Crisis: Bergman's First Film

What a thrill to finally see Ingmar Bergman's directorial debut, "Crisis" (1946). Why did it take me so many years to track it down? Bergman is considered by most cinephiles (myself included) to be one of the best filmmakers of all time. And he would probably win the most votes for absolute best of all time. Yet I've never even heard of his early films, much less seen them! Boggles the mind.

"Crisis" isn't hard to find in the US today, thanks to the Criterion Collection, which has done an incredible job in the last 25 years of rescuing the world's greatest films from celluloid disintegration. Someone please give the Criterion founders a Nobel Prize. And thanks to Netflix for making Criterion DVDs available for rent. I hear that the entire Criterion Collection is also now available for streaming on Hulu's subscription service. 

"Crisis," I have to say, is more a feat of screenwriting than of direction. Bergman is known as a director, but he should also be known as a screenwriter. He wrote most of his films, perhaps even all of them, including "Crisis." It has the look and feel of a standard 1940s melodrama, complete with cheap movie music that swells up at emotional moments the way it does in classics of the era such as "Stella Dallas" or "Mildred Pierce."

But, oh, how the script breaks with the 1940s mold. It starts off in a fairly ordinary fashion, with a charming girl being raised in a charming small town and courted by a charming doctor. A couple of odd plot turns bring the girl to the big city (presumably Stockholm), and slowly but surely the story gets darker.

I replayed several scenes to drink in the rich, oblique dialogue that hinted at deep icebergs of desire and confusion inside each of the characters. How many times is dialogue so packed with poetry and meaning that you have to play it again and again just to wrap your mind around it? I haven't done that in years.

Rather than melodrama, I'd describe "Crisis" as psychodrama. It's not a masterpiece, but it shows the young Bergman (he wasn't even 30 when he made "Crisis"!) bursting out of the gate and already galloping in the directions that would make him a worldwide legend a dozen years later. I cannot wait to explore more of his early films.