Waiting Women (Ingmar Bergman, 1952)

Cast: Anita Björk, Eva Dahlbeck, Maj-Britt Nilsson, Birger Malmsten, Gunnar Björstrand, Karl-Arne Holmsten, Jarl Kulle, Aino Taube, Håkan Westergren, Gerd Andersson, Björn Bjelfvenstarm. Screenplay: Ingmar Bergman, Gun Grut. Cinematography: Gunnar Fischer. Production design: Nils Svenwall. Film editing: Oscar Rosander. Music: Erik Nordgren. 

Ingmar Bergman's Waiting Women is also known by its slightly racier American title, Secrets of Women. Both titles are apt. Four women are waiting at the summer home of the Lobelius family for their husbands to arrive. Each is married to one of the four Lobelius brothers, who run the family business. When Annette (Aino Taube) complains about the lack of intimacy in her marriage to Paul (Håkan Westergren), the other three respond with stories about their marriages. Rakel (Anita Björk) tells how her confession to an affair with an old flame caused her husband, Eugen (Karl-Arne Holmsten), to threaten suicide. Marta (Maj-Britt Nilsson) tells of her affair with the youngest of the Lobelius brothers, Martin (Birger Malmsten), who wanted to break free from the family business and become an artist in Paris. Marta discovered that she was pregnant with Martin's child, but when she went to tell him, his brothers had just arrived to tell him that their father has died and he's needed back home to run the company. She decided to have the baby on her own, but Martin returned to marry her. The oldest, Karin (Eva Dahlbeck), tells of attending a party with her husband, Fredrik (Gunnar Björnstrand), who scolded her on the way home afterward for wearing a dress that he thinks is too décolleté. We have already seen how pompous Fredrik can be in the scene in which the brothers try to persuade Martin to give up la vie bohème and join the business, but Fredrik loosens up a lot when he and Karin are trapped overnight in an elevator. It's one of Bergman's best early films, with his usual bittersweet comedy touch that he would perfect in Smiles of a Summer Night (1955), though it's decidedly pre-feminist in its outlook: Contemporary viewers may wonder why marriage seems to be the only object in view for these intelligent women.  

Brink of Life (Ingmar Bergman, 1958)

Ingrid Thulin and Bibi Andersson in Brink of Life

Cast: Eva Dahlbeck, Ingrid Thulin, Bibi Andersson, Barbro Hiort af Ornäs, Erland Josephson, Max von Sydow, Gunnar Sjöberg, Ann-Marie Gyllenspetz, Inga Landgré. Screenplay: Ingmar Bergman, Ulla Isaaksson, based on novels by Isaksson. Cinematography: Max Wilén. Production design: Bibi Lindström. Film editing: Carl-Olov Skeppstedt. 

For all the frankness of its subject matter, Ingmar Bergman's Brink of Life is as formulaic as a Hollywood movie of the 1950s. Three women are sharing a room in the obstetrics ward of a hospital. One of them, Cecilia (Ingrid Thulin), has miscarried and is being treated for bleeding. Another, Stina (Eva Dahlbeck), is in almost the opposite condition: She has gone well past term in her pregnancy and is there hoping that labor will be induced if it doesn't occur right away. The third, Hjördis (Bibi Andersson), is only in her third month, but she has experienced some bleeding -- perhaps, we learn, because she's unwed and doesn't want the baby, so she's been trying to cause a spontaneous abortion. Cecilia is in the throes of depression, blaming herself for the miscarriage because neither she nor her cold, priggish husband, Anders (Erland Josephson), was entirely certain that they wanted a child. Again, Stina is the precise opposite: She's rapturous about having a baby, and so is her husband, Harry (Max von Sydow). Between these polarities, Hjördis is fighting with the social worker who is trying to advise her on how she can live after the baby arrives. The best advice is, of course, to go home to her parents, but since she left precisely because she doesn't get along with her mother, she strongly rejects the idea of facing the disapproval she expects to encounter from her. It's all a setup for the kind of plot resolutions you might expect: Cecilia grows stronger and chooses to face up to her disintegrating marriage and a childless future. Stina loses the baby in a prolonged and difficult labor. And Hjördis discovers that maybe her mother isn't so bad after all. There's a feeling of anticlimax about these eventualities. That the film works at all is the product of the performances of the three actresses, along with Bergman's steadily unsentimental direction, which makes the predictability of the story more tolerable than it might be in a Hollywood tearjerker. Still, I can't help feeling that the stories of what happens to Cecilia, Stina, and Hjördis after the film ends would make a more interesting movie.   

