Star of the Month: Ingrid Bergman
TCM, Beginning at 7 p.m.
It’s another evening (into early tomorrow morning) of film classics starring legendary Swedish actress Ingrid Bergman on Turner Classic Movies, titles from the late 1950s and into the ’60s, later in the middle of her career. First up is the 1958 romantic comedy favorite Indiscreet (pictured), pairing Bergman with Cary Grant in their second film together (after 1946’s Notorious). The two stars earned Golden Globe nominations for their performances. Next, Bergman, Yul Brynner and Helen Hayes star in Anastasia (1956), in which a group of exiled Russians claim to have found Anastasia, the living daughter of the czar, presumed to have been executed with the rest of her family in 1918. In actuality, she is an amnesiac woman (Bergman) with a remarkable resemblance to Anastasia being used by the exiles in their scheme. Bergman won her second Best Actress Oscar for her performance. Following that, Bergman portrays the real-life Gladys Aylward, a British woman who became a missionary in China in the years leading up to World War II, in the Oscar-nominated The
Inn of the Sixth Happiness (1958), also starring Curd Jurgens and Robert Donat. Then, in the American-French romantic drama Goodbye Again (1961), Bergman stars as a 40-something woman who enters a romance with a younger man (Anthony Perkins), to the chagrin of her friends and business associates. Yves Montand costars. Bergman headlines a fully French production in tonight’s next film, Elena and Her Men
(1956), directed by co-writer Jean Renoir. The actress portrays an impoverished Polish princess who sets out to find a wealthy husband in 1880s Paris. Finally, Bergman stars in the third of three stories in the 1964 anthology drama The Yellow Rolls-Royce, which follows the three owners of the titular 1931 Rolls-Royce Phantom II. Bergman’s story takes place in 1941, when her character, a wealthy American widow, buys the car to tour Europe. On her journey, she encounters an anti-fascist fighter (Omar Sharif) who convinces her to smuggle him across the Yugoslav border to escape a Nazi attack, and the two end up falling for each other.
— Jeff Pfeiffer