I’d just like to put in a word for Ingmar Bergman. Sure, a lot of his stuff looks absurdly pretentious from this distance; and sure, he lurched into self-parody now & then (though having enough of a self to parody, isn’t nothing); and sure, there was the Hitler thing (though swooning for Hitler in 1934 at age 16 is by no means the same thing as doing so later & older).

He was all the rage when I was in my late-teen and college years, and I think I saw every darn one of his movies from late 1950s to early 1960s. Some of them were very moving. I recall being particularly struck by The Virgin Spring –I think I saw it twice. I haven’t seen it since, and my tastes weren’t fully formed at the time, so it’s entirely possible that on seeing it again I’d think: “What a load of tosh!” Anyway, I have just ordered it from Netflix so I can find out.

Now someone please remind me: Of all the send-ups of that scene in The Seventh Seal where the knight plays chess with Death, which movie was it where the hero plays Twister with Him?