Early Bergman

Night Is My Future. It isn't actually plagiarism. It's just that love's young dream, the way romantic young men like to dream it, often as not has more or less the same silly plot as Jane Eyre. This time the romantic young man is Ingmar Bergman, and the dream is dreamed in a movie he made in 1947--in parts the most puerile, as a whole the most heart-warming picture so far sent to the U.S. by the saturnine Swede.

Like the heroine of Charlotte Bronte's novel, Bergman's heroine is a shy young servant (Mai Zetterling) who falls in love with her master (Birger Malmsten). Like the hero of the novel, the master is an arrogant and atrabilious young bourgeois who hammers moodily on a grand piano and one day is stricken blind. Bitter in his affliction, he scorns her love. "Dare I aspire," he sneers, "to marry the housemaid?" Hurt to the heart, she leaves, and he is left to suffer at life's hands what she has suffered at his, to take the fall that pride traditionally portends.

Rejected by the conservatory where he hoped to study, he is forced to work at a low job tickling the ivories in a busy beanery. The servant rises as the master falls: she goes to college and prepares to be a teacher. When they meet again, he is forced to swallow his pride and dissemble his heartburn. With humble irony he asks himself: "Dare a poor blind honky-tonk pianist aspire to marry a beautiful college girl?"

A sentimental question deserves a sentimental answer, but was it really necessary to play both the Moonlight Sonata and Here Comes the Bride in the same movie? At 29, Bergman obviously thought so. But the film has flair as well as faults.

The story is told with grace and good surprises; the camera is aimed unerringly at the point where the story is growing; and the actors are used in the inimitable Bergman manner--as windows not so much seen as seen through, as ways of entering a reality that lies within them and beyond them. In Mai Zetterling, for instance, Bergman sees warm flesh and hot blood, but he also sees through body into being, into the luminous soul of a woman in love.

The Bergman who made this movie still had akvavit in his veins. Intellect, that glittering and treacherous Snow Queen, had not yet struck her icy sliver into his heart.

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