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| Max von Sydow in The Exorcist |
Max von Sydow: Where to Stream 13 of His Best Movies
From his many collaborations with the Swedish director Ingmar Bergman to more mainstream Hollywood fare, the actor was a fixture of world cinema for decades.
Scott TobiasMarch 9, 2020
The international film star Max von Sydow died Sunday at age 90, after a career that spanned over half a century. With his lean, imposing frame and commanding voice, Von Sydow had the presence to square off against Death in “The Seventh Seal,” the first of his 11 collaborations with Swedish director Ingmar Bergman.
Though von Sydow would continue to regularly work with Bergman for another 14 years, his command of the English language opened up horizons in Hollywood and elsewhere, including roles for top-flight directors like William Friedkin, Steven Spielberg, John Huston, David Lynch and Martin Scorsese, as well as turns in franchise smashes like “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” and “Game of Thrones.”Here are 13 movies that highlight his best work with Bergman, his consistent attraction to epics of immigration, and his effective turns as men of God and pitiless heavies.
1957
‘The Seventh Seal’
It’s the most famous image of Ingmar Bergman’s career — and von Sydow’s, for that matter: A knight, returning from the Crusades to a country ravaged by the Black Death, playing chess with the Grim Reaper in an effort to bargain for his own life. This allegorical scene on the beach sets the stage for “The Seventh Seal,” which opens up into a larger pursuit of religious meaning at a time when mortality was being cut cruelly and arbitrarily short. As the knight and his squire roam a countryside gripped with fear, Bergman ponders divine justice on the precipice of human oblivion.Where to watch: Stream it on Criterion Channel; rent it on Apple TV, Amazon, Vudu, Google Play and YouTube.
1960
‘The Virgin Spring’
Three herders rape and murder a virginal young woman as she passes through the forest to deliver candles to the church. When they inadvertently seek shelter in the girl’s home, carrying an incriminating piece of her clothing with them, her parents come to grips with the situation and have their revenge. As the girl’s father, von Sydow’s anguish and desperation turn to cold resolve, but Ingmar Bergman hasn’t fashioned anything like a typical rape-revenge scenario. Like in a fairy tale gone amiss, the forest itself takes on a mythical quality. The religious significance of this tragedy is never far from the surface, leading to a moment of startling transcendence.
1966
‘Hawaii’
George Roy Hill’s three-hour epic is a strange beast, at once an austere historical drama about the folly of missionaries trying to convert Hawaiian “savages” to Christianity in the early 1800s and an escapist spectacle involving a love triangle and scenes of adventure, like a natural disaster and a shark attack. But von Sydow brings a fascinating earnestness to the role of a stiff reverend who volunteers for this important religious endeavor, but needs to find someone to marry first. To that end, he begins an awkward courtship with a younger woman (Julie Andrews) that’s complicated by her open-ended relationship with a seaman, who happens to resurface once they’re on the island.
1968‘Shame’
With his 1966 classic “Persona,” Ingmar Bergman dove headlong into an experimental period that reflected the dramatic changes in European cinema at the time and political upheaval around the globe. Produced as the Vietnam War was in full effect, Bergman’s “Shame” is a radical war movie of sorts, set largely in a rural idyll where two former violinists, played by von Sydow and Liv Ullmann, have holed up to escape a civil war. When the conflict comes to them, however, they’re forced to make decisions that reveal difficult truths about their individual integrity and their relationship. In terms of style and substance, “Shame” represents Bergman’s attempt to break out of his hermetic bubble and let the tumult of the outside world come in.Where to watch: Rent it on Apple TV, Vudu, Google Play and YouTube.
1969
‘The Passion of Anna’
The final part of an informal trilogy that began with “Hour of the Wolf” and “Shame,” Ingmar Bergman’s “The Passion of Anna” casts von Sydow as a recently divorced loner who gets enmeshed in a pair of complicated relationships — one with a deceitful widow (Ullmann) who loses her husband and son in a car accident, the other with a married woman (Bibi Andersson) who lives nearby. Meanwhile, someone in their rural community has been mutilating animals. Bergman presents this disturbing juxtaposition through a semi-experimental lens, commenting on the action through voice-over narration and occasionally breaking the fourth wall altogether. At one point, von Sydow even pauses to reflect on the challenges of playing his own character.
1971
‘The Emigrants’
In the first of two three-hour-plus epics from director Jan Troell, shot in close succession, von Sydow and Ullmann teamed up again as a couple from rural Sweden in the mid-1800s who are facing too many cruel harvests to feed their family, which is up to four children and counting. So they and other family members decide to emigrate to a farm in the Minnesota territory, a journey that Troell documents with painstaking ardor. Though they arrive in Minnesota by the end of the film, “The Emigrants” mostly lingers on their time in the Swedish province of Småland, where they suffer from drought and hunger, and their long passage across the Atlantic, where they’re beset by spoiled food and an outbreak of lice and disease. Troell emphasizes hardship and authenticity above all, but there’s no denying the sun-touched beauty of his images, too.
