the first overwhelming moment of triumph exclaim, “This is too good to be true!” Yet even he would, after enjoying the benefits for a time, conclude that it feels deliciously right, but hardly too good to be true.

ANIMADVERSIONS OF A “LOOKIST” CRITIC

In The New York Times Book Review of September 25, Maureen Dowd reviewed Roger Ebert’s autobiographical “Life Itself.” The highly favorable notice contained the following: “Ebert tries to avoid gossip and ‘hurtful’ comments about actors. ‘I feel repugnance for the critic John Simon, who made it a specialty to attack the way actors look,’ he writes. ‘They can’t help how they look, any more than John Simon can help looking like a rat.’”

Needless to say, in her laudatory review, Dowd does not take issue with this statement, so the burden falls on me. It is a foolish assertion of Ebert’s for any number of reasons. First of all, because it makes him one of those ill-informed people who claim I made that procedure my specialty. I never went out of my way to attack actors for their looks; I attacked then, when I did, for something more relevant: not looking like what their parts called for. That, as I repeatedly stated, does matter.

If a set designer’s sets look poor or inappropriate, we criticize them with universally conceded impunity, even praise for our perceptiveness. The same goes for our criticism of a production’s costumes. Now, of course, it will be said that sets and costumes have no feelings, and cannot be hurt.

True, but their designers can be hurt more than actors can. If I say that actor X, in the hero’s role, looks like a garden gnome (which I haven’t actually), future directors and producers may, being ever so much more humane or purblind, disagree and ignore my “unfounded” slur. If, on the other hand, they agree with it, what harm have I done?

With sets and costumes, though, it is a different matter. Because opinions pro and con in those areas are much less emotionally charged and more debatable, sympathies can be more easily shaken than about faces, and poor reviews may actually damage a designer’s opportunities.

I do not hold with pussyfooting criticism of any kind.  If I say that actress Y in the role of the leading lady looked like a cigar store Indian (I actually did), I was saying so because she glaringly didn’t fit the role: two dashing young men would not have fought a deadly duel over her.

Now, I know that some reviewers would merely say of a visually thoroughly unsuited actress that she is miscast; or if she is many years too old, that she is too mature for her role. But those statements do not make much of an impression. A critic is a salesman for his reviews, and to sell them, he needs to make a powerful effect. Ergo the cigar store Indian.

There are other things to be considered. If a performer is brilliant, such talent easily eclipses any deficiency in her looks. Take, for instance, Edith Piaf. Her looks were definitely wanting, but never made me note a lack that she glowingly transcended. OK, she was more a singer than an actress, but I have been just as tolerant of, say, Rita Tushingham or Peggy Ashcroft, whose talents dazzled. And surely sovereign talent is what we are entitled to get from a performer.

In other words, actors can definitely help their looks, often even without surpassing talent. Wigs, makeup, costuming and, onscreen, clever photography can also do the trick. It doesn’t matter how it is arrived at as long as it is done. And then there are all those roles for which looks are not necessary. In some cases, albeit rare, good looks can even be inappropriate and distracting.

Among these cases I include not only such obvious examples as the witches in “Macbeth,” but even Lady Macbeth herself, who, though she shouldn’t look repulsive, need not be a great beauty in that very much leading part. This seems especially true in Britain, which, for whatever reason, does not have so many beautiful women, and thus also beautiful actresses, as can be found in other countries. But who would have found fault, say, with Celia Johnson for not having had Hollywood good looks?

And, speaking of Hollywood, what does anyone who considers thespian comeliness unimportant make of the fact that looks of actresses, and to only slightly lesser extent actors, was capitalized on and greatly contributed to the movies’ success? So why not criticize looks in a medium where looks have been paramount—and not only at Paramount?

But never mind crassly commercial Hollywood; didn’t even so great a director as Ingmar Bergman set tremendous stock by the looks of his leading ladies? And if beauty can be of such importance, cannot its absence be equally important and duly reprehended?

As for me, I take beauty seriously everywhere, even in dogs. I am ill at easy with unsightly canines, no matter how vaunted the supposed superior intelligence of mutts may be. I am all for pure breeds, except, of course, in breeds like bulldogs, where ugliness is prized. But they look funny, and this is where comedy comes to the rescue. An unsightly actor or actress can be just the thing in comedy or, better yet, farce. There lack of looks actually scores.

