Bergman 5: To Joy (1950)

By this point it's possible, I think, to feel Bergman becoming more accomplished with each film - which of course doesn't mean that each one is necessarily "better" or more satisfactory overall. But this is certainly a very strong piece of work, even if opening with a man being told of his wife's death in the middle of rehearsing the Ode to Joy is a little on the nose. The structure is interesting, if not fully taken advantage of - the film slides without warning at one point rather disorientatingly but effectively from an emotional high point to the depths of anguish (the return, as was probably predictable, of another of Bergman's accounts of how miserable it is to be involved with two women at once); at another we move, briefly but interestingly, into another character's consciousness. The performances are consistently strong and have interesting connections with other Bergman films - Stig Olin, memorable as Jack in Crisis, is our protagonist here; Victor Sjostrom gives us a preview of the grumpy but sensitive figure he will incarnate so triumphantly a few years later in Wild Strawberries; and Maj-Britt Nilsson was be important to Bergman over the next few years. (The windmill from A Ship to India also reappears here.)

The new ingredient the film adds to the familiar dynamic of the couple who cannot stay together or apart is Stig Eriksson's (Olin) struggle to accept his averageness, dramatised rather obviously but not uneffectively by making him and Nilsson members of an orchestra. (Admirable care is taken to get the music to match the images of the musicians, seating them amongst a real orchestra and taking care with the editing and synchronisation.) Though the plots are very different, a double bill of this and another early work consisting of an orchestrally-centred melodrama, namely Douglas Sirk's (well, Detlef Sierck's) Schlußakkord (1936) might be informative. 

And the cameo-spotting continues - see the image above.