Crisis and A Ship to India: Bergman in the Making

Crisis arose when Svensk managing director Carl Anders Dymling approached the young writer with the text of a Danish play by Leck Fischer called Moderdyret (The Maternal Instinct). The first step, Bergman recalled, was to “wring a good script from this grandiose drivel.” After two or three rewrites, he found himself in a very hot studio, with a cinematographer who didn’t know the equipment, a “walking catastrophe” of a sound technician, and a stage actress (Dagny Lind) who was “paralyzed with fright” in front of a movie camera. The early results were not promising. After seeing the first three weeks of dailies, Dymling told Bergman to start over, and sent in as adviser the great Victor Sjöström (whose classic film The Phantom Carriage inspired Bergman’s directorial ambitions); he became a mentor to Bergman and a decade later starred as the stern and haunted Isak Borg in Wild Strawberries. Sjöström urged Bergman to be simpler—to photograph the actors from the front, for example. Still, frustrations mounted. Rain ruined a three-week location shoot in Hedemora. Caught up in studio politics, Bergman raged on set, and his decision to continue filming the night a grip fell from some scaffolding and was hospitalized did not endear him to the crew. 

Yet the film is confident and, at times, ingenious. As the camera pans over a riverbank, a narrator describes a town where the day’s major event is the arrival of the bus. The church bell tolls insistently, and a plump woman in black descends. This is Jenny (Marianne Löfgren), come to collect her eighteen-year-old daughter, Nelly (Inga Landgré), raised in the country by Ingeborg (Lind). “Let the play begin,” the narrator says. “Let’s raise the curtain.” And as Ingeborg’s maid pulls up the window shade, the camera draws us in. In no time at all, Jenny’s younger lover, Jack, arrives, causing a scandal and altering the course of Nelly’s fate.  

There is one sequence in Crisis that Bergman later defended, about “two hundred feet” of film shot in Jenny’s beauty parlor at night: perhaps it begins with the moment when Jenny dissolves into view over the mannequin heads, or perhaps it’s from when she gazes, hands clasped under her chin, into the mirror. “Under this face,” she says, “my God!” Jenny’s monologue is interrupted by gunshots. She rushes outside and screams offscreen, while the camera remains inside the shop. On the street, a newspaper already covers a fallen body, and sirens wail, a “Theater” sign blinking on and off. The moment is clearly indebted to French poetic realism, and one almost wishes Bergman had had the courage to make it the film’s last scene. But conventions demanded that Nelly return to the sleepy country town, where the filmmaker gives her story an ending that resembles the requirements of happiness but is, unmistakably, crushing. 

Bergman claimed that after Crisis opened, he received a call from producer Lorens Marmstedt: “Dear Ingmar. That was an awful film! Hard to imagine anything worse! I suppose your phone is ringing off the hook with offers.” In fact, Marmstedt himself put the young director on another 1946 project, It Rains on Our Love, teaching him how to watch dailies—to see what he had made, not what he wished he had. Next, Marmstedt approached him with a play by Finnish-Swedish author Martin Söderhjelm.