Accordingly, I have no problem with Barbra Streisand in “Funny Girl”; it is only as an unfunny girl, especially when, as in “The Way We Were,” the smashing Robert Redford is in love with her, that she really bothers me. Of course, in real life handsome men often marry plain women, but art plays by other rules than life.

All of which reminds me that Peter Bogdanovich once described my film criticism as being “about as much help as a legless man teaching running.” And why not? May not a legless man value running more highly than those who take it for granted, and so dedicate himself to studying it and guiding runners from his wheelchair?

I have, in any case, one consolation: rat-faced and legless as I may be, I can still be a perfectly adequate critic of performing arts and even actresses’ looks. Unlike actors, a critic does not depend on his looks, only on his writing.

MANNERS TO THE FORE

All schemes for improving humankind appear to be hopeless. The masses are definitely not kind and, I fear, barely human. Where even quite ordinary individuals manage to rise above ordinary callousness, the moment they merge into a crowd, they become intolerant and intolerable.

Among other seemingly gratuitous pursuits, I have often pondered what could make man and womankind more human. Are there not enough kind humans around even to form an active core of gentility? For, of course, gentility would be the solution.

Gentility or, by its other name, manners. Optimists, if there are any of those, would assume that although intelligence cannot be generated, and stupidity thrives and multiplies even without teaching, manners, at least theoretically, ought to be teachable. Even dogs can be trained to behave as well as cats, which are fastidious by nature.

But what about people? Couldn’t they be taught good manners? To be sure, there have been elegant, seemingly well-behaved persons who, secretly, were criminals. Not for nothing do we have a play entitled “A Woman Killed With Kindness.” It is conceivable that even Dr. Mengele and Vlad the Impaler (aka Dracula) had good manners. On the other hand, can you imagine an off-the-field football team, let alone  an army, with good manners?

Still, the majority of persons exhibiting mannerly behavior do this not as a cover-up, but because inwardly too they are considerate and gracious. With those people we have no problems. But can anything be achieved with instinctual loudmouths, boors, bullies, laggards, drones, know-nothings, mugwumps, fence sitters, the various kinds of fanatics or phlegmatics?

Probably not much. Nonetheless, what if, unlike what’s usual, we made an effort? Perhaps the real problem is not so much young rowdies as unqualified or nonexisting teachers. Heaven knows schooling of the traditional kind is generally either failing or not in the curriculum. As an intermittent college faculty member, I can vouch for the untutoredness of even elite school graduates, even by the time they are college upperclassmen. The rub is the lack of learning on the secondary-school level, and, no less drastic, in the home.

There have been times within human memory when parents were willing and able to teach their offspring a thing or two at home, or at least encourage them to become creditable autodidacts. As Jacques Barzun has eloquently pointed out, there is not much real teaching and learning in the schools; instead, there is an abstraction called education, windy palaver instead of getting down to brass tacks.

Given ineffectual parents and teachers, how could manners possibly be acquired? Good question, alas. Perhaps some kind of books could help: books on etiquette, if only they were wittily and charmingly written. Could even worthy works of fiction and drama influence mannerly behavior? Perhaps even certain games, in which finesse triumphs over brashness and opportunism.

I would like to think, for instance, that intelligent reading of Bernard Shaw’s plays might make a difference. Or any number of plays by Giraudoux and Anouilh, Schnitzler and Hofmannsthal, possibly still crying out for adequate translations. All of them are foreign; make of that what you will.

And, while I am fantasizing, just think what could be achieved if important phone calls were taken by courteous human beings rather than impersonal machines. If this makes me a Luddite, so be it. And what if computers and their e-mail spoke not some jarring jargon, but simple, good human language?

As I implied in the beginning, probably impossible. But couldn’t we at least try?

INVALUABLE OBITS

Obituaries should be read by everyone. We already know that life can be stranger than fiction—although contemporary fiction goes a long way toward strangeness—but what we should also know is how fascinating obituaries can be. No wonder many readers of the New York Times begin their reading with them. After all, deaths are in a dead heat with taxes in inevitability and universality, so that every life, tersely summarized in an obituary, should be of commanding  interest and importance to any mortal.

