De Düva: The Dove (1968) User Reviews

Magnificent Parody of Bergman.

[rmax304823 · 8/10 · 20 November 2017]

I saw this when it was released and have never forgotten it. I can't stop laughing.

It opens with a shot of a bird coasting overhead, right out of "The Seventh Seal. Soon we find a pigeon instead of a buzzard. It swoops down and poops on he windshield of a car grinding its way along a dirt road in the forest.

Then, as in "Wild Strawberries," there begins a narration by the old professor on his way to a lecture. If you don't pay attention to the subtitles you'd swear the dialog and narration were in Swedish. The supersegmentals are impeccable. The professor informs us that he just won the Peace Prize in Nuclear Physics. The Peace Prize for Nuclear work. That's about the level of humor throughout.

It's about fifteen minutes long and I don't want to spell out too many jokes but Madeleine Kahn plays the part of a girl at a picnic who interrupts the man scolding her to point out that her bedroom window overlooks the barn. The man looks shocked and glances at a nearby cow. "Moo," says the subtitle.

Look, if you haven't seen any of Ingmar Bergman's movie you might still enjoy it because it's intrinsically funny. If you've seen Berman's movies and DON'T like them, you can treat this as cutting and deflationary satire.

Great satire of Bergman

[JBinjersey · 8/10 · 30 January 2006]

I saw this movie on TV over 30 years ago, never forgot it and have been hoping to see it again. I hope it's as funny today as it was then. The opening scene is typically Bergmanesque, in black and white, cutting from a bird flying overhead to a chauffeur driven car and back again several times until the car finally arrives at a summer home on the shores of a lake in Sweden. The bird leaves a dropping smack in the middle of the windshield and the chauffeur turns to the passenger in the back and, as if announcing a momentous event says "De Duva." The movie continues in mock Swedish with subtitles as the passenger gets out of the car and goes to the outhouse where he sits and recalls his youth through flashbacks. Any Bergman fan should enjoy it.

personal anecdote

[Mich@el · 27 September 2004]

Years ago, long before DVD's, video tapes, cable TV, etc. the only was to see films like "The Dove" except at an art house movie theater was to rent a 16 mm print of it, a projector, a screen and get a large room to set up. We used to do this at college and held screenings once a month. There were companies that

supplied the college circuit with independent and underground films. It was a good way for new filmmakers to have their works seen. Most films were

forgettable but not this one. I remember it as the most enjoyable and funniest too.

Years later when I was working with Sven Nykvist on "Only You" I mentioned to him that I had seen "The Dove" and asked him if he had. He smiled and told me that he had and that Ingmar Bergman had seen it too and loved it!

I laughed till I cried

[philtrau-2 · 10/10 · 13 August 2001]

I saw this when it came out in '68, and like everyone else in the theater I initially assumed it was a legitimate Bergman film. The look and feel of the picture was perfect, down to the lingering silences, pregnant with meaning. Or so we thought. About two minutes into it, I began to hear a few people giggling, then a few more as slowly it dawned on the audience that this wasn't the Master Himself after all. Soon everyone was roaring, and by the time it was over most of us were ruined for the feature film (No, I have no idea what it was). You don't have to be familiar with Bergman to enjoy this, but it helps. This is an inspired masterpiece that I rate up there with such untouchable classics as "Bambi Meets Godzilla". When is someone going to put these old shorts on video or DVD? The world could use the laughter these days.

Best Short Film Ever

[nuntukamen · 10/10 · 20 May 2005]

This film first smashed its way into film goers mass consciousness in the late Sixties when it was tagged unannounced into art houses all over the country. I caught it at the Art Theatre in Akron, Ohio, as a prelude to the main feature, Putney Swope(also recommended for anyone who liked this). Or maybe it preceded Greetings, same location with direction by Brian De Palma and starring Robert Deniro in their first movie, another highly recommended film of frivolous fun. At any rate, it had to be one of the two back in those Ripple years. The Dove even has a young Madaline Kahn and set the stage for the advent of Mel Brooks and Woody Allen to entertain us with feature length nonsense that makes a sabered point. If you think Bill and Ted's wrestling with Death was original and funny, here, in fact, is where the entire battle gestated from. No point outlining the plot and purpose, others have done so very well here, but I do have to urge anyone and everyone to catch this under whatever opportunities they have. Beyond Classic.

