Hamsun

He is old and very remote, his wife is bitter.

Quisling tells people what they want to hear.

And one sees German troops in Oslo, one has to deal with Hitler per se, not per Quisling. The subject of this biographical film has not, in 1942, read Mein Kampf. “But I’ve read the reviews.”

The great man, the national poet, his wife and kids.

The Germans rub Hamsun’s admiring nose in their piddle.

“England must be brought to her knees,” he says. He shakes the Fuhrer’s hand at Berghof and pleads the case of Norway and is dismissed. He writes an obituary of the “warrior for humankind”, the “reformer of the first water”.

He is very old, a retired writer.

Psychiatric clinic and trial. Hamsun’s eloquent, revealing defense.

Stephen Holden of the New York Times ventured to say that “great authors can also be colossal fools.”

“Sags a bit in the middle” (Boxoffice). Film Journal International has “the corrosive power of art over love and intimacy.”