Take the September 4 obit of (to quote the headline) “Rev. Eugene A. Nida, 96; Spurred Bible Translations.” Now I have a modest interest in the Bible as literature, but a greater one in Dr. Nida, who, I read, traversed the globe from pole to pole by plane, train and canoe to oversee the translating of Scripture into more than 200 languages.

Margalit Fox, the obituarist, points out that Nida’s efforts were to make the Bible’s language as accessible as possible in all those languages, including English, where the Good News Bible, possibly at Nida’s instigation, translated “Behold the fowls of the air” as “Look at the birds flying around.” That is certifiably colloquial, but surely less appealing than the King James version. The latter, by the way, owes much of its popularity to its English being archaic enough for exoticism, but not enough so to defeat comprehension.

Yet what is most informative, indeed instructive, about the Nida obit is its last paragraph, which concludes: “’I am sorrowful’ gets a variety of translations for tribes within a small area of central Africa:  ‘My eye is black,’ ‘My heart is rotten,’ ‘My stomach is heavy’ or ‘My liver is sick.’”

This gives us a lot to think about.  If there can be that much difference between adjacent tongues, does that not imply sizable differences between less neighborly ones the world over? To be sure most languages do not—naively or poetically—locate sadness in diverse parts of the anatomy.  Still, even without checking up, I can assume that “sorrowful” resonates differently from what I imagine as its counterpart in German and French Bibles.  It is peculiar even in English, as is “fowls of the air.”

How? Well, “sorrowful” has a literary, or perhaps romantic, aura that the commonplace, expectable “sad” would not have.  It suggests a Byronic hero going about (or flying around) in a showily melancholy state. A modern sports fan, for example, after his team loses, can hardly be described as “sorrowful.”

As for “fowls,” they mean to us chickens or ducks or geese, but certainly not pigeons and sparrows. We are inadvertently nudged to imagine the air around us populated by, say, hens and turkeys, the better to befoul us with bird droppings, but also, conversely, to provide the needy with easily available sustenance.

What this means is that foreign languages may well be more alien, less fathomable, than we realize. The moment another language waxes even moderately poetic like our pre-Nidan biblical English (never mind such difficult poets as Mallarme and Rilke, or, in reverse, Eliot and Pound), we find ourselves more left out than we might imagine.

Still, in Europe and America, thanks to education, travel and dictionaries, these differences have been reduced. But what about other parts of the world, where differences in language may intensify other kinds of difference into hostility and bloody strife?

I have no wish to exaggerate. Even within the same language there can be incomprehension and lack of tolerance. Most Germans read their classical poets—Goethe, Heine, George, Rilke—just as most French people read theirs—Villon, Ronsard, Baudelaire, Verlaine—and such delectable modern ones as the German Erich Kaestner and the French Jacques Prevert, without its making them more tolerant of their neighbor nations, or even of their very own Jews. Did it even keep so many Germans from becoming Nazis that they read, memorized and sang settings of beloved poems by Heine, a converted Jew?

What I really wonder about, though, is those contiguous African tribes. Now that they have, thanks to Rev. Nida, the Bible in their own lingo, does that make them better Christians? Better human beings? Does it stop their slaughtering one another even if they are as neighborly as Sudan and the just recently created South Sudan? It looks as though the confusions of the biblical Babel (which begat the English “babble”), though surely contributive to mutual intolerance in, say, Israel and Palestine, were not the only reasons for the deadly enmity. Does possession of, for all I know, well-translated Bibles in Syria, Libya and Iran make those countries, even intramurally, less murderous?

Alas, poor human nature—plagued by social, political, economic, religious as well as linguistic disparity—whose fault is it that you are so unnatural?

THE GOAT, or WHO IS PORGY?

One of the major monstrosities is rewriting a classic. That is what Suzan-Lori Parks (playwright), Diane Paulus (director) and Audra McDonald (star) are perpetrating with their forthcoming Broadway revival of Porgy and Bess. Partly rewritten, it is to be called Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, allegedly with the blessings of the executors of the Gershwin and DuBose Heyward estates.

Absurd right off is retitling the classic as “Gershwin’s” after you have arrogantly de-Gershwinized it. If the offenders were honest, they would call it “Parks’s” or “Paulus’s” unless they have obtained the go-ahead from the composer and lyricists in the Great Beyond. Unlike the executors, the authors do not stand to profit from a revival, however travestied.

