“Miss Bergman’s delicate playing was a tour de force, a brilliant portrait of the woman whose life is wrenched out of joint by the fates of the heart.” -- New York Times
Directed by Ted Kotcheff
Ingrid Bergman gives a tour-de-force performance as a middle-aged woman going through an emotional and psychological breakdown at the end of a doomed love affair in Jean Cocteau’s pioneering one-character play, presented as the final installment of the ABC Stage 67 series. The drama unfolds as an extended monologue – a one-sided telephone conversation between the unnamed woman and her invisible, inaudible, soon-to-be former lover. The phone becomes her final link to the man and she employs it in a desperate attempt to hold onto him, despite a bad connection, the knowledge that he is leaving her to marry a younger woman, and her growing certainty that he is in fact, speaking to her from his fiancée’s home. Written in 1930 and first staged at the Comédie-Française in Paris, “The Human Voice” (“La Voix Humaine”) was subsequently filmed in Italy by Bergman’s lover/husband-to-be Roberto Rossellini as a segment of the 1948 anthology film, L’Amore starring Anna Magnani; and an operatic version with libretto by Cocteau was composed by Francis Poulenc in 1958. Bergman, who had recorded an LP record album of “The Human Voice” in 1960, makes a rare television appearance in this program, only her fourth dramatic television role to date (she had previously starred in a 1959 Ford Startime version of Henry James’ “The Turn of the Screw,” for which she received an Emmy Award; 24 Hours in a Woman’s Life, a 1961 CBS special based on a story by Stefan Zweig, whose executive producer was “The Human Voice” producer Lars Schmidt; and Hedda Gabler in 1963). Broadcast directly opposite Arthur Miller’s The Crucible on CBS, the ABC State 67 presentation of “The Human Voice” reflects a frustrating pre-TiVo television scenario, and recalls then-ABC president Thomas Moore’s suggestion that the networks establish a clearinghouse in order that notable specials such as these not be scheduled to compete with each other.
Dan Einstein
A Talent Associates Rediffusion Televison Production. Producers: David Susskind, Lars Schmidt. Writer: Jean Cocteau. Adapted for television by Clive Exton. Translated from the French by Carl Wildman. With: Ingrid Bergman.
Digital Betacam, color, 55 min.
Preserved from the original 2” master. Video transfer at KTLA. Engineering services by Don Kent. Courtesy of Parmandisam, LLC.