Might be a one-joke short film, but at least that one joke is a funny one

[Jeremy_Urquhart · 7/10 · 8 October 2022]

Was reading up on films that use fictional languages, and came across this short film that's a parody of the work of Ingmar Bergman. He has a distinct style that's kind of ripe for parody, and I've been watching quite a few of his films lately. Given this was a short film (and promised made-up, vaguely Swedish sounding dialogue), I figured I had nothing to lose by watching it.

It ended up being pretty funny. Even if it may have gotten old if it had been longer, I'd still probably have stuck with it had it been feature length. The main joke is really just the way they speak, and how it's translated in the English subtitles. Other highlights include a cow's moo getting translated as "Moo," and Death challenging one of the characters to a game of badminton instead of chess (as famously seen in The Seventh Seal).

So it's not really deep or varied when it comes to its humour, but the jokes it does have were pretty funny, and it was an overall strong parody. I could see people finding it too stupid or shallow to really be appealing, but I can find a lot of humour in the right kind of dumb parody, and De Düva was pretty much the right kind of dumb for me.

funniest movie short I ever saw

[phoenixmed · 10/10 · 25 February 2006]

Seen in the fall of 1969 at a downtown Pittsburgh theater, it continues to be the funniest movie short I ever saw. Like the writer in the post above, no one knew what to expect. I had read a review of the film prior to attending. Having a hint of what to expect my friends and I began laughing early in the run, to the bemused confusion of the audience. Soon others began to understanding snippets of the fake Swedish dialog, causing trickles of laughter. By the end of the film the entire audience was howling.

I do remember the film that followed "Last Summer" with Barbara Hershey but it didn't come close to De Duva for entertainment.

The last time I checked,about 20 years ago, the University of Pittsburgh library had a copy. I'm not sure if its still there but would very much like to buy a reasonably priced CD or VHS copy.

I didn't get it at first

[zerobeat · 10/10 · 3 August 2006]

In 1977 I had a really cool high school English teacher who did two particularly good things I'll never forget. The first was teach us all about media manipulation. The second was to have us all watch De Düva in the class, without any explanation beforehand. I was 14 or 15 years old, and had no prior knowledge of Bergman films.

I don't even think the SCTV parody of Bergman was out by that time. It took a few minutes before I suspected this film wasn't serious - one particular bit I remember is when the subtitle says something like "....the night" and the actor's voice says something like ".... pitchen blackness". My young self thought that this can't possibly be real Swedish!

I thought about this film a lot in the coming weeks/months, not understanding it completely.

Around 1980 in college, at the library we could actually sign out films and screen them in a small room. There was an alphabetic list and a bunch of us would get together during some breaks and take turns picking films. I randomly spotted "The Dove" in the list and gambled that it was that really weird film I had seen a few years earlier. Well, a little older, and a little exposure to Bergman (maybe even only via the SCTV parody by that time) allowed me to GET the film this time. It was funnier the 2nd time. It was especially funny noticing the moment that OTHER people would start to get it.

If there ever was a film to NOT spoil for somebody, this is it.

It's funny, but it took me a few minutes to figure out that Buckaroo Banzai and This Is Spinal Tap were spoofs too.

Some folks take pride in saying things like "I knew it all along", but I absolutely love being surprised, whether it's in something like the above mentioned films or in a plot twist like in Silence of the Lambs or Crying Game or Sixth Sense.

Unsuspecting Victims

[danbranstrom · 9/10 · 17 April 2004]

I worked with a man who was quite serious. After a weekend, I asked what he'd done, and he'd gone to the same movie I had. Along with the main feature, De Duva was shown.

I asked him how he liked it. He said, "It was O.K., but the audience was so disrespectful." He and his wife had sat through the whole film, not realizing it was a parody in, as one of the other people put it, macaroni English. He had taken the whole thing straight, and hadn't caught on it was a parody.

