The Big Screen (51 page)

Using his dedicated agent and scout in London, Jenia Reissar, he found “talent” in Sweden that might make the film. There was a director much praised in Stockholm, Alf Sjöberg, and there was a young writer. Through Reissar, a contract was made with the writer, though she reported that he had long, unwashed hair and was rather dirty and quite odd. Still, for American money he did the script and gave it a happy ending to meet American tastes. I have read the script, though it was never made. It doesn't deserve to be made. The name of the writer was Ingmar Bergman.

Bergman was born in Uppsala in 1918, the son of a Lutheran pastor, and he was raised in severe strictness, a domestic atmosphere alleviated by his fascination with toy theaters. During his boyhood, Sweden was a country of around five million, but its contribution to film history was already remarkable. In the years of Griffith, Mauritz Stiller had shown himself to be a director of romantic comedy as sophisticated as that of Lubitsch and as skilled with the camera as Griffith. He had a rival, Victor Sjöström, so highly regarded that he had been invited to Hollywood where, as Victor Seastrom, he had directed Lillian Gish in
The Wind
. When Louis B. Mayer recruited Greta Garbo, she was actually baggage in the deal that really wanted Stiller. The couple came together, Garbo thrived, and Stiller was thwarted. A decade later, Ingrid Bergman arrived from Sweden to be an American star as important as Garbo.

Ingmar Bergman studied theater at the University of Stockholm. He wrote fiction and plays and he found work as a script doctor in the film industry. In 1944 he got his first credit on Alf Sjöberg's
Frenzy
, a film about a school where the teacher is a fascistic figure who intimidates the young. Its cast included the nineteen-year-old Mai Zetterling in one of her first roles. It was on the strength of
Frenzy
that Bergman was offered the Selznick job on Ibsen.

At the same time, he began to get directing opportunities. His first films—
Crisis
(1946),
It Rains on Our Love
(1946),
Port of Call
(1948),
Thirst
(1949)—were essentially realist in their approach but marked by the psychological or neurotic unease that would characterize Bergman. He began to emerge as he found projects for the actresses he loved—
Summer Interlude
(1951, Maj-Britt Nilsson),
Summer with Monika
(1953, Harriet Andersson),
Sawdust and Tinsel
(1953, Andersson), and
Smiles of a Summer Night
(1955, Ulla Jacobsson, Eva Dahlbeck, and Andersson again).

These films were of a pattern: they were all in black and white; made modestly for Svensk Filmindustri, a state entity; with strong Swedish casts; but selling successfully to the international art house circuit. Bergman worked always as writer-director, a regular practice in Europe but far more unusual in America. The films were sometimes so sexually candid they had to be cut overseas: Harriet Andersson is often nude in
Summer with Monika
. It was released in America in 1956 and cut down by a third, as
Monika: The Story of a Bad Girl
, with posters stressing the nudity theaters could not show. The films won festival prizes:
Smiles of a Summer Night
played at Cannes and won for “Best Poetic Humor.”

“Poetic humor” wasn't quite Bergman's style at home. He was already on his third divorce, but living most of the time with Harriet Andersson. And he was troubled:

This is not the small talk of Hollywood parties, where most people boasted steadily of success and happiness. But it is the voice of postwar European existentialism, and of a spirit that regards the film director as an exemplary modern neurotic and artist, exploring angst, and sleeping with many of his actresses but feeling bad about it. Hollywood directors often behaved that way, but they found the grace to be cheerful.

Bergman took a break, time to observe the increasing fallout from bomb testing in our atmosphere, and came back for 1957, the year that altered his status forever and established the new world of art house movies.
The Seventh Seal
was derived from a play of Bergman's first performed on radio, and then in Malmö and Stockholm. It is set in the fourteenth century. A knight (Max von Sydow) has returned from the Crusades in disenchantment. He sees a land of madness, plague, intolerance, and savagery. Then the figure of Death (Bengt Ekerot) approaches him and they play chess for the knight's life—chess got as much of a boost from this film as it did from Fischer versus Spassky in Iceland in 1972. In the end, the knight wins a reprieve by his kindness to a family of traveling players (featuring the young Bibi Andersson).

The film is ninety-six minutes long and it cost about $150,000. It may have changed more careers than any film since
Citizen Kane
. It shared the Special Jury Prize at Cannes with Andrzej Wajda's
Kanal
, and played all over the world.
The Seventh Seal
pushed me to join the National Film Theatre in London to see a retrospective of Bergman's films. The theater was packed for that season. I was in awe of the film, so much so that I never quite asked myself whether I liked it. I know I like it a good deal less now than the second film Bergman released that year:
Wild Strawberrie
s, or
Smultronstället
—the hushed musicality of the Swedish language was dawning on us.

