Ingmar Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night (Sommarnatten leende) first hit American cinemas in 1957. The film is a little like Bergman for people who don’t like Bergman. Coming in a decade or so after the heyday of screwball comedies in Hollywood, Summer Night plays like one just back from its first year of college – the same little film bursting with grandiose ideas but never quite offering any substantial answers.
Like all screwball comedies, Summer Night has a guy, lawyer Frederik Egerman, and a girl, the actress and lost love, Desiree. The guy and the girl can’t be together despite mutual affection. Wackiness ensues. Adding to the films mismatched couples are Egerman’s young, wife, who is in love with his just back from seminary son. Desiree is having an affair with a married man, whose wife wants him back. A lesser film would lose track of all these story lines, but Bergman weaves these storylines plus that of a sultry maid together in a seamless mix.
Bergman will probably forever be associated with his darker fare, but Summer Night’s success provided the weight for his iconic and often imitated glance into the existential condition – The Seventh Seal. In his review in The New York Times, Bosley Crowther wrote of the film: “Who would have thought august Sweden would be sending us a film comedy as witty and cheerfully candid about the complexities of love as any recent French essay on l’amour?” Fifty years later, the shock of such a film coming out a Sweden may have worn off, but the film’s appeal hasn’t.
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