“Once he wrote a script about a girl named Birgitta Carolina. She went through the world as if living in a real-life morality play, encountering evil, oddity, degeneracy, poetry, and goodness. And the script ended with her finding salvation. In the final scