DVD : Smiles Of A Summer Night - Criterion Collection
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Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1
Audience Rating: Unrated
Binding: DVD
Brand: Image Entertainment
EAN: 9780780028715
Format: Black & White, DVD-Video, Subtitled, NTSC
ISBN: 0780028716
Label: Criterion
Manufacturer: Criterion
Number Of Items: 1
Publisher: Criterion
Region Code: 1
Release Date: May 25, 2004
Running Time: 108 minutes
Sales Rank: 22399
Studio: Criterion
Theatrical Release Date: December 23, 1957
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Editorial Review:
Description:
Distinguished lawyer Frederik Egerman lives with Anne, his picturesque, young wife, his son Henrik, a forlorn student of the cloth, and Petra, the flirtatious yet sensible maid. One summer evening Frederik takes Anne to see a play starring his former lover Desirée, the veteran actress with an equally seasoned reputation. With her glamorous stage entrance and one inviting smile, she sparks the lives of the parties involved into a game of love and loyalty that barely masks each player's percolating insecurities. Through witty dialogue, theatrical direction, and an ensemble cast, director Ingmar Bergman delivers a raw exhibition of human desire.
Amazon.com:
Ingmar Bergman achieved international stardom with this classic melancholy comedy about the romantic entanglements of three 19th-century couples during a weekend at a country estate. It's exactly what you'd expect from a bedroom farce filtered through the ideas and eyes of Bergman: sharp, serious, pensive, austerely sexy, and ultimately sobering. Still, anyone who thought the Swedish filmmaker was incapable of a little fun has only to watch Bergman's orchestrations of these dangerous liaisons. Prosperous lawyer Fredrik (Gunnar Björnstrand) is married to the comely young Anne (Ulla Jacobsson), who (despite his best efforts) remains a virgin. Henrik (Björn Bjelfvenstam), Fredrik's grown son from a previous marriage, is desperately in love with Anne--and having an affair with the maid (Harriet Andersson)--despite the torturings of his pious soul. When actress Desiree (Eva Dahlbeck), Fredrik's former mistress, breezes into town, Fredrick pays her a visit, only to find himself jealous of her relationship with the piggish Count Malcolm (Jarl Kulle), who just happens to be married to Anne's best friend, the depressed and suicidal Charlotte (Margit Carlqvist); both women have a decided bone to pick with Desiree. All convene at the estate of Desiree's mother for a weekend of confrontations, illicit romance, dinner, dueling, and eventual pairing with the right romantic partner. Bergman winningly conveys the aspects of love among both the young and the old--those who feel they'll live forever and those whose impending mortality colors their actions. Absolutely brilliant and heartfelt, a true cinematic masterpiece. The basis for Stephen Sondheim's A Little Night Music, of "Send in the Clowns" fame. --Mark Englehart
Average Rating: 
Rating:  -
In the Scandanavian countries, Midsummer Night, when the sun does not set for days, and the world seems lit by a osy or golden glow, is a time of revelry and sexual abandon. There's a great Stindberg play, MISS JULIE that takes place on a Midsummer night. A fine movie of the play was made in the 50s, and is well worth seeing. This original story was filmed roughly at the same time as MISS JULIE, and is written to take place at roughly the same time; that is, the 1880s - 90s, at end of the 19th century. This film is called one of Bergman's few Romantic Comedies. It is, if you consider that it takes place a a time when romance as we know it at the beginning of the 21st Century, was unknown. Marriages were generally or at least often, maters of financial arrangement between families. Romance, then, consisted of flights of erotic fancy between ponderous volumes of sexual domesticity; or, to put it more frankly, Romance had more to do with the excitement of adultery than anything else, and was a form of enertainment given to upper-middle class people and to aristocrats. The European way.
At a time when the world's management definitely belonged solely o ostensibly intelligent men, such men were expected to be deftly manipulated by clever women. And this film is a celebratin of that fact.
All the actors are good, and some exceptionally so. The scenario was brilliantly written and filled with a superabundance of sometimes exquisite, but often brual ... Read More
Rating:  -
An immoral, sexually obsessed troupe: some kind of religious sect of wackos á la Sweden try to find love and live-fulfillment but they look for it in sex -changing and exchanging sex partners in order to find the combination that does the trick, and alas! it fails. A parody of the absurd "make love, not war" 60's-old sentiment.
It could well be read as I did above, however, here's another alternative.
Fathre/son dialogue (The libertine father and the soon to be cleryman son): "Man loves himself, his self-love, and his love of love itself." (Father dixit). On sex: "-Fortunately, women don't take it half as seriously as we do. Otherwise the human race would die out." (At the rate they are aborting today, for sure). -You joke about everything. -You will too when you see your own foolishness.
Father and son represent opposite world/life views. Clearly Bergman prefers the father figure over the old morals, customs and must-nots of the clery and religious minded, who are depicted as ignorant, frustrated, angry and pitiful creatures.
But then the libertine father meets his "artistic" lover. He asks her to please tell him that his 18 year-old wive Anne is either a "hopeless case or the opposite", meaning is she ever going to grow up and love him as a man-husband, instead of the father figure she sees in him, a man who rescued her from her innocent family life. The lover wants to know what he'll give her for the info. He offers hre his ... Read More
Rating: -
Ingmar Bergman's 1955 comedy Smiles Of A Summer Night (Sommarnattens Leende) was the film that first garnered him international recognition. It would be a couple of years before The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries cemented his reputation as an international film auteur, but looking back on this film, over a half a century later, and half a world away, it only shows how differently tastes in humor can be. Compared to today's better film comedies, this film is both more mature and more puerile in its approach to sex, in that it treats its characters as intellectual beings, yet also shows them as somehow reserved. Granted, the film is set in turn of the 20th Century Sweden, yet there is still an element missing in the film, especially when compared to later films in the Bergman canon. That missing element would most likely be depth.
Yes, compared to even more `intellectual' Hollywood comedies of recent vintage, like Sideways, Smiles Of A Summer Night is far deeper, but there is truth to the old Woody Allen claim that drama is `sitting at the grown ups table'. In fact, Allen was so smitten with this film that he tried to do his own version of it a quarter century later, in A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy. Of course, his own film was one of Allen's lesser works. Yet, so too is this film one of Bergman's lesser works. Stephen Sondheim also based his musical, A Little Night Music, on this film. The camera work, by Bergman's first collaborating cinematographer, Gunnar Fischer, is ... Read More
Rating: -
"Smiles of a Summer Night" was Bergman's last chance. He'd been making films for a decade, and none of them had been a commercial success. His backers were fed up. Unexpectedly, though, "Smiles" was both a box office and critical hit, and immediately afterwards Bergman got the go-ahead to make "The Seventh Seal." The rest is history.
"Smiles" is a very good film, although it has its flaws. It's a bit too long, for example. The first half could've been edited more closely. The musical score, moreover, is syrupy, as only 1950s cinematic scores can be.
On the other hand, the script is good, alternating between genuinely funny lines and darker, more ambivalent ones. The characters and situation are comic at one level, but this is definitely not your typical bedroom farce. Throughout the film run themes of loneliness and unfulfilled yearning to love and be loved, fear of aging and losing one's sexual attractiveness, the tension between our interiors and the public masks we don, and the transience of affection--staples of Bergman's films. As one of the characters says, "most of us have neither the gift nor the punishment of love"; another laments that "one can't protect another from any kind of suffering. That's what makes one so weary." And in the monologue about the three smiles of a summer night, the first smile, enjoyed by those who love innocently, is acknowledged to be rare and fleeting.
The acting is superb, with laurels going to Harriet ... Read More
Rating:  -
***** 1955. Written and directed by Ingmar Bergman. A prize (Best Poetic Humor!) at Cannes and the Bergman phenomenon started at that moment. This film is a romantic comedy opposing women and men or rather life and death. In SMILES OF A SUMMER NIGHT, men are clearly related to death, just observe the lawyer Egerman playing Russian roulette or his son Henrik trying to commit suicide. Women, on the contrary, are described as solar, filled with life, by the Swedish master. Yes! Such serious and dark themes can be found in this pseudo light comedy which is already in your library if you like cinema. For those of you more attracted by the lighter side of this film, I would advise them to stick to Woody Allen's A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy, a smart remake of the Bergman's masterpiece that holds only its light side without proposing any special food for the mind.
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