1972
‘The New Land’
“The Emigrants” ends with the promise of a Swedish family finally arriving in the Chisago Lakes area, where the soil is rich and deep, but the miseries they face in America are equally daunting. Beyond the language and cultural barriers, their new home rests on unsettled territory, full of false promises, like the gold rush luring some out west and hostilities from the local Sioux. The cumulative impact of Troell’s two-part epic stands alongside the first two “Godfather” films as immigration stories writ large, but “The Emigrants” and “The New Land” stand alone in their austere realism. When the Sioux come calling in “The New Land,” for example, it’s treated not as a mass movement but one intimate, harrowing piece of a more comprehensive terror.
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| Max von Sydow in The Exorcist |
1973
‘The Exorcist’
For his horror classic, based on William Peter Blatty’s novel, director William Friedkin cannily seized on the religious gravitas of von Sydow’s performances in Ingmar Bergman’s film to make him the wedge between a possessed girl (Linda Blair) and the Devil incarnate. As Father Merrin, von Sydow plays an exorcist who’s essentially tasked with putting to rest an evil he inadvertently summoned on an archaeological dig, joining a younger priest in an effort to expel the demon that’s taken residence in Washington, D.C. Friedkin’s technical mastery accounts for much of the reason “The Exorcist” is held in such high esteem, but performances like von Sydow’s add a human dimension to the shocks.
1975
‘Three Days of the Condor’
One feature of the post-Watergate political thrillers of the 1970s — like “All the President’s Men,” “The Conversation,” and “The Parallax View” — is that ordinary people are up against faceless, unaccountable, conspiratorial forces that cannot be identified or defeated. Yet von Sydow proves the exception in “Three Days of the Condor,” appearing as a fedora-donning hit man who leads a daytime massacre of a C.I.A. office that kills all but Robert Redford’s intrepid code breaker. But just because he makes himself known doesn’t mean he can be stopped: von Sydow’s calm, implacable villain makes it chillingly clear that escape is impossible.
1986
‘Hannah and Her Sisters’
Woody Allen’s admiration for Ingmar Bergman made it an inevitability that he would cast Bergman’s favorite actor in one of his films, and he chose one of his best — a sophisticated comedy-drama about siblings whose familial bonds are strained by their love lives. Ranting about Auschwitz and the debased value of American culture, von Sydow’s aging artist has worn down his former-student-turned-lover (Barbara Hershey), who wants to leave him while she still has a shot at romance. Von Sydow’s dyspeptic intellectual speaks like an Allen mouthpiece, but he also conjures the deep hurt and rage of an older man who’s lost his fountain of youth.Where to watch: Rent it on Apple TV, Amazon, Vudu, Google Play and YouTube.
1988‘Pelle the Conqueror’
Winner of both the Palme d’Or at Cannes and the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, “Pelle the Conqueror” found von Sydow in familiar territory as an immigrant in the 1800s facing terrible conditions in his new home, which is also the premise of “Hawaii,” “The Emigrants,” and “The New Land.” Compared with the others, this Bille August’s drama is more scaled-down and sentimental, focusing on the relationship between an elderly father (von Sydow) and his young son (Pelle Hvenegaard), neither of whom are of ideal working age. At the end of the 19th century, they travel from Sweden to Denmark in search of a living wage, but wind up on a farm where they’re treated with relentless harassment and abuse. Their resilience, buoyed by a powerful father-son bond, lifts the film from the dirge of ceaseless trauma.
1992
‘The Best Intentions’
Written by Ingmar Bergman and directed by Bille August, “The Best Intentions” exists in multiple cuts, a 323-minute TV mini-series version and the 174-minute version that won the Palme D’Or, but even the three-hour abridgment is a coherent and affecting treatment of Bergman’s semi-autobiographical script. Telling the story of his parents, renamed Henrik (Samuel Fröler) and Anna (Pernilla August) for the film, Bergman frames their relationship as a Romeo-and-Juliet pairing between a poor minister and a young woman of greater wealth and stature. Von Sydow plays Anna’s father, who conspires to keep the two apart until mortality intervenes. As the title suggests, Henrik and Anna’s partnership falls short of their ideals, but the intensity of their devotion — and the intensity with which it’s tested — gives the film a warmth and emotional sweep that’s closest to Bergman’s “Fanny and Alexander.”
‘Minority Report’
In the year 2054, the “PreCrime” unit in Washington, D.C., operating from the visions of three psychics called “precogs,” is in charge of arresting killers before they commit the crime, a system that has effectively wiped out all murder in the city. Based on a Philip K. Dick short story, “Minority Report” begins just as PreCrime is poised for a national rollout, and the program’s nefarious director, played by von Sydow, works hard to suppress some serious flaws in the system. The director, Steven Spielberg, takes advantage of von Sydow’s thunderous voice and imposing stature, particularly as it contrasts with Tom Cruise’s hero, who threatens to expose the program as he runs from his own precog-determined fate.
Correction:
An earlier version of this article misspelled the title of Bille August’s 1988 film. It's "Pelle the Conqueror," not "Pelle the Conquerer."
Correction:
An earlier version of this article misidentified the day Max von Sydow died. It was Sunday, not Monday.
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