Bergman had written the script for
Wild Strawberries
in the Karolinska Hospital. It concerns Isak Borg, aged seventy-eight, a widower and a bacteriologist who is to receive an honorary degree from Lund University. He drives there with his daughter-in-law (Ingrid Thulin) and along the way he dreams or has flashbacks that examine his life and a lost love. She is played by Bibi Andersson, who also appears as a carefree modern girl Borg picks up on the road. Like
The Seventh Seal
,
Wild Strawberries
was shot by Gunnar Fischer, Bergman's genius before Sven Nykvist came along. (Nykvist's first Bergman film was
The Virgin Spring
, in 1960.)

In the role of Borg, Bergman cast Victor Sjöström, who was then Borg's age and in declining health. Sjöström was the father figure of Swedish cinema and he had been an important mentor to Bergman. One day in the 1940s, Sjöström had walked onto a Bergman set, grabbed him, and said, be simpler, film from the front so actors relax, don't be unpleasant with everyone.

Wild Strawberries
is a tale of futility and failure at last recognizing its own happiness or resignation. It has many symbols in a harsh, etched look that suggests some substance more enduring than film will ever be. It also has a passion for fleeting summer light that is so vital in Swedish film—few nations depend on the light as much or feel such meaning in it. If only the light were more elusive in California; we might treasure it more.

They were set to shoot the final scene of
Wild Strawberrie
s, where Borg's young love leads the old man to a hillside and he sees his parents in the distance waving to him. Bergman wanted to shoot at five because of the light, but Sjöström preferred to stop at 4:30. He was disagreeable sometimes and he needed his whisky. “Are we going to take those damned scenes?” he asked his director.

That is what filming can be like: saving a moment in time and the light. And you can see it.

Wild Strawberries
won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival. It was nominated for an Oscar for Best Screenplay—but it lost, to
Pillow Talk
.

Sjöström died in 1960; Bergman not until 2007. He continued to lead what seemed like a quiet life, with constant inner turmoil, going from one lover to another and one nervous breakdown to the next. In the 1970s he had embarrassing trouble with the Swedish authorities over income tax fraud. It passed; he had brought so much money into the country. He dabbled in offers from Hollywood: he shot
The Touch
(1971) in English (with Elliott Gould) and he made
The Serpent's Egg
(1977) in Germany. But long before the end he was living on the island of Fårö, working steadily in Sweden.
The Seventh Seal
and
Wild Strawberries
may not be his best films, even if they are the turning point in his career. For the best, you can pick from
Persona
(1966),
Cries and Whispers
(1972), and
Fanny and Alexander
(1982). Other people will mount claims for
The Silence
(1963),
Through a Glass Darkly
(1961), or
Scenes from a Marriage
(1973). But you should not forget
Faithless
(2000), which he only wrote and which another of his actresses and lovers, Liv Ullmann, directed.
Faithless
is about Bergman—what would you expect? He is the first director in the world who takes it for granted that all the work is about him, his way of seeing and feeling. But
Faithless
is filled with regret over the damage he knows he has done to real people while creating great fictions.

In Hollywood in 1959 it was still possible to look on the bright side.
Pillow Talk
, a screen romance between Doris Day and Rock Hudson, had not been produced to make an ironic point with
Wild Strawberries
. Rather, it had been aimed at rentals of $7.5 million, the sum it reached. In 1959 the Hollywood major studios released 189 pictures. Weekly attendance fell to 32 million, and box office revenue was below $1 billion for the year, having been steadily over that amount from 1942 to 1957. And yet it was the year of
Ben-Hur
and
Pillow Talk
,
On the Beach
and
North by Northwest
,
Porgy and Bess
and Disney's
Sleeping Beauty
.

Of those,
On the Beach
was the only picture that addressed the real possibilities of 1959. Produced and directed by the earnest Stanley Kramer, it was a story about nuclear Armageddon in which Gregory Peck, Fred Astaire, Ava Gardner, and others faced the end of the world. The film was solemn and woeful, and in its views of a sunlit but empty San Francisco it was piercing enough. It was full of dire warning, presented as entertainment (it had rentals of nearly $5 million), and it left audiences speechless and depressed, if only because they felt so powerless.

Of those 1959 films, the madcap one has survived best:
North by Northwest
, which is as funny and exhilarating as ever. People said it was a Hitchcock comedy-thriller, with Cary Grant playing himself—all true. But its daring bears closer inspection. It is a ridiculous story: witness the crop-dusting aircraft working semidesert “fields,” or the way in which the moment when the plot secret is spelled out is flagrantly smothered by the sound of an aircraft engine. Between the melancholy of
Vertigo
and the shock of
Psycho
, Hitch felt the place for a film that said aren't movies ridiculous, especially when you're having fun?
North by Northwest
is a parody of a suspense thriller. It's camp, before that word was in common use.