Own the rights?
10 out of 10 people found the following review useful: Solid, Unspectacular from the Swedish Master, 17 February 2006 Author: thenewbohemian from Beijing
*** This review may contain spoilers ***
Though this film only hints at the psychological explorations Bergman will make into his future characters, it does, in some ways, predict the care and thoroughness to come in future masterpieces like "Wild Strawberries" and "The Seventh Seal". The themes of human desire for change, lost innocence, intense longing, and other existential themes are apparent at the surface, but do not reach the intense depths with which we can analyze the main characters from the films I just mentioned.I found the character Jack, Jenny's boyfriend/lover to be the most interesting and think he is worthy of a more detailed analysis. Though we later learn that his words are completely contrived (he says the same thing to all women) we see that he has a talent of making women sympathize with him, and he possesses a special ability to say what women want to hear, thus revealing his unique understanding of the female psyche. He is something of a broke down Don Juan, if you will, but he is also the most deeply passionate and complex character in the film. Perhaps it would be easy to write his character off as a wolf who preys on women, but I think he reveals more about human desire and an intense longing for life that plays out in his lust for women and his joy in wooing them. Jack does not know where to direct his passions, and the pure, young and innocent Nelly is simply one of his targets in his misappropriated releases. Despite his selfishness and apparent callousness, he is eventually unveiled as a horribly tragic and lost figure, a man incapable of reconciling his passions with reality.If you have not seen this film, there is no reason to enthusiastically run out and buy or rent a copy, but the simple fact that this is his directorial debut should hold enough curiosity for any Ingmar Bergman fan, or burgeoning fan, one of European cinema's great masters.
13 out of 16 people found the following review useful: A wispy breeze hints at an impending storm, 15 April 2003 Author: ian_harris from London, England
Bergman's adaptation of Leck Fischer's play behaves like a stage play that has been slightly adapted for the screen. It is essentially a chamber melodrama and it makes little use of the cinema's expanded scope. The film is watchable and the cast is competent. Almost everything about it is competent. It was Bergman's first go at directing a film. He was 27/28 years old at the time.Bergman is clearly influenced by Ibsen - I say "is", because the old master (nearly 85 years old now) is still at it on the stage - I have the privilege to hold tickets to see his adaptation of Ibsen's Ghosts in London May 2003 - can't wait. Kris is clearly influenced by Ibsen, but while the piece has borrowed Ibsen's mastery of structure and development, Kris lacks depth. If Ibsen is grand opera, Kris is operetta. Bergman had not yet acquired the skill to turn a minor play into a major film.There is the odd hint of greatness to come, in particular the railway scene between Jack and Ingeborg. There is also the odd interesting camera angle. But some of the cutting is amateurish and the music is ghastly.If the weatherman tells you that there is going to be a tremendous storm, you do not need to be a genius to recognise that the wispy breeze is a prelude to that storm. In the absence of that weather forecast, you could be forgiven for not recognising the breeze as an early hint at the big one. So it is with this film. Because we know it is Bergman, we see hints of greatness to come. Otherwise this would seem like an (admittedly above average) ordinary 1940's film.Bergman aficionados will enjoy it, but it should be quite a way down the list for people who want to start discovering the greatness of Bergman's work.
12 out of 15 people found the following review useful: My brief review of the film, 20 September 2005 Author: sol- from Perth, Australia
For a directional debut, this is very solid stuff, not only skillfully directed but also set to a brilliant original music score. I would however identify one weakness with Bergman's directing here: it is very much tailored to the script, with dialogue or narration almost all the time, and this leads to it being too talkative, with limited breaks in which one can stop and admire the way that the story is being told. The film is in this sense very different to the style that Bergman would later adopt, and although perhaps somewhat weak, Bergman's skills do shine through. There are well-framed shots, an effective stream-of-consciousness sequence, great camera angles and excellent camera movement. The inclusion of some more non-dialogue bits possibly would have improved this film, but there is little else to complain about, with quite a good story behind the material too.