All These Women (Ingmar Bergman, 1964)

Jarl Kulle in All These Women

Cornelius: Jarl Kulle
Humlan (Bumblebee): Bibi Andersson
Isolde: Harriet Andersson
Adelaide: Eva Dahlbeck
Madame Tussaud: Karin Kavli
Traviata: Gertrud Fridh
Cecilia: Mona Malm
Beatrica: Barbro Hiort af Ornäs
Jillker: Allan Edwall
Tristan: Georg Funkquist
The Young Man: Carl Billquist

Director: Ingmar Bergman
Screenplay: Erland Josephson, Ingmar Bergman
Cinematography: Sven Nykvist
Production design: P.A. Lundgren
Film editing: Ulla Ryghe

Roger Ebert called Ingmar Bergman's All These Women "the worst film he has ever made," and I don't think it's because the butt of so many of the jokes in the movie was a critic. It's an arch, highly stylized comedy, supposedly inspired by Federico Fellini's 8 1/2 (1963), though apart from the zings at critics and the gathering together of the various women in an artist's life, there's not much that Bergman's film has in common with Fellini's. Bergman's artist, a cellist named Felix, has just died, and the film opens at his funeral through which a number of his "widows" parade to view the corpse. The funeral is presided over by Cornelius, Felix's supposed biographer, actually a music critic who was trying to persuade Felix to perform one of his compositions: "A Fish's Dream, Abstraction #4." The film flashes back to the days before Felix's death when Cornelius arrived at the cellist's estate and encountered his wife, Adelaide; his mistress, called "Bumblebee"; and several other women who had various connections, presumably sexual, to Felix. What follows is much running about, some slapstick, some misfired attempts by Cornelius to bed Bumblebee while trying to gather information about Felix's private life, and much tiresome and unfunny ado set to music cues ranging from Bach to "Yes, We Have No Bananas." All These Women was Bergman's first film in color, but the print shown on Turner Classic Movies is sadly faded, with captions that are hard to read. I also sampled the print on the Criterion Channel; it's better, but still rather washed-out looking. The cinematographer, Sven Nykvist, is a celebrated master, so the color flaws may be that of the aging Eastmancolor negative. Only the fact that the film is a lesser work of the director who gave us The Seventh Seal (1957), Persona (1966), and Fanny and Alexander (1982) really argues for restoring it, however.

A Lesson in Love (Ingmar Bergman, 1954)

Eva Dahlbeck and Gunnar Björnstrand in A Lesson in Love

Marianne Erneman: Eva Dahlbeck
David Erneman: Gunnar Björnstrand
Susanne Verin: Yvonne Lombard
Nix Erneman: Harriet Andersson
Carl-Adam: Åke Grönberg
Prof. Henrik Erneman: Olof Winnerstrand
Svea Erneman: Renée Björling
Pelle: Göran Lundquist

Director: Ingmar Bergman
Screenplay: Ingmar Bergman
Cinematography: Martin Bodin

In A Lesson in Love, Ingmar Bergman seems to be trying to turn Eva Dahlbeck into Carole Lombard. She certainly has Lombard's blond glamour, and she makes a surprising go at knockabout comedy. But where Lombard had the light touch of a Howard Hawks or an Ernst Lubitsch to guide her in her best work, Dahlbeck is in the hands of Bergman, whose touch no one has ever called light. A year later, the Bergman-Dahlbeck collaboration would make a better impression with Smiles of a Summer Night, but A Lesson in Love sometimes verges on smirkiness in its treatment of the marriage of Marianne and David Erneman. They are on the verge of divorce and she is about to marry her old flame Carl-Adam, a sculptor for whom she once posed. David is a gynecologist who has had a series of flings with other women, including Susanne, with whom he is trying to break up. But Marianne has not exactly been faithful to their vows either. Meanwhile, we also get to know their children, Nix and her bratty little brother, Pelle, and David's parents, who in sharp contrast to Marianne and David are celebrating 50 years of marriage. While Bergman sharply delineates all of these characters -- especially 15-year-old Nix, who hates being a girl so much that she asks her father if he can perform sex-change operations -- the semi-farcical situation he puts them has a kind of aimless quality to it. I appreciated Harriet performance as Nix the more for having seen her as the dying Agnes in Bergman's Cries and Whispers (1972) the night before, but in this film her role makes no clear thematic sense.