The grating music at the outset establishes the tone as something severe, serious, edifying. But this adaptation of the Hesse novel develops into an easily digestible lesson in humanity, along the same lines as Zorba the Greek, about a self-destructive, stuffed-shirt intellectual learning to embrace life -- learning to foxtrot, for example -- under the tutelage of Dominique Sanda. The thick, uncertain, English-language pronunciations of the European cast (Sanda, Von Sydow, Clementi) tend to bog down the journey to enlightenment. Directed by Fred Haines. (1975) — Duncan Shepherd
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