The Serpent's Egg (1977)
Directed by Ingmar Bergman

Film Review

The late 1970s was a difficult period for Ingmar Bergman.  Accused of tax evasion by the Swedish authorities, the director went into exile in West Germany, where he continued directing and writing screenplays for cinema.   It was during this period that Bergman made what is widely accepted as his weakest film, The Serpent's Egg, a Kafka-esque thriller set during the turbulent German autumn of 1923, in the days leading up to Hitler's failed putsch.  It was Bergman's second English language film - after The Touch (1971).

The main reason for the film's failure was the incompatibility of styles of director Ingmar Bergman and producer Dino de Laurentiis.  Whereas Bergman's expertise was with very focussed films involving a small number of inward-looking characters in a constrained setting, what De Laurentiis had in mind was the Hollywood blockbuster vision, with spectacular sets, a sprawling narrative and larger-than-life characters.  Given the magnitude of the difference in their approaches, it's surprising that The Serpent's Egg isn't a lot worse than it is.  Bergman regarded the film as one of his biggest disappointments, and it certainly does not compare favourably with most of his other work.

The Serpent's Egg is not classic Bergman, but it is a strangely compelling film, in spite of its faults.  The rambling nature and apparent lack of logic in the storyline are irritating at first, but out of this chaos there gradually emerges some kind of coherence, and the film ends on a note of brilliance.   It's a pity that the performances are almost universally bad (thanks largely some very shoddy dialogue) - Bergman enthusiasts will be appalled to see what he does with Liv Ullmann in this film - but, strangely, the hammed-up acting seems in keeping with the sinister Grand Guignol feel of the film.

What the film does convey, rather well, is a world that is slowly degenerating into an almost Medieval vision of Hell, as adverse economic and political circumstances take their toll.  As the pillars of civilisation begin to crumble, as the veils of civilisation are stripped away, human nature is exposed as something weak and ugly.  In contrast to all of Bergman's other films, where an individual or small group of individuals are tormented by some terrible crisis, here the whole world seems to be caught in the maelstrom, and notions of normality and morality become almost irrelevant.

The world that Bergman shows us is very plausibly the world that made Hitler's rise to power, World War II and the Holocaust inevitable.  A country with mass unemployment, crippling war reparations and a weak government of old men with no vision - the perfect incubator for the most venomous serpent the world has known.   What Friedrich Nietzsche foresaw in his 1880s work Thus Spoke Zarathustra became horrible reality in Germany of the 1930s.   Despite its many failings, the film does get the historical perspective more or less right, and it leaves us with a chilling thought - if the world drives one country to the brink of anarchy, then the world should be ready for the consequences.

Film Synopsis

In November 1923, American Jew Abel Rosenberg finds himself in Berlin.  He is alone, unemployed, and finding it hard to keep his grip on reality, in a country that is heading for political and economic meltdown.  He was a famous trapeze artist, but now his partner Max is dead, driven to suicide.  Abel hooks up with Max's wife, Manuela, a prostitute and cabaret performer, but then finds himself suspected of perpetrating a series of bizarre killings.  Can there be any connection with Max's death...?