Bergman and Quinn are ill cast and way too young as the leads but the insurmountable problem is the castration of Durrenmatt's finale - in which the good but greedy citizens of Gullen take the money, strangle Schill and present Claire with his corpse, which she carries off with her with much pomp and circumstance. I saw the Lunts play the leads (their theater farewell) when I was 17 and still remember the play, especially the ending, vividly. (I've seen Kander and Ebb's stab at a musical version, as well.) The play is a kind of dark parable or fairy tale about vengeance and the ways love can be perverted into something horrible. Claire has a line about her love growing gnarled and twisted like the roots of the trees in the forest where she made love to Schill as a girl. The film simply doesn't work. Perhaps in 1964 there was no way to get Durrenmatt's ending past what remained of the censors. Also the film looks pretty bad, obviously shot on the cheap in eastern Europe,and the only available DVD (in the US) is a pan-and-scan version of the original 2:35:1 B&W print.