7 out of 8 people found the following review useful: Fabulous early Bergman melodrama with many pointers to later masterpieces.(possible spoilers), 25 July 2001 Author: Alice Liddel (-darragh@excite.com) from dublin, ireland
Like much of his pre-'Seventh Seal' early work, Bergman's 'Crisis' has been called a melodrama. One can see the attraction of the label - the largely cramped theatrical settings; the plot, with a prostitute coming to a sleepy provincial town for the daughter she abandoned 18 years earlier, taking her back to the big city and a young lover-coded-pimp; the squalls of over-emphatic music at key moments; the accumulation of narrative tension finding release in sexual violence and death; the contrast between the sophisticated, but corrupt ethics of the city, and the decent, but dull values of the country, coded in costumes and architectural space; the 'doomed', morally impotent young anti-hero.But if 'Crisis' is a melodrama, it belongs to the work in that genre by those great directors who, like Bergman, began their careers in the theatre, Max Ophuls and Douglas Sirk. Like them, Bergman takes a form dependent on moral certainties to create a world where such certainties have cased to exist. This is not to say Bergman has contempt for the genre he works in - like all great melodramatists, he gives vivid dramatic form to oppositions, for instance, the cramped, interior world of Ingeborg, and the fresh, location shooting in which we first find Nelly; or the young people's jazz intrusion of a fusty mayor's ball. He respects the melodrama's focus on women, their stifling in set social roles - prostitute, mother, spinster, lover, daughter, illegitimate child, ideal, whatever.But what Bergman cleverly does is milk the expectations of genre, only to totally confound them. When Jenny comes to abruptly collect a daughter she simply dumped on Ingeborg, followed by a young man clearly coded as a pimp, we imagine the sordid horrors into which Nelly will be flung, especially as she's seduced by Jack with drink, fine words and jazz. Her mother, dressed in black, and shamelessly free with her body as she takes a foot bath, all suggest a licentiousness into which the 'innocent' will be trapped. The huge elision between her leaving Ingeborg, and the latter's visit to the city, marked only by a letter of dubious provenance, contribute to the bad omens. And yet, as Ingeborg discovers, Nelly is quite respectably working in the beauty salon as her mother had promised; she has new clothes and friends. The young man is no pimp, but an aimless sponging egoist.This isn't mere leg-pulling on Bergman's part - it's a way of forcibly shaking us out of lazy assumptions. The supposed haven of the village is shown to be repressively conformist and culturally dead, while Nelly's aunt's house combines lassitude with penury. The location shooting that seems to express Nelly's authenticity become a Skakespearean stage, where Jack seduces here, and the prosaic Ulf beats him up, in a heavily stylised and brilliantly artificial masque.Bergman from the opening narration emphasises the fictiveness and theatricality of his story, where his marionettes are continually placed in transposed theatres: his framing, as with Ophuls and Sirk, is elaborately intrusive, capturing characters in boxes or behind bars; the sequence shot at the ball, the camera moving from the kids jiving to the old folks' pretentious horror is a masterpiece of concise visualising of themes, catching these two seemingly disparate groups in the one trap.The heavily contrived finale is not only introduced by a glaring narrative elision, but is soundtracked to the noise from an adjacent theatre. Add to this the dreams and anxious visions of Ingeborg, which, like the young hero's in 'Fanny and Alexander', seem to seep into the narrative itself, so that it is difficult to tell whether what we are watching is objectively happening within the narrative, or the subjective projection of a lonely woman's nightmares, and you have a structural ambiguity, with which Bergman not only transcends the limitations of traditional melodrama, but points forward to the impulses of his finer later work.
He Certainly Got Better, 29 October 2009 Author: Hitchcoc from United States
I guess it is forgivable for a first film to be maudlin, with cardboard characters and silly dialogue. This is the story of a young woman who decides to get out of town because there is no future there. She lives with her dying stepmother, her real mother leaving her behind for 18 years. She just kind of flits through things because she has pretty much been adored. She is impetuous. I haven't seen such a tear jerking woman as her loving stepmother, maybe Mrs. March in little women. She goes to be a hair stylist and gets hooked up with some bad ones, including a wolfish playboy. Meanwhile some big lunk with a silly name, Ulfe, carries a torch for her. In fairness, it has lots of very good shots and is pretty polished for a first film. It's just a bit dull and silly and very predictable.
