George Coe and Anthony Lover | De Düva: The Dove / 1968

o, brave new world!

by Douglas Messerli

 

Sidney Davis (screenplay), George Coe and Anthony Lover (directors) De Düva: The Dove / 1968

 

If you ever attended art house foreign film in the late 1960s, there is a good chance you will have seen this short parody based mostly on Ingmar Bergman films of a few years earlier, most notably Wild Strawberries (1957) and The Seventh Seal (1957). This short film, De Düva: The Dove played alongside some of the most notable world cinema of the day.

    It was what we called simply “a hoot” at the time, but looking back on it now, and realizing some of its then almost unthinkable subject matter and given its superb young actors it is now far more interesting, perhaps, than some of the classic films to which it served as comic break.

    Although, for inattentive viewers, it first may have appeared to be yet another film translated from the Swedish, the film was, in fact, almost completely in English with many of the nouns ending in “ska” along with a few words in Yiddish and German.

    Much as in Wild Strawberries, a 76-year-old physics professor is traveling by chauffeured car to give a university lecture, but suddenly determines to visit his boyhood home. More specifically, he has to take a dump, and knows that at the “old family home” there is still a friendly outhouse.

    Actually, the film begins with a dove dropping “dovakaken” (translated as “dove doody”) on the front windshield, which forces the poor chauffeur (David Zirlin) to stop the car and wipe off the bird slime. The incident is repeated in different variations throughout the film, and the dove becomes a kind of symbol without any particular referent attached, except perhaps for the vagaries of fate.

     In this first case, Victor Sundqvist (George Coe) demands from the back seat that the chauffeur should take the west road so that he might visit the “old house,” the chauffeur warning him that it’s the long route, and that he may be late for the lecture where the entire faculty is waiting.

    Victor explains that he has his reasons, as he now takes over the narrative, commenting on how brittle and worn the woods look, introducing himself, naming his age, and reporting that he, quite incredibly, has last year won the Peace Prize in Nuclear Physics. He adds, for no apparent reason that he has a hernia.

     They arrive at the old house, and it is here that he makes use of the outdoor john, and it is there he finds a ceramic dove that leads him to think back upon the past.

     He was young and handsome in those days, he notes, as he exits the outhouse and in the last days of summer runs to his beautiful sister Inga (Pamela Burrell) who he kisses long and intensely upon the lips, the siblings obviously involved in an incestuous relationship.

 

   But meanwhile, uncle Anders (Peter Turgeon) is giving the young Victor a farewell party before his nephew returns to the Institute. At the party is his cousin Sigfrid (Madeline Kahn, in her first movie role) and his best friends, Gustav (Tom Stone) and Olin (Stan Rubinstein).

     His friends sing a short drinking song to Victor, while the brother and sister stare into one another’s eyes, Sigfrid touching Inga’s hair as she offers her up a “phallican symbol” (a cigar), to which Inga somewhat dismissively responds in something close to actual Swedish, “Nej tacken.”

    Victor offers her a rosebud, which Inga gladly accepts, but immediately runs off, likely in sorrow for her lover’s near departure, Sigfrid commenting in the strange conglomerate of English with Swedish-sounding endings, “Someday Inga will love me when she sees what fools men are.”

     Uncle Anders wonders aloud to Sigfrid when she will stop trying to force herself on Inga; her answer is “When you stop trying to force yourself on Mooska.” A large cow is standing next to him.

     What are you implying, Anders enquires, Sigrid answering, while looking off in the opposite direction at her cracked mirror, “You forget, my dear Anders, my bedroom window overlooks the barn.” The cow aggressively moos.

      Meanwhile, Victor has caught up with Inga, who wonders what is wrong. She tells him of a horrible dream where, as she put his rose into a vase the night before, a shadow came across her, causing her to be cold and the room feel totally empty. And when she awoke the rosebud was shriveled up and had died.

      He attempts to comfort her, telling her it was just a bad dream, and points to a dove hovering nearby. The dove drops its “dovekakken” this time directly upon his eye.

      Inga once more runs off, with Victor unable to catch up, particularly after he trips and falls. But eventually they both encounter Death (Sid Davis), who admits that he has been stalking her recently. “The time is coming near” he mutters in a mix of Latin, German. and Swedish-sounding words, for her to follow him into darkness.

     But Victor, remembering that death like gambling, challenges him to play a game of badmintonska (badminton); if she wins, she is free to live.

      If she loses, however, Death insists he will take Victor as well.

     The game is a long one, with Death speaking the entire time of how he controls the Moon and so much else; and it is soon apparent that he near his final volley, except at the that moment a Dove flies by, dropping its slime this time upon what Death describes as his “schmatta,” the Yiddish word for “rags,” or clothing that has seen better days; losing his focus the ball lands on his thorax. Death kills the dove with his badminton racket.

      But he has lost the game, as brother and sister run off the river to go skinny-dipping.

 

      The older Victor leaves the outhouse feeling much better now.

    So our little comic short, telling a tale of incest, lesbian desire, bestiality, and an encounter with death, is perhaps as shocking to some audiences of the day as the sexual content in the 1968 Bergman film, Hour of the Wolf.

      All said, however, the real delight of The Dove lies not in its story but in the made up language it employs, something that cannot be effectively expressed in an essay, but needs to be experienced by watching the work of art. The essence of this little gem exists in the very way we perceive reality, through words, even when they simply echo through our mind as cognates.

 

Los Angeles, October 25, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2025).