When I had seen it, I was interested at first because I am a first, second, and third generation Swedish American, and while I don't speak Swedish, I do understand a word or phrase here or there in Swedish films. I sat there, for a couple of minutes, trying to reconcile the English subtitles to words in some Swedish dialect that wasn't making sense to me, until I realized it was not Swedish at all.

Surprised by the appeal

[Horst_In_Translation · 4/10 · 14 November 2017]

"De Düva: The Dove" is a 14-minute black-and-white short film from 1968, so this one will have its 50th anniversary next year. These days, you really don't see parody (short) films being nominated for an Oscar, but the fact that this one was shows how big Swedish filmmaker Bergman was back then because this one here spoofs his works, even if at times it felt almost like a real Bergman film. But maybe Americans tried to hide their embarrassment a bit through comedy here that they weren't capable of coming up with Bergman's works at that time. Anyway, back to this one here. There are some actors in here that are known by today's standards in here like Madeline Kahn in her mid-20s and of course George Coe who is also one of the two directors. The best moment about it was maybe the badminton game near the end and the introduction/wager leading to it. I am not a great expert on Bergman to be honest, so maybe you should be to appreciate this one. Or maybe then, you will dislike it even more. I can only say that I cannot see this being one of the defining spoofs in film history whatsoever and it is seen like that by some I think. It's not really funny, not too witty and the Swedish talking just isn't enough to make it work from the comedy perspective. I give it a thumbs-down. Don't watch.

Don't forget the Yiddish

[duvv · 18 April 2004]

This short film would show up in Manhattan movie theaters every so often for ten years or more. We remember it so well because we treasured our first viewings of it, and were so flummoxed by trying to describe it to friends, that the subsequent viewings were often spent compiling mental notes. As the 70s wore on and Madeline Kahn's star brightly ascended, her big joke -- "phallica symbole?" -- became widely quoted. To be able to quote that line got used more than once to fake having actually seen this cool in-joke of cinemagoers. The more of us who saw it, the more we tormented our virgin friends over their having missed it yet again, while arming them with more details to fake their way through chuckling with the beaming cocktailers rather than in envy of them.

Kind of like an initiation rite, because the more pretentious the moviegoer -- those cocktailing cognoscenti -- the more humiliating the first viewing must have been, especially if one were not extra-attentive to the gibberishy narration/dialogue track (overstuffed with nature sounds, to further the verisimilitude).

Much as with actual Swedish, the first jokes detected were often squelched as inappropriate thoughts, distant Germanic echoes from a related tongue, so those who believed they were watching a meditation on memory had the hardest time catching on that they'd been slipped an unannounced comic short. Only well into the 70s did newspaper ads start billing when De Düva (The Dove) would be shown.

Even after realizing it's a comedy, what we took to be Swedishy gibberish revealed itself to be a pastiche of Scandinavianized English, Yiddishisms, and silly dirty jokes.

The climactic incest scene was the hottest screen action I'd ever seen to that point, satirizing the brief era when Swedish features showed more skin than US-released ones.

Rare perfection

[surreal_subtext · 10/10 · 5 February 2006]

If only for the performance by the sublime Madeline Kahn as the incestuous sister Sigrid, this short gem should be required viewing. I would love to see it again, but it seems to be completely unavailable. In 15 minutes, Coe sends up every Bergman mannerism in Wild Strawberries, The Seventh Seal, Smiles of a Summer Night and others. Spoken in a hilarious mock-Swedish, with sly English subtitles. this picture is truly one of a kind. Who can forget Kahn, puffing on a huge cigar, offering it to her brother with the words: "Fol-lee-ken seem-bowl?" (Subtitle: "Would you like a puff?") Everything about this picture is original and wackily hilarious. If only it were not so hard to see.

silly and stupid parody of a Bergman film--and really funny

[planktonrules · 10/10 · 10 March 2006]

This film combines two of Ingmar Bergman's most successful films, THE SEVENTH VEIL and WILD STRAWBERRIES, into a parody that is a must-see for fans of Bergman that don't take his work too seriously! I could imagine some fans being offended by this silly film--exactly the same type people who insist Shakespeare can't be parodied as well. Well, I liked these two very somber movies and still love how this little film completely tears them apart. In particular, I love how the Angel of Death agrees not to play a game of chess to determines whether or not a man can keep his soul (like in The 7th Veil)--but battles it out over badminton! It's silly, schlocky and funny as they speak in faux-Swedish and get the look of the original as well!

