Random Thoughts

This Can’t Happen Here (Sånt händer inte här). Ingmar Bergman. 1950. ⭐★★★★★.

This is a movie that apparently has never gotten a DVD release? I had to source it from teh torrentz, and it looks like it has its origin in a VHS copy. Perhaps it was shown on TV at one point?

It’s a thriller based on a Norwegian novel, apparently made just because the producers had gotten a subsidy to create a film for an international audience (so it was filmed both in Swedish and English).

Bergman tried to have the production halted after a few days of shooting.

This is what Bergman said about it: “Few of my films do I feel ashamed of or detest for various reasons. This can’t happen here was the first one; I completed it accomained by violent inner opposition. The other is The Touch. Both mark the very bottom of me. My publishment did not fail to come from the outside as well. This can’t happen here opened in the fall of 1950 and was regarded as a fiasco.”

The critics didn’t know whether it was supposed to be a parody or not.

It’s bad. Some of the shots look rather good, but it’s just tedious.

This post is part of the 87 Bergman Things series.

To Joy (Till glädje). Ingmar Bergman. 1950. ⭐⭐⭐⭐★★.

This is Bergman’s second writer/director credit, and it couldn’t be more different from his first one, Prison. As the title suggests, it’s basically a happy and nostalgic film, where the protagonist is an obvious and hapless stand-in for Bergman himself. It’s pretty funny. Bergman is pretty savage in his takedown of himself.

I like the long scenes from the orchestra rehearsals.

The critics were savage. “Bergman, according to Schein, gave his films “the necessary stamp of tendentious realism” courtesy of “violence towards women, talk of abortions, empty brandy bottles and the line ‘Bloody hell, I like you’ instead of ‘I love you’.”

And this: “Not forgetting the peculiar phenomenon that Bergman, in the country with fewer prostitutes per capita than any other in the world, manages to put a whore in every film.”

This post is part of the 87 Bergman Things series.

Thirst (Törst). Ingmar Bergman. 1949. ⭐⭐⭐⭐★★.

After the brilliant Prison completely bombed at the box office, Bergman is back to directing another movie written by somebody else. A bundle of actors from his previous film reappears here, though.

It’s a surprisingly vigorous and amusing film: Bergman isn’t sulking after the less than stellar reception of his last movie. It doesn’t shy much away from its origin as a short story collection, either.

Definitely the best Bergman-not-written-by-Bergman film so far.

This post is part of the 87 Bergman Things series.

Prison (Fängelse). Ingmar Bergman. 1949. ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐★.

Finally! A real Bergman film. This is the first of his films that’s both written (not based on a book/play) and directed by Bergman, and we basically get all his obsessions on a plate: Religion, injustice, evil, making movies, symbolism, Fraudianism, watching old movies. It’s the first of these films I think basically anybody would be able to watch a snippet of and then say “yup, Bergman”.

The cinematographer, Göran Strindberg, had done a lot of Bergman’s previous movies, but this has a completely different and confident look.

The dialogue is so Bergman! I love it.

Hm… Oh, the story behind the production is fascinating. He was given free rains to make this “artistic” film if he promised to make it as cheaply as possible, and only came in 40% over the minuscule budget. And didn’t get a salary himself.

The only thing that stops this from being absolutely brilliant is that Bergman still doesn’t have the right troupe of actors assembled: Birger Malmsten is still pretty hapless. But it’s mostly super-fresh and some scenes hints at the direction of European cinema for the next twenty years.

This post is part of the 87 Bergman Things series.

Port of Call (Hamnstad). Ingmar Bergman. 1948. ⭐⭐⭐⭐★★.

Oh, it’s Bergman’s 100th birthday this year, so there’s supposed to be a bunch of retrospectives, re-releases and documentaries this year. I had no idea when I embarked upon my Bergmania…

Anyway, this is a very strangely edited film. It’s like if the editor is off by a few frames every cut. Things judder and shiver.

Bergman says in interviews about this film that he was basically riffing on Rossellini and Italian neo-realism in this film, and it’s quite different from his earlier movies. The people do seem more realistic than his earlier attempts, and I don’t think it features any of the actors that he usually uses?

The evil mother and the evil social worker are pretty tiresome cliches. There are some good scenes in here, but also some pretty bad ones (like the one where Our Hero gets drunk).

This post is part of the 87 Bergman Things series.