Before Bergman

Before Bergman.

For a wide eyed film freak from the colonies, London in the sixties was like visiting 

Mars.  Battleship Potemkin got West End

Louis Brooks : Canary Murder Case - not Swedish

Theatrical seasons, though they did pull Ivan the Terrible  from a Sunday double feature with Three Faces of Eve (embarrassment in the booking office I suspect) and the suburban Repertory Cinemas occasionally filled their double features with items like Fedor Ozep’s 1934 Amok or Welles’ Othello.

I however discovered that the advantages weren’t all one way. The first thing I faced when I went to the London Times Sixty Years of Cinema exhibition at the Round House was a display of “lost” movies, featuring Louise Brooks in Malcom St. Clair’s (awful) The Canary Murder Case which I’d seen on Australian TV a few months before.

The late arrival of down under TV kept battered old theatrical prints running in the suburbs and the new medium was eventually deluged with the Hollywood back catalogues, meaning that the determined viewer had a better grip on the American sound film than Europeans - not that I noticed anyone here taking advantage of this bounty.

The night I landed in London, the then legendary Hampstead Everyman was in the second week of a thirteen (!) week season of the work of Ingmar Bergman. I piled into the Northern line for the last showing  of Törst -  and for the succeeding offerings. It took about four for me to realise how awful the early Bergman was.

That however left their first offering, which had finished while I was still on the water, 1947's  Skepp till India land /A Ship Bound for India / Frustration. During the subsequent fifty years I was vaguely aware that this one still eluded me - until last week when a sale priced copy of Madman’s DVD came my way.

Actually Bergman’s third film as director, it is already characteristically steeped in gloom. Heavy father Captain Holger Löwenadler (in the Sjöberg Barabas) has approaching blindness. He’s convinced son Birger Malmsten that the boy’s deformed by a humped back. The crew of the salvage ship they work dread the wreck they are resurrecting, full of mud & sea shells, will turn over. “She will pull us down.” Mum Anna Lindahl just waits for the day when her husband’s incapacity will mean they have to move to a cottage on shore and fallen woman Gertrud Fridh faces a return to her life of degradation.

Skepp till India land: Gertrud Fridh, Birger Malmsten

The film opens wordlessly with sailor Malmsten coming ashore (dock cranes against the sky) after seven years and mistaking a girl we never see again for Fridh, who it turns out has become an ailing, depressed recluse in the waterfront apartment of  the two ominous women listening at the key hole to the pair’s meeting.

Flashback takes us to Captain Löwenadler interfering with his son’s dream to become a real sailor traveling the world, by insisting he work on their salvage job on the day he should go for his passport.   

The most filmic passage has Löwenadler pass through the busy carnival (where Bergman does a walk on) to the seedy music hall with caricatures on the wall. He becomes involved in a brawl and shelters in singer Fridh’s dressing room before the police arrive. He then takes the girl to the secret flat that his wife has never seen, with souvenirs of his travels, and brings her back to the salvage boat, shifting Malmsten out of the mate’s cabin. (“You and your hump can go sleep with the crew”) Passive mum Lindahl has been through this before.

However after some antagonism (of course) the young people become an item and go off in the row boat to inspect an abandoned windmill. Capt. Löwenadler predictably takes a dim view of this and secludes himself, so the crew elect Malmsten to take over, with his dad coming out and slapping both his cheeks (the duellist’s challenge - get it!) only to be hit back for the first time. With the younger man now in charge, he has to substitute for their regular diver and Löwenadler is stroking his straight razor. He starts working the pump seen as shadow.

Manager Ake Fridell forbids the young suitor backstage access in the theatre Fridh has gone back to and maliciously describes her idea of a secure relationship with a rich man, which we have already heard - effective short scene very characteristic of Bergman. Malmsten sets out to sea.

Back in the present we have a confrontation which doesn’t fit with the grim build up.

Malmsten gives the only plausible performance, maturing in his time at sea which has reduced his (slight) hump to round shoulders. No one else makes any impact, with Fridh an unlikely vamp. The staging is filmic, with well chosen angles and the camera passing through the walls of elaborately built settings.  Photography by the exceptional Goran Strinberg (distantly related to the dramatist) is impressive but, like the Bergman regulars in support, was seen to better advantage in the contemporary films of Alf Sjöberg.

This is a genuinely bad film. The handling is assured but the dialogue still seems written and played for stage performance - Malmsten’s eager description of  a ship arriving at Africa or Löwenadler doing the monologue about listening to the sea in the shell for hours. The seafaring setting never really rings true. They don’t run to underwater footage. None of it has any real conviction.

We know that it is available because Ingmar Bergman became the pin up boy of the festival circuit and his name still has clout. This raises the interesting question of what sort of a film industry sustained such an unlikely talent through fifteen dodgy movies till he hit form with Sommarnattens leende / Smiles of a Summer Night in 1955. Most English language viewers know zip about the Swedish films between the silent work of Sjöstrom/Seastrom and Stiller (if they know those) and Ingmar Bergman. Even Gustav Molander, who appears to be the heavy hitter of this period, is rarely shown.