However, to really enjoy the film, it's best if you have seen the Bergman films. Others will probably also like it, but to a lesser extent.

Surprising trailer

[dr-jazz · 9/10 · 26 August 2005]

This was shown as the 'trailer' before a screening of "The Magic Christian". I was about 20-21 years old and I was stunned by the 'subtlety'. Of course, at 20 a kick in the head was considered subtle. I have hunted for this film for nearly 35 years and was thrilled to finally locate it as an MP-4 file. It surprises me in retrospect that, even at the age of 20, I was able to recognize the satire in the film, though at that time I had never seen a Bergman film. It wasn't till I saw "The Seventh Seal" on a Kibbutz - dubbed into Hebrew with French subtitles!!!!!, that I realized where much of the imagery had been sourced. A brilliant pastiche and a fantastic voyage into the past. Thanks to all concerned.

Jon Monsarrat review: hilarious even for a non-insider

[johnnymonsarrat · 9/10 · 27 May 2002]

This is a short film but wonderful.

I had never seen The Seventh Seal back in the 1980s when this film came out, but I knew the genre of overly arty overly dramatic take-ourselves-maybe-a-wee-bit-too-seriously stuff, and found this to be so hilarious I am still fondly hoping I may see it again someday.

It actually inspired me to go out and rent The Seventh Seal recently, which I found to be aging but of real interest to me academically speaking.

Who should see this film:

-- Everybody, if you get a chance to see this short, jump at it.

-- drama / art fans: a must-see

I'll give this film a 10 out of 10.

Incredible movie, rare memories

[barrynewman · 10/10 · 13 January 2009]

Nothing much more needs to be said. (although a minimum of 10 lines is required for publication so now I will have to wax poetic anyway) I remembered seeing this as an intro to an art film (that i have now long since forgotten) while I was in college. As a fan of "art films" my friends and i would go almost religiously to several films a week, including among others many of Bergman's. We were watching this without much thought when we suddenly realized that it was all in pidgin English made to sound Swedish, with the hilarious subtitles, the pseudo symbolism (cannons, long limo, trees), the outhouse instead of the strawberry field, then there is the badminton game with death. I never saw it again, and have searched for years to find it again. I tried very hard for years to locate this film with little success. I actually located a few versions in 16mm film in a university archives, and almost rented it and a projector (a true sign of desperation). About a year ago I found a copy on VHS as part of a compendium of short subjects (including Bambi vs Godzilla, BTW) and since it is nearly impossible to locate otherwise, and the VHS is out of print, i will be happy to supply anyone who wants with a copy of this incredible film. Feel free to contact me.

One of the great shorts.

[roarshock · 9 August 2000]

Assuming you can find a copy, this is one of the greatest ambush films of all time. Have a few of your movie fanatic friends over for some serious film viewing, and sometime that evening, without warning, start playing "The Dove". It is so well done that when I first saw it I took it seriously... that is until I realized that the word "water" in the subtitles was translating a "Swedish" word pronounced "H2Oska". If you play it right, you can wait and see how long it takes for your friends to catch on.

Our story of De Düve

[nwsayer · 9/10 · 5 July 2021]

About 35 years ago our family went to the Kensington theater in San Diego, which at the time was the local "art" movie house. They showed this before the main movie.

As we began to watch it, all of us immediately figured it out, because we heard the pidgin Swedish and the old man dropping his drawers in the outhouse and nostalgically picking up a dead pigeon. It was just laughable.

But we were the only people who caught on at first. People were turning around and giving us ugly looks and shushing us... it was surreal.

Toward the end, when Inga and Death are playing _badminton_ for her life, everyone else finally figured it out and was laughing along with us, but even the pre-title card - lauding the movie for winning the Golden Escargot - is parody (and funny) if you're paying attention.

