Zandy's Bride" (1974): Liv Ullman Taming Gene Hackman on the Wild Big Sur Coast

Director Jan Troell's 1972 film of Swedish emigrants to Minnesota "Utvandrarna" (The Emigrants) won some awards for (Norwegian) actress Liv Ullman and received half a dozen Academy Award nominations, including picture, director, and actress. The sequel released the next year, "Nybyggarna" (The New Land) netted Ullman some more awards (and took the family portrayed to the Southwest United States). Meanwhile, Gene Hackman was winning a best actor Oscar for "The French Connection" (1971) and Eileen Heckart a best supporting actress one for "Butterflies Are Free" (1972). They were, thus, on a roll of acclaim when they went to the west edge of the continent to shoot "Zandy's Bride."

What went wrong? Certainly not the performances of the talented actors. Certainly not the striking Big Sur location that is filmed beautifully by George Cronenwerth. The problem is a lack of ideas and the complete predictability that Ullman will to some extent tame Hackman and make him like it.

Ullman's character advertised herself as a spinster who wanted to go west from Minneapolis. When she arrives on the west coast, Zandy Allan (Hackman) is outraged that she is older than she led him to believe (32 instead of 25). He is set in his "no frill" ways and does not intend to change. He works seven days a week building up a cattle ranch at the precipitous edge of the world and expects her to be yoked with him, rarely seeing anyone else.

Oafish as he is, his father (played by Frank Cady) is even worse, so more time spent in the bosom of his family would be no boon. Eileen Heckart tells her son: "You don't know nothin' 'bout marriage, 'cept from pa an' me." Knowing nothing at all would be better, I think. Zandy follows Pa's example of treating the farm animals with more affection than he aims at his wife or sons (Sam Bottoms is a younger one, still on the home place).

There is a bear attack, a barbecue (at which Zandy misbehaves with a buxom, horny local Latina played by Susan Tyrrell), and a shopping expedition to San Francisco (where Zandy is jostled, not knowing how to share a wooden sidewalk with other pedestrians). How much time is passing is unclear.

Hackman is really good, particularly in the last scene in which he is buffeted by conflicting emotions. Is he ever bad? Hackman has compiled an impressive body of work in a range of roles in a range of quality of movies. Ullman had already starred in a string of late masterpieces directed by Ingmar Bergman (before going to Hollywood and helping kill off the genre of musicals with "Forty Carats" and "Lost Horizons"). Heckart and Harry Dean Stanton provide reliably wry support. "Zandy's Bride" really should be better, but it is slow and totally predictable, scenic as is its locale and perfect as are its performances.


(BTW, Troell directed Max von Sydow, who had played the patriarch in the Sweden-to-America emigration movies, in that great actor's greatest performance, as Knut Hamsum in a Strinbdergian 1996 biopic(titled simply "Hamsum") that was not released in America. (I saw it at the San Francisco Film Festival.) It is available on DVD and I highly recommend it.)