Curious I watched a couple of  these unknown titles, a ridiculously small but still revealing sample.

Schamyl Bauman’s Swing it magistern / Swing It Teacher lifts the corner of the curtain on Swedish film making in 1940 during a peak for their industry where they did forty films a year.

In this one, at Viran Rydkvist’s Comprehensive (co-ed) private school, young  Åke Johansson is handing round sticks of chalk to chew, so the kids voices won’t impress in the auditions that day. However the new music teacher proves to be cool Adolf Jahr, with a silly thin moustache, qualified Cathedral organist who can’t find a Cathedral. He fields the chalk thrown at him and runs auditions which sort out the vocal talents of the class. Of course, sixteen year old Alice “Babs” Nilson’s rendition of the title song, which he joins on piano, steals the show.

Swing it magistern  Adolf Jahr,“Babs” Nilson

However severe school owner Rydkvist doesn’t approve and, after a rendition for the board, Jahr has to promise not to do any more of that.

Meanwhile Johansson is organising the School’s Jatterostfest concert, where Babs will of course be the star turn, which is not surprising when she’s up against lady gym teacher Solveig Hedengran making those girls in baggy shorts do ill coordinated routines and head teacher Quar Hagman’s magic tricks.

Turns out that Babs is supplementing mum’s contributions to her school fees by singing at the local Shanghai Palais (one tracking shot around the small dance floor) where Jahr is also moonlighting. The so talented teen age girl, that he encourages, forms a crush on him despite his interest in Hedengran.

One of the pupils rats them out and Rydkvist visits the Palais and puts a stop to all that, forbidding the girl’s appearance at the school show. Enterprising Johansson gets her trapped in the boiler room for the performance but she escapes and is, of course, a hit.

Despite her wholesome (among the film's strengths is that the leads are so ordinary) image Miss Nilson's immense popularity outraged sections of her community, one cleric calling her "the foot and mouth disease of our culture."

The piece has some naive energy, despite going on too long and being short on imagination. The handling is better than competent but it disappoints in showing virtually nothing of WW2 Sweden. Outside the studio is represented a bit of playground and some ordinary back projection of streets and cars.

It’s comparable to the later US Donald O’Connor-Jane Powell teenager musicals but also not all that far away from the grim school in Hets/Frenzy, despite all the jollity. A sequel Magistrarna på sommarlov (1942) reunited Babs and Rydkvist.

It’s up for consideration because  Sandrews made an excellent quality DVD with good English titles.

Munkbrogreven / The Count of the Old Town, directed by Edvin Adolphson with some uncredited help from Sigurd Wallén, dates from 1935. This one survives because it’s Ingrid Bergman’s first speaking part. It turns out to be an unsophisticated piece where she gets attention mainly as a good looking girl (with poor posture) supporting  the movie’s top billed character grotesques.

The opening is the most filmic passage with bell chimes over wide shots of Stockholm’s old town introducing cloth cap robbers knocking over a jewellery store and fleeing the beat copper. The plot then develops to include the comic newspaper seller, suitor to the fish shop lady, and his lay-about friends whose day starts with contraband beer. Shadows falling on the cobbles introduce a bumbling detective duo.  

 

The newcomer, played by director Adolphson, shelters from the pair in the modest City Hotel, where he claims to be a resident in the room occupied by young Ingrid in her slip.

Romance develops between the two, running to him helping her to beat carpets on the line in the street while he hides the beer the comics don’t want portly policeman Weyler Hildebrand to find. The community like the guy, not least because he has a license to buy Swedish vodka which he shares round. They worry that he may be the jewel robber.

The fish shop lady’s personal advert brings a hand kissing aristocrat who offers to help her with her investments now that the robberies have extended to the bank, while the false bearded blind man prowls the streets at night from his room where the light still burns.

Throw in a band which sets up in the street for the number which Ingrid reprises.

People turn out to not be what they seem and there is a quite lavish horse carriage multiple wedding where all the nice characters’ fortunes turn out for the best.

Passable entertainment, this is a curiosity. Removed from it’s original time and place the film is simple minded and routine with some resemblance to the courtyard movies being made in then contemporary France, like  Pabst’s Du haut en bas or Renoir’s Crime de M. Lange.  It would seem that it represents the more ambitious pre-Alf Sjöberg Swedish production. The film making is competent but ordinary with those involved sometimes having three figure filmographies running from  Sjöstrom silents to Ingmar Bergman. The designer did Scott of the Antarctic.

There is some kind of comment in the scene of one of the colourful oldies selling used clothing in what appears to be a doss house and on the place of liquor in a country which retained prohibition until the 1970s. Incidentally after that was lifted, all the winos I saw sleeping it off in doorways were in their twenties, which is revealing.

A French series of  Swedish Bergman (Ingrid this time fortunately) disks fielded this one in a sharp slightly contrasty, slightly cropped version as Le Conte du point au moine.

The one thing the earlier films have in common is that there is nothing notably Swedish about them. No one dies in childbirth. No one is crushed by loss of their faith.  I'll wait till I've seen three figures more to offer a conclusion.

 

Barrie Pattison 2020