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Ingmar Bergman's Vargtimmen (The Hour of the Wolf) received mixed and largely unenthusiastic notices when it first appeared twelve years ago, even from Bergman enthusiasts and those who had hailed Persona. Penelope Gilliatt did contend that "The formal organization of the film is beautiful," and Philip Strick did conclude, "In the hour before dawn, Bergman's imagination remains the finest, and the most disturbing, of all the cinema's modern visionaries. "1 But John Simon called it "a film . . . that does not work"; Stanley Kauffmann decided that "Hour of the Wolf ... is not one of his [Bergman's] successes"; and Richard Corliss and Jonathan Hoops drew attention to "the weakness of the second part of Bergman's script" while summing up: "reviews . . . have been, deservedly, reserved but respectful. "2 In subsequent years the film's reputation has, if anything, declined: Vernon Young (admittedly not a Bergman admirer) characterizes Vargtimmen as "theatrically shoddy and built on an ill-bred premise," while most recently Lynn Buntzen and Carla Craig have concluded that it is (pace Gilliatt) "an incoherent work of art"; and in fact it has fared best when regarded as a bridge between Persona and Skammen (Shame) or ignored altogether.3
Even Bergman's most ardent supporters do not insist that his every film is a complete success. But Vargtimmen's cool reception is somewhat surprising in view of the popularity and high critical repute enjoyed by its two primary sources: Mozart's opera Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute) and the works of the German Romantic writer E. T. A. Hoffmann. These sources did not go entirely undetected by the reviewers. The puppet -theater presentation of Die Zauberflöte would have been difficult to overlook, especially since arkivarie Lindhorst explicitly identifies it; but only Strick and Corliss/Hoops make more than a passing reference to the opera, and the subsequent discussions by Robin Wood and Robert Rosen, though useful, leave much unsaid.4 Hoffmann, moreover, is mentioned at all only by Simon and Corliss/Hoops, and it is left to Rosen to detail some of the more important borrowings.5 As Corliss and Hoops conclude, "Although these references are not the irrelevant quotes that Godard, after a morning's browse in Left Bank bookstalls, inserts in the afternoon's footage, Bergman's reliance on them provokes the...