Stephen Sondheim, in a cogent and witty letter to the New York Times, has pointed out the preposterousness of an undertaking that treats composer George Gershwin, bookwriter and co-lyricist DuBose Heyward, and co-lyricist Ira Gershwin as needing the two P’s, Parks and Paulus, as baldies needing a toupee. (The pun is mine; if you dislike it, don’t blame Sondheim.) The supposed explanation was that the principal characters needed backstories and fleshing out to become rounded flesh-and-blood characters, which is bloody nonsense.

Unlike—perhaps—major characters in a novel, the principals in an opera or musical (which of the two the show is has been the subject of unending and pointless debate) require no such ministrations. The story, lyrics and music of a classic will satisfy all demands. Provide a cast of gifted singing actors or acting singers, and the production’s living is easy.

I realize that I am not saying anything very new, but what is raised here is the larger issue of rewriting the classics to bring them “up to date,” or to bring in a new, young audience, presumably wanting more “reality.” Is then a Porgy who sets out to retrieve Bess from New York with his goat cart less believable than one who needs only a cane—not even a pogo stick—for the journey, and who, in one misguided version, asked “Bring my coat” for “Bring my goat”? A goat makes much more sense, even if, unlike the protagonist of Edward Albee’s ludicrous The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?, he is not in love with the critter.

But it’s that damned happy—or at least happier—ending that is supposed to keep an audience contented. Thus the 2P Porgy, needing only a cane, is less of a cripple and so more likely to satisfy Bess and the audience. If audiences were desperate for happy endings, half of our plays and three quarters of our operas would not have survived. As if a good death scene weren’t as satisfying as a final embrace—think Shakespeare’s Othello or Verdi’s Otello.

Well, all this may not be news. What may be news is my contention that the history of the arts is as important as history itself. A human being is three things: what he is, what he thinks he is, and what he would like to be. Now history records the first of those things, but scants on the other two. For them, we have to go to the literature, fine arts, and even music of ages past.

However, to get back to that goat. I read in today’s Times that an experienced hiker in Olympia Park was gored to death by a 300-pound goat. That, of course, was a wild one—the goat, I mean, not the hiker. Still, while a trained goat would behave itself, and not even demand rewrites in its role, it might be a good idea to weigh it as well as the Porgy, and avoid excessive weight disparity. But goat there must be if the production is not to get my goat, not to mention Stephen Sondheim’s and that of other right-thinking folks.

REQUIEM FOR THE LONGHAND MISSIVE

This is an obituary for the art of letter writing. Of course, there are people who do not believe that e-mail and its electronic relatives have killed epistolary beauties, but they seem to me overly optimistic or purblind. Even the wonderful Thomas Mallon, in his splendid Yours Ever: People and Their Letters, writes about 1997, “ just as e-mail was reaching Everyman and beginning to kill or revive (there are both schools of thought), the practice and art of letter writing.” Note that out of modesty or prudence or politeness (not to offend anyone) he speaks of revival via e-mail.

I don’t believe this for a moment. I do, however, believe that some hardy and gifted epistolarians who were able to conquer the typewriter, taming it into submission to their style, may also still be literate on e-mail, though surely not on Tweeter and the rest of the ungodly inventions. But oh, what was surely lost! You need only read (I sincerely hope you will) Mallon’s marvelous Yours Ever, over 300 pages of sheer delight—not only from the adduced letters, but also for Mallon’s wise and witty commentaries—and you will be sure that, whatever he may or may not say, Mallon considers letter writing a gravely imperiled species, if not quite yet stone cold dead.

It is not just that handwritten letters look a bit different from typewritten and e-mailed ones, even though that “bit” of difference is enormous. It is so many things that I hardly know where to begin. It is first (and more about this later) that the handwriting, as Buffon might also have said, “c’est l’homme” and also, in our less paternalistic times, “la femme.” Ad almost so as in writing  “le style” in writing, is style in speech, tone of voice, hairdo, clothes and any number of other things.

Consider merely what letters are written on. I always resented those on a page of cheap lined paper from a pad or torn from a loose-leaf notebook. That, to me, was like someone going out in the street in his underwear. There is the kind of stationery, but also how the writer uses it. Does he write on both sides of even transparent paper, how much margin does he leave, how many words he gets on a page, what color ink he uses (pencil? Heaven forfend!) , whether he thinks me worthy of a second page, etc. etc.

