A Woman Wronged

The Visit is the kind of movie that leaves viewers wishing they had seen the play instead. On the screen, it is little more than a melodrama. On Broadway, as an unforgettable vehicle for the Lunts in 1958, Friedrich Duerrenmatt's drama drilled annihilating satire into a spare, pitiless tale of vengeance and greed.

In the stage version, an express train stops unexpectedly at Guellen, a poverty-stricken village somewhere in Central Europe. Onto the platform sweeps "the richest woman in the world," a flamboyant beldame whose effects include a wooden leg, a pair of eunuchs, a caged panther and an empty coffin. She has returned to her birthplace seeking revenge. She offers a fortune to Guellen and its citizens in exchange for the life of one man, now a local merchant, who seduced her when she was 17, left her pregnant and dishonored after hiring perjurers to testify to her lewdness. "The world made me a whore; now I will turn the world into a brothel," declares Madame Zachanassian. When the horrified villagers reject her offer, she smiles coolly: "I can wait."

Though the movie follows roughly the same plot, the darkly gleaming heart of it has undergone major surgery. In a postscript to his play, Duerrenmatt wrote: "Nothing could harm this comedy with a tragic end more than heavy seriousness." Director Bernhard Wicki falls into that error, compounding it with a gimmicky screenplay. The eunuchs, the coffin, and much of the mordant wit are omitted, as is the wooden leg. The sex angle is fattened up with a juicy subplot. And to make the slow corrosion of conscience more graphic, the good burghers of Guellen struggle against the all-too-solid temptation of a flotilla of trucks--crammed with fancy clothes, TV sets and shiny gadgetry, no down payment required.

Sadder still, The Visit suffers from heroic miscasting. As the implacable billionairess and her victim, Ingrid Bergman and Anthony Quinn work hard and seriously but to little purpose.

For the audience never really believes that the robust Quinn is an aging, frightened, sycophantic shopkeeper, or that Ingrid Bergman could be so cruel. She is more martyr than Medea, and thus the film's climax--appropriately altered --turns its grand vindictive triumph into a puny game of tit-for-tat.

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