Hilarious parody of Bergman films

[llltdesq · 10/10 · 1 December 2014]

It being almost impossible to talk about this short without mentioning some details, I hereby warn you that ahead there be spoilers:

This short is a hilarious send up of Bergman films. It features a kind of pidgin "Swedish" which would make the Swedish Chef of The Muppet Show green with envy, magnificently warped "subtitles" and it's played completely seriously by the cast, which makes it even funnier.

An old professor is reminiscing about his youth, his loves and a brush with doves and Death. In between, you meet relatives, Freudian in-jokes and a wicked sense of the absurd. Madeline Kahn, pre-Blazing Saddles, is a hoot as a cigar smoking lesbian with two of the best lines in the short.

This short is available online for viewing and has been on at least one DVD of which I'm aware. It was nominated for an Academy Award for Live Action Short, losing to Robert Kennedy Remembered, which is also quite good. De Duva is most definitely worth seeing. From downtown at the buzzer, nothing but net! Most highly recommended.

A forgotten gem

[thegreenes · 10/10 · 29 April 2011]

In the spring of 1972, I worked as the assistant manager at the Westgate, an old movie theater in Edina, Minnesota, a suburb of Minneapolis. We began screening what would become the longest running regular feature in Minneapolis history, "Harold and Maude". It ran for a total of 115 weeks, over 2 years. What most people forget when talking nostalgically about this incredible run is that "De Duva" was screened before every performance. People would leave the theater and say it was like watching a double feature even though "De Duva" was only 15 minutes. You don't have to know a thing about Ingmar Bergman's films to appreciate the satire and the pure silliness of the film. It was the perfect lead-in to "Harold and Maude".

Hilarious!

[stikeerht · 8/10 · 12 April 2019]

A bunch of my friends and I were having a party at somebody's apartment well over 40 years ago and one of the guys rented this movie. We were all in our early 20's and caught on right away. We were rolling and practically wet ourselves laughing. It's one of the craziest and funniest films I've ever seen and I'd love to see it again. It's simply priceless. I'd love to show it to my kids and (grown) grandkids. I think they'd enjoy it.

Hilarious short satire of foreign films.

[LarryMac · 22 September 1999]

I saw this movie almost thirty years ago, and the fact that I've been looking for a copy ever since attests to my enthusiastic recommendation. If you are in to foreign films, especially the heavily symbolic Swedish films of the late 50's (Bergman's "Wild Strawberries" for example), you will enjoy every one of the fifteen minutes running time and wish for more. The film is a small masterpiece of satire, spoofing in a kind of macaronic English-Swedish the overt symbolism characteristic of the time and genre. Finding a tape anywhere of this film is to search for the proverbial needle, but I urge you to make every effort to find it and enjoy it. You will be well rewarded for you

very amusing parody

[TIALI · 13 May 2002]

I say "amusing" because this short film isn't laugh out loud funny without the appropriate context: I've never seen a Bergman film, but I understand what "Bergmanesque" means,...so the jokes might be just outside my experience. I taped this off USA Night Flight many years ago, so I've been able to show it to others and have had mixed responses, again, because you need the right background of understanding. Otherwise this is just a short comedy about an old man taking a dump and remembering his youth filled with bestiality, lesbianism, incest and watching Death take a dove's money shot right in the eye--if you think that's funny, then God bless you...

I remember de duva

[davidgraf88 · 30 September 2005]

i can still remember when we as a family first got home box office. It was a very simple box for cable TV. One button was black for standard TV, and the other button was red for premium TV. The year was 1974. The movies shown back then were at best decent movies, but every so often the short of "De Duva" would come on . This movie short would send my father into hysterics, especially the finish when the dove would dump it's load on an unsuspecting face. We saw this short maybe ten times or so, but never again. If anyone knows how to obtain a copy of this movie short, it would greatly be appreciated. As guidelines state this comment needs to be at least ten lines long. What else can I say about this very short movie that appeared only on HBO in the early seventies. I remember that it contained sub title's and that I could of swore that Liv Ullman was part of the cast. I would very much like to obtain a copy of this movie short.