The New Pictures

The Poacher's Daughter (Show Corp. of America), being a rustic Irish comedy, is a pack of lies; white lies, green lies, slick, sly, funny lies, and every one as harmless as the tines of a well-sharpened hayfork. Adapted from George Shiels's play called The New Gossoon,* the film is lifted off the green sod by the main strength of its cast: the Abbey Theater players and their American guest, Actress Julie Harris.

Julie, the daughter of an old rabbit trapper named Rabit Hamil (Harry Brogan), is the youngest and fairest member of a family notorious the length and breadth of the county. "The Hamils," says a neighbor, "have the minds of rabbits, the instincts of rabbits, and the morals of rabbits." Young Luke Carey (Tim Seely) has been seeing Julie without sanction from his family. But she is determined to be his wife. "Sure," says Julie, "I wouldn't break in another greenhorn for a thousand pounds."

The plot is banal enough, but the Abbey company plays its comedy with a fine Irish verve. Actress Harris blends nicely into the background of County Wicklow, where the picture was made. Wrote Manhattan's Irish Echo: "To native ears her carefully acquired 'brogue' jars at times, but who could have done better? . . . God bless."

A Lesson in Love (Svensk Filmindustri; Janus), the most natural, robust and heartily funny of Ingmar Bergman's comedies, is for the most part a riskily sophisticated satire on the tiny, interminable adventures of any Dagwood and every Blondie. Made in 1953, two years before Bergman's Smiles of a Summer Night summed up his ironic discussion of the domestic predicament, A Lesson in Love lacks the assurance and allegoric precision of that picture. Instead it is warm, accidental, lifelike, full of lucky hits, preposterous misses, and all sorts of surprises. A comedy of morals as well as manners, the film seems, like the Rorschach test, no more than an amusing game, but it soon develops some remarkable insights into the character and predicament of human beings.

The hero (Gunnar Bjoernstrand) is a Swedish gynecologist who, after 15 years of marriage, succumbs to a hazard of his occupation: the woman who wants personal as well as medical attention. "I need fire," he reassures his conscience, "to burn away the apathy" of middle age. But he is stunned when his wife (Eva Dahlbeck), who soon finds out about the affair, decides to strike a match of her own. She pops off to Copenhagen to resume a premarital relationship with a sculptor (Ake Gronberg). The doctor follows his wife to the rendezvous and heads her back to the reservation.

In the process, Writer-Director Bergman displays a wide range of comedic accomplishments. He is a master of bedroom farce--not to mention bathroom humor, most of which is not translated in the subtitles. In a flashback to the couple's courtship, he pulls a hilariously rowdy switch on the old Tristan-Isolde routine, and follows it with an uproarious crescendo of crockery-busting buffoonery. Moreover, Bergman flashes a redoubtable power of cynical epigram ("Only impotent men are faithful, and they have unfaithful wives"). And almost every character and scene is shaped by the cutting edge of his irony.

Ironist Bergman allows the husband to concede ruefully that men are often "lazy in love," afraid to lose their "safe and selfish solitude," afraid of the "uncertainty" and emotional danger of real relationship. Sometimes Bergman's wit and irony broaden into a life-accepting humor, as when a young girl is assured by her serene old grandfather that he is not at all afraid to die. "Wouldn't it be awful." he asks her, twinkling and yet serious too, "if I had to go on wearing long underwear forever?"

All these effects and episodes are bril liant things, considered singly--and they must be considered singly because Berg man tells his story in such a manner that the moviegoer cannot guess, until the last moment, what each part of the jigsaw puzzle will signify in the completed picture. And when the picture is finished, it is still not complete. Several pieces seem to be missing, and several do not seem to fit in. The moviegoer is left with a nagging sense that the picture he has seen is really part of a larger picture.

That, of course, is part of what Bergman means to say: one Lesson does not make a sentimental education.

* Gassoon is the English version of the Gaelic version (garsun) of the French word for boy: garcon.

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