Bergman 2: A Ship to India (1947)

I'm not sure what Nicholas Parsons was doing in 1947, but Bergman was making his third film as director, A Ship to India (his second, It Rains on Our Love, isn't in the Criterion set). Another splendid restoration (though the sound occasionally hasn't borne up so well), this film bears the traces of French poetic realism even more than Crisis. (There are definite hints of Vigo's L'Atalante throughout.) This film is also based on a play, but Bergman claims in Images that there are "not many words left" from the original in his screenplay. There are a couple of very striking sequences, particularly the extraordinary passage involving faces, long shots of characters clambering over ships, bubbles, and one splendid silhouette, in which the tyrannical (and tormented) Captain Blom (Holger Löwenadler) both tries to kill his son and realises that his eyesight is failing for good. (Quite which takes precedence is ambiguous.) Once again it's clear how early Bergman's basic understanding of the kinds of actors he wanted - both in terms of physical types and in their performances - was established. It's easy to imagine Blom played by Max von Sydow, for example (though he would have been much too young at this point, of course). Another thing that struck me watching this, as stupid as it might sound, is what a terrific language for film Swedish is. Like Russian, it seems to have a perfect mix of slightly exaggerated (to English ears!) musicality and emphatically corporeal consonants to make it beautiful but also chewily earthy, to heighten everything that is said - but only so far. Finally, I wonder if the biographical references start at the very beginning with Bergman. We know about his childhood fondness for puppet theatres, and Jack in Crisis (a character, as I understand it, added by Bergman) makes reference to puppetry on more than one occasion. Here we get an actual puppet theatre - and doesn't that young fellow in a beret watching it look familiar? (See the above image, bottom right.)