Ingmar Bergman, making his directorial debut, presents a lovely story that begins light and grows darker, 11 September 2009 Author: J. Spurlin from United States
Ingeborg (Dagny Lind) is a small-town piano teacher who raises her foster daughter, Nelly (Inga Landgré), into young adulthood. When Nelly is eighteen, she is shocked by the arrival of Jenny, her mother, whom she calls "Auntie." Jenny wants to take her to the big city and teach her to be a beautician in her salon. This is devastating news for Ingeborg, who is ill and does not expect to live long. Ulf, the stolid 30ish man in love with Nelly, begs her to stay; but she is not in love with him, considering him much too old. Instead, she is attracted to Jack, a new arrival in town. She doesn't guess that this strange young man with the striped suit and dashing mustache is her mother's lover as well.Ingmar Bergman, making his directorial debut working with his own script adapted from a play by Leck Fischer, presents a lovely story that begins light and grows darker. Although he gets some beautifully composed shots from his cinematographer, Gösta Roosling, the movie is not put together in a particularly exciting or interesting way. His most impressive work is with his actors, who bring out all the shades of their multifaceted characters.Those Shakespearean characterizations are what strike me the most. I don't know if they come from Fischer or Bergman. We see Jack (Stig Olin) as a dangerous lover, mischievous young man, laughable weakling, brooding intellectual and manipulative seducer. Jenny (Marianne Löfgren) appears as a selfish intruder, silly airhead, vain older woman and compassionate mother. 400 years after Shakespeare and over 60 years after this movie, we still don't often see characters like these.
Kris - a great debut for Bergman, 20 September 2008 Author: Dengoku from Belgium
Ingmar Bergman started off his productive career as film director with 'Kris', a fine little gem. As the comments on this film are rather mixed, let me explain how I came to like it.Having seen already a few Bergman films, I decided to do a retrospective of his work as a film director. I gathered as many of his films as possible, and started now watching them in chronological order. This allows the viewer to observe the evolution in a director's style.While being familiar with films such as 'The Magician' and 'Jungfrükällan', I picked out 'Kris' for take-off. The first film of a director is usually not the best - keeping this in mind is important when watching it. If you have seen some of the greatest movies of a director, it's unlikely that you will be equally impressed by his debut.I enjoyed 'Kris' thoroughly because I tend to ignore the occasional mistakes or failures and seek for those indications that show us a (lurking) genius. Watching 'Kris' this way makes it simply joyful, as one can see clearly an upcoming talent. The theatrical dramatization gives us clear hints of Bergman's favorite subjects which he will continue to explore in many of his later movies, such as the doomed destiny of human desire, surrounded by existential pain.'Kris' is categorized as a drama here on IMDb - the first half is full of cheerful comedy though. Bergman informs his audience about this at the start of the movie, in order to prepare them for what is to follow. That is also the way I recommend you to watch this movie, or as Bergman describes: "This is an everyday play, perhaps even a comedy."Enjoy,
1 out of 2 people found the following review useful: Crisis, 29 February 2008 Author: Michael_Elliott from Louisville, KY
Crisis (1946) ** (out of 4) Ingmar Bergman's first film as director is also the first film of his that I haven't enjoyed. A young girl, living with her foster mother, learns the truth to the world's ugliness when her real mother shows up after eighteen years. Being this was his first film, Bergman's directorial touches aren't quite in place and the screenplay bounces around a little too much to keep this for going for very long. The film becomes way too overly dramatic and the annoying music score doesn't help matters either. The performances are decent but nothing too great.
1 out of 24 people found the following review useful: Lousy first film, 30 April 2007 Author: zetes from Saint Paul, MN
Well, they don't all start out as geniuses. Ingmar Bergman's first film is very weak. It's an adaptation of a play about an 18 year old girl, Nelly (Inga Landgré), who leaves her adopted mother to live with her real mother in the city. The story itself isn't too bad, but the situation is so black and white. Nelly's mother is depicted as utterly wicked, and the adoptive mother as a saint. Every aspect of the city corrupts you; it is the country where you belong! It really is a boring little film and not even really worth seeing. Landgré gives a good performance, and there are a couple of other decent actors, but that's about it.
Add another review
