The Serpent’s Egg

One rainy night in Weimar Berlin, Jewish American circus performer Abel Rosenberg (David Carradine) discovers that his brother Max, his trapeze-act partner, has killed himself. What follows is one of Bergman’s darkest and most fearful visions, as the drowned-in-drink Abel and Max’s ex-wife, cabaret singer Manuela (Liv Ullmann), feel increasingly unwelcome in a menacing and destitute city, eyed by the police as well as a scientist with diabolical intentions. The director’s sole big-budget Hollywood production, for which he created a surreal and atmospheric Berlin on a Munich soundstage, The Serpent’s Egg conjures a Kafkaesque nightmare about the decaying society that gave rise to the horrors of Nazism.

United States
1977
119 minutes
1.66:1
English, German

Available In

Collector's Set

Ingmar Bergman’s Cinema

Blu-ray Box Set

30 Discs

$239.96

Cast & Credits

Cast

Liv Ullmann: Manuela Rosenberg
David Carradine: Abel Rosenberg
Gert Fröbe: Inspector Bauer
Heinz Bennent: Hans Vergerus
Fritz Strassner: Dr. Soltermann
Hans Quest: Dr. Silbermann
Edith Heerdegen: Mrs. Holle
James Whitmore: The priest
Glynn Turman: Monroe

Credits

Director: Ingmar Bergman
Producer: Dino De Laurentiis
Music: Rolf A. Wilhelm
Cinematographer: Sven Nykvist
Editor: Jutta Hering
Production design: Rolf Zehetbauer
Art direction: Werner Achmann
Art direction: Friedrich Thaler
Costume design: Charlotte Flemming
Assistant director: Wieland Liebske
Sound: Karsten Ullrich

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Explore

Ingmar Bergman

Director

The Swedish auteur began his artistic career in the theater but eventually navigated toward film—"the great adventure," as he called it—initially as a screenwriter and then as a director. Simply put, in the fifties and sixties, the name Ingmar Bergman was synonymous with European art cinema. Yet his incredible run of successes in that era—including The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, and The Virgin Spring, haunting black-and-white elegies on the nature of God and death—merely paved the way for a long and continuously dazzling career that would take him from the daring “Silence of God” trilogy (Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light, The Silence) to the existential terrors of Cries and Whispers to the family epic Fanny and Alexander, with which he “retired” from the cinema. Bergman died in July 2007, leaving behind one of the richest bodies of work in the history of cinema.