Ingmar Bergman’s 1958 drama The Magician has never had the vaunted reputation of his ’50s classics Smiles Of A Summer Night, Wild Strawberries, or The Seventh Seal, but it’s of a piece with those early films, in that it comes from an era when Bergman’s wit and whimsy were as central to his style as his preoccupation with pain, death, and the piteousness of religious faith. Set in 1846, The Magician stars Max von Sydow as a grim-looking performing hypnotist who rides into Stockholm with his usual entourage: a palm-reading/potion-selling tout, an old lady, and a young female assistant passing as a man. They get detained by Gunnar Björnstrand, a doctor who has heard rumors of the troupe stirring up the rubes in the European countryside. Björnstrand decides to discredit von Sydow before his spiritualist shadow-plays sucker a local nobleman and his wife, who are looking for comfort in the wake of their son’s death. And so a contest of wills ensues between smugly rational aristocrats and a group of grifters.
