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To his consternation she refuses: "I have dedicated my life to my art." Having already seen the overdressed girlie show she works in, a Western viewer may be somewhat confused by her attitude. But Brando has to pretend to take the situation seriously, and it plainly bores him. He has some fun now and then monkey-see-monkey-doing like the Japanese, but he seems to find it unsatisfying to have to scratch himself through a kimono.
Ordet (Palladium; Kingsley International) is that rarest of delights for the fastidious eye, a film by Carl Dreyer. Dreyer, 68, is a Dane who has made his living as a newsman and his reputation as a cinematic creator on the strength of a half-dozen pictures that few people have seen. Only two have been generally noticed in the U.S. The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) was considered by most critics "an experimental film," but it has since served serious moviemakers as an invaluable primer on the uses of the closeup. Day of Wrath (1948) was a tenebrous expatiation on the theme of Jeremiah ("The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked"), and it roused Broadway critics to such a passion of love-hate that it ran for 13 weeks at a Manhattan art theater.
Ordet (The Word) is another religious film of the same midnight-sunny Scandinavian sort. Based on a play of the same title by Kaj Munk, the Danish pastor and playwright who was murdered, probably on Gestapo orders, in 1944, the picture does not tell a story so much as it poses an allegory. A village divided by religious faction into "life-affirming" and "death-seeking" sects is intended to signify what is rotten in the state of Denmark's soul, and in the world's as well. Because of this tragic split, the true faith—symbolized by a pathetic lunatic who imagines that he is the Christ of the Second Coming—wanders in alienation; and because there is no real religion, the world's soul—symbolized by a pregnant woman—dies in giving birth to a dead future. In the end a child's faith works a miracle, restoring religion, and through the power of religion restoring the soul to life.
The story is told with the luminous sincerity that haloes most of what Dreyer does. He has a deeper sympathy with the burgher virtues, a higher sense of the prosperous interior than almost any artist since the Flemish Renaissance; his frames impart the spiritual light of common things. And he can paint for the ear as well as for the eye; when suddenly the sound track fills with singing birds and a music of axles, bright September blows into the theater, tingling in the thoughts like merry harvest weather. Director Dreyer loves the human face ("A land one can never tire of exploring"), and he has chosen his faces with a sure insight. Best of all, perhaps, are the faces of the pregnant woman (Birgitte Federspiel) and her husband (Emil Haas Christensen), which make a simple, touching revelation: that they are deeply and quietly and naturally in love.