Then there is the handwriting itself. Is it large a la Hancock, or tiny, in the manner of the Swedish writer Per Wastberg?  Is it vertical or slanted, the kind taught in school (when such things were still taught there) or something more individual, is it hasty and messy, or finely crafted and beautiful? I recall that the tycoon Huntington Hartford would not employ anyone whose lower-case g was not closed as in a number 8, but had an aperture at the top of the lower half. That was some sort of nonsense graphology,  a discipline to be reserved for detective work and court cases.

And what about the things one can do with an envelope? They culminate in Mallarme’s admirable rhyming quatrains, with which he addressed letters to friends, and which the worthy postman, often apostrophized in the first line, always managed to deliver in an age when even mailmen, at least in France, read poetry. They were published as Les Loisirs de la poste, the leisure of the postal service, whose leisure is getting costlier by the minute. In my Harvard days, I too, in emulation of my beloved Mallarme, attempted something similar, addressing with quatrains letters to a Radcliffe girl named Diana Frothingham. I don’t recall whether they reached their destination, but I do remember some of my horrible rhymes, notably the dubiously culinary “brothing ham.” It might better have been ”nothing am,” inasmuch as it never led to getting into that charming but very Protestant New England young lady’s pants.

There are even such niceties as the choice of stamps. I used to—and still do—whenever possible not settle for the basic, humdrum stamp of the requisite denomination, but busied the postal employee with displaying the special issues, and picking the prettiest, or the ones most appropriate to some of my correspondents. I still preserve the original stamp design created for the Canadian mail by a girlfriend who gave me a framed print version of it. The poor woman is long dead, but her stamp, at least in this format, survives. Like the nightingales of Heraclitus, in William Cory’s rendering of the famed Greek epigram, “For Death, he taketh all away, but them he cannot take.”

But let’s get to the most important aspect of the handwritten letter. It required some feeling, because of the effort, however minimal, involved. And it required some thought, because it could not be produced as quickly and thoughtlessly as e-mail. This partly because the letter on paper would survive, certainly in human possession, and perhaps even beyond, if it managed to get itself into a printed book.

You really must read at least Thomas Mallon’s remarkable Introduction to Yours Ever, in which, for all his seeming tolerance, he writes, “the relative ease of e-mail feels undeniable, as does . . . the glaze of impersonality over what pops up on that computer screen.” That Introduction comprises, among other things, an invaluable brief history of letter writing, from its alleged beginning with “Queen Atossa, daughter of Cyrus the Great, [writing] the first letter, from Persia, sometime in the sixth century B.C.” or, as Alvin F. Harlow in a 1928 book insisted, much earlier, though unrecorded. From there all the way up to 2009, when Yours Ever was published.

Although Mallon alleges tolerance of it, I cannot really countenance the new language or simplified spelling of computerese, a true atrocity. Even the individual typewriter had its recognizable idiosyncrasies, as Mallon points out. But not so e-mail and the rest. I personally cannot imagine genuine emotion in an e-mail, not even if it’s printed out on paper. Long live snail mail, I say, even if it is not escargot and edible.

TITULAR MISCHIEF

The other day I read about the Williamstown Theater Festival presenting Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, which title is used again and again even though it is wrong. I have waged a campaign, to no apparent avail, on behalf of the correct A Doll House. Not calling the play that is a serious mistake.

Ibsen’s point is that the husband, Torvald, has turned his wife, Nora, into a doll—not a full-fledged human being, but a plaything for himself. Their house is like that still popular toy: a miniature dwelling with a doll as its miniature mistress.

Now if you call the play A Doll’s House, you make Nora the proprietress, in command, which is precisely what Torvald and the mores of that time would not allow. The house is Torvald’s, the husband and master’s, and the play might accordingly be called A Doll Owner’s House. Ibsen’s true meaning is conveyed only by A Doll House, without the apostrophe and the final S, i.e., the possessive case. Other languages have translated it correctly. Thus in German it is Ein Puppenheim, a doll house, rather than Heim einer Puppe, a doll’s house.

This somehow led to speculation about title mistranslation and manipulation in general, most significantly of the titles of foreign films, a particularly nefarious practice. They are the ones with which the crassest liberties are taken, in most cases to lure people in under falsely provocative pretenses.

Ingmar Bergman alone has been the victim of numerous mistitlings. Take the film that first brought me to Bergman, but almost deterred me by its American title, The Naked Night, which doesn’t even make proper sense. Still, it made me think that it was yet another of those Swedish sex movies in which lovers go skinny dipping and the camera lingers pruriently on the heroine’s naked body.

Of course the film was nothing of the sort, although it does contain a very different instance of nude bathing, appalling rather than alluring. The actual Swedish title is The Clown’s Evening, which has several meanings, not least the twilight or downfall of the circus artiste, but perhaps also of other than circus people, stultified in their private lives. The British title, Sawdust and Tinsel, is nearer the mark, because there is in the film a bitter conflict between a man of the circus and a man of the theater.

Consider now the retitling of The Face as The Magician. True, the protagonist is a magician of sorts, but what is more important is that he is in disguise, as is his lovely wife, for safety’s sake disguised as a male youth. But their true faces are revealed, making a vast difference, and implying that all art is a kind of disguise, salutary in some ways, but not the bare truth. The Magician may sell better than The Face, but it derails the viewer’s attention.

Similarly, The Communicants was retitled as Winter Light. Yes, it does take place in a snow-bleached Northern winter, but the film is really about communion with the Divine and communication, or lack thereof, among humans. They try to communicate and commune, but with only mixed results. There are wintry hearts in the story, but light, if any, comes only in a very ambivalent ending. The title change reflects the striving to avoid narrowly Christian implications, but is its vagueness any kind of real gain?

Much more objectionable is the turning of the Swedish for A Passion into The Passion of Anna. That could suggest a woman in heat, whereas the film deals with the very different passions of the four principal characters, inviting also thoughts of Christ’s passion. Altogether it evokes the conflicted and conflicting  passions of all humanity, which the changed title cravenly bypasses.

To be sure, Bergman is not the only one to suffer from mistitling. Take Ermanno Olmi’s wonderful Il posto (the job), about two young persons’ desperate need to find gainful employment. In English, it became The Sound of Trumpets, from an almost throwaway line in the dialogue, but having nothing to do with the plot. It has since reverted to its original Italian title, yet again eschewing simple literal translation. Why could it at no time become The Job?

This calls attention to a more recent trend, the retaining of the untranslated original title, usually Italian, as in La Dolce Vita, L’Avventura. I Vitelloni, La Notte and many others, presumably on the assumption that people could figure out the meaning while also basking in the newness, the exoticism of the foreign title.

At other times there was literal translation, albeit foreshortened. Thus what was in the Italian The Nights of Cabiria became a mere Cabiria, perhaps gambling on the suggestiveness of that mysterious foreign word. On the other hand, I can understand the decimation of Lina Wertmuller’s yard-long titles. So it is that Swept Away by an Unusual destiny in the Blue Sea of August became the terse Swept Away. Even more frugally, Film of Love and Anarchy, or At Ten o’Clock This Morning at the Via dei Fiori in a Well-known Brothel was preshrunk into Love and Anarchy, superb films regardless of titular tribulations. But was even the witty Everything Orderly But Nothing Works needful of condensation into All Screwed Up, conceivably because of a far-fetched suggestion of screwing?

However, there are also cases where a literal translation was retained, but not making much sense in English. So with Truffaut’s Les 400 Coups, where in French this means painting the town red, but the English of The 400 Blows means nothing at all. Then there are the tiny, inconspicuous changes, as with that Ibsen play, which nevertheless are misleading. Why would DeSica’s Bicycle Thieves become The Bicycle Thief, when there are at least two characters to whom the title refers? I can see why Rossellini’s Paisa (homeland) was changed to Paisan (homeboy), because the latter had some resonance even for Americanized Italians. But the film is not about a single person; it is about Italy under German occupation.

I could go on and on, but what’s the use of griping? Why in a dishonest world should titling be an exception? But flagrant error, as in Doll’s for Doll, should not be tolerated and prevail. I was once invited to a Midwestern production of the Ibsen play with a seductive note about how my title correction was scrupulously observed. Even so, I didn’t attend. There are matters even more important than fiddling with titles.