A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC (1977)

(1977, Color) 124m. / Directed by Harold Prince / Music & Lyrics by Stephen Sondheim / Screenplay by Hugh Wheeler / Starring Elizabeth Taylor, Diana Rigg, Len Cariou, Lesley-Anne Down, Hermione Gingold, Laurence Guittard, Christopher Guard, Lesley Dunlop, Chloe Franks

In 1955, Ingmar Bergman's comedy Smiles of a Summer Night gained him both his first international success, and his rise to prominence. Now, Bergman is widely regarded as one of the finest filmmakers of all time. It’s not an exaggeration to say that the worldwide embrace of the film helped to pave the way for the innovative Swedish director to gain the carte blanche to continue to create such further masterpieces as The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, Fanny and Alexander, Persona, and so many others. Though almost all his films are imbued with comic touches, Smiles of a Summer Night is Bergman’s only outright comedy, a bedroom farce laced with wit and style. A case could be made that his television film of Mozart's The Magic Flute would qualify, but it is equal parts opera and a filmed stage performance.

For their third collaboration as director and composer respectively, Harold Prince and Stephen Sondheim turned to the film as the inspiration for what would become A Little Night Music. Bergman's film would seem a natural source, in keeping with the sophistication they brought to Broadway in their previous efforts, Company and Follies. For the score, Sondheim decided to keep all the songs in waltz time (3/4) or variations thereof, and there is no percussion in the orchestra, in keeping with chamber orchestras of the early 20^th century.

The plot remains close to that of the film: In Sweden, in 1900, Fredrik Egerman, a middle-aged lawyer, takes his young, virginal second wife Anne to the theatre to see a play featuring a famous actress, Desiree Armfeldt, who had also been the lawyer’s mistress prior to his recent remarriage. When Anne learns of this affair, she flees home. Egerman rekindles the flirtation with Desiree. Complicating matters are the presence of Desiree’s current lover, a jealous Count, his spurned wife, and Fredrik’s young adult son, home from college, not to mention their bawdy maid, Petra, and Desiree’s young daughter Fredrika. A “Greek chorus” chamber quartet offers wry commentary through songs like “Remember?” and “The Sun Won’t Set.”

The original cast featured Len Cariou as Egerman, Glynis Johns (most well known as Mrs. Banks from Disney’s Mary Poppins), and Hermione Gingold as Desiree’s mother. The show premiered on February 25, 1973, and ran for 601 performances. It won the Tony Award for Best Musical, Best Book of a Musical (Hugh Wheeler), Best Actress in a Musical (Johns), Best Featured Actress in a Musical (Patricia Elliott), and Best Costume Design for a Musical (Florence Klotz). Boris Aronson and Tharon Musser were nominated for Scenic Design and Lighting, respectively, and Gingold lost the Tony to co-star Elliott. Len Cariou was nominated for Best Actor in a Musical, but lost to Ben Vereen that year’s Pippin, for which Bob Fosse won Best Director of a Musical.

Song List

Overture

Night Waltz

Now

Later

Soon

The Glamorous Life

Remember?

You Must Meet My Wife

Liaisons

In Praise of Women

Every Day a Little Death

A Weekend in the Country

The Sun Won’t Set

It Would Have Been Wonderful

Perpetual Anticipation

Send in the Clowns

The Miller’s Son

Finale

BLUE indicates Broadway songs removed for the film version, RED indicates songs altered considerably from their original form, GREEN indicates songs added specifically for the film version

Smiles of a Summer Night is such a perfect example of the bedroom farce that its most astonishing attribute is that it’s not French. A Little Night Music, onstage, is more a thoughtful rumination on its themes rather than a direct retelling of Bergman’s film. In musicalizing the film, Sondheim gets inside the characters’ heads and plays out their foibles and eccentricities in ways that only the theatre can get away with.

A prime example can be found the early musical triptych of “Now” (sung by Egerman), “Later” (sung by his son Henryk), and “Soon” (sung by the 18 year-old Anne). In Bergman, the entirety of the events enacted in this trio of songs (becoming a fugue in the last portion) takes less than a minute (the son is unhappy, Egerman suggests he and his wife take a nap before attending the theatre, and he accidentally whispers Desiree’s name as he’s falling asleep). In Sondheim, the same sequence is an exquisite musical montage that goes on for more than ten minutes.

This goes toward explaining why the film version of A Little Night Music feels supremely long and tedious. Every interior moment is procrastinated into song. Even jettisoning numbers like “The Miller’s Son,” “In Praise of Women,” and all of the Greek chorus numbers, the film runs nearly twenty minutes longer than the breezy Bergman original (yes, “breezy” and “Bergman” in the same sentence). Also gone (and largely absent from the stage play) are the small touches of peasant life that serve as a counterpoint to the middle and upper-class characters, leavening the farce with some well-placed satire.

Even more conspicuously absent is Sweden – the film has transplanted the action to Austria for some reason (it certainly isn’t for the scenery – the film is trapped almost entirely on some embarrassingly chintzy looking sets and a faded park). For good measure, Egerman’s son’s name has been changed from Henryk to Eryk.

If these alterations indicate a sea change, the entire enterprise is ultimately torpedoed as a result of the casting of the film’s Desiree, Elizabeth Taylor. The casting of a Movie Star in the role shifts the cast dynamic drastically, particularly since Prince seems unwilling or unable to incorporate Taylor into the ensemble nature of the rest of the cast; she remains a singular presence, akin to watching a production of A Chorus Line starring Ethel Merman. As a result of Taylor's status, the film is forced to begin with a lengthy discussion of her attributes, as Fredrika sings a newly rewritten version of “The Glamorous Life.” A Little Night Music now becomes about Desiree without justifying such a change.

Sondheim produces a minor masterpiece in the newly rewritten song, but it’s an unwise shift in focus away from the other characters so early on. Taylor also now barges her way into the one large number in which Desiree should be heard of and not seen, the film’s closest thing to cinema, “A Weekend in the Country.” What should be a galvanizing song seeing all the diverse cast converge on the Armfeldt family estate (invited or not) gets unnecessarily protracted by interruptive interludes positing Desiree’s stiffly delivered treatise on how to break up a marriage to the not-at-all-appalled Fredrika. One wonders if the oft-divorced Taylor had any special insight into this particular aspect of a famous actress scheming to shatter a family – but she’s above sharing such insights with the audience.

Of all the actors who acquit themselves admirably to this leaden affair, Rigg and Downs come off the most naturally, which makes sense in that they (Taylor aside) had had the most on-camera experience. Gingold, usually a vivacious presence onscreen (Gigi, The Music Man) is given little to do but spout portentous quotations at odd intervals, since she’s been robbed of her solo number, “Liaisons,” which would have stopped the movie even deader in its tracks, at any rate. It’s particularly painful to see her during the oddly abbreviated dinner sequence, in which characters arbitrarily bicker, shout at one another, and throw drinks, without the slightest awareness that their esteemed hostess is sitting at the table with them.

Which brings us to the most glaring omission the film version of A Little Night Music contains: gone is the central catalyst to the characters' loss of inhibitions as the night "smiles" upon the gathered guests. A toast made using the specially saved (and possibly magical) wine that Madame Armfeldt makes. The bottle is brought out, but Eryk (Henryk?) storms away from the table, and takes the camera with him, apparently.

The rest of the movie collapses upon itself distressingly, as director Prince fumbles through the rest of the plot points as carelessly as if he’s flipping through a deck of playing cards. The less that can be said of Taylor’s particular rendition of “Send in the Clowns,” the musical’s big breakout hit and Sondheim’s most famous song, the better. Taylor acquits herself better in the slight duet "You Must Meet My Wife," earlier on, but the later portions of the score are a bit beyond her range. To be fair, though, everyone involved should have been aware that this would be the case, as nobody has ever considered Taylor a musical performer.

Cariou, in the leading role, is a fine singer and actor, but he's done no favors by leaden dialogue, stiff-looking costumes, a romantically disinclined leading lady, and the fact that his character spends a good deal more time reacting to events than he does instigating them. 

Prince shoulders the primary responsibility for the film's inertia, although the source material itself (the musical, not the Bergman film) consistently proves resistant to adaptation. Upon examination, the musical A Little Night Music is less a faithful retelling of the Bergman film than it is a deconstruction of it -- as mentioned earlier in considering "Now / Later / Soon", the musical numbers are generally introspective examinations of moments, rather than narratively propulsive songs. This is why "A Weekend in the Country" seems so much more dynamic -- it is about an action that is happening, rather than something recounted or an emotion experienced. 

The very theatrical nature of Sondheim's scores frequently present these sorts of dilemmas for film. To take a more recent example, similar narrative problems pop up in the film adaptation of Into the Woods (2014), most strikingly in "The Steps of the Palace," where a few awkward changes of past-to-present tense in the lyric does less to alleviate the song's ruminative nature than it does to turn the scene (Cinderella fleeing the ball) into a moment of a character inexplicably narrating her own actions.

Is A Little Night Music worth seeking out? If you are already a Sondheim fan, then probably, if only for the opportunity to see the rarely staged musical. Or a Sondheim musical itself -- America's premier Broadway composer has remained consistently difficult to adapt for film, and A Little Night Music unfortunately represents a glaring example of why this is the case. Most of the remaining music is performed well, especially Downs and Riggs in their duet "Every Day A Little Death." The print circulating now on DVD appears to be taken from the same ½” video master used to create the Magnetic Video release in the 1980s, and is a dreary, faded affair that only exacerbates the colorless art direction and lackadaisical cinematography. 

Of more interest is Prince's oddball black comedy Something For Everyone (1970), but good luck finding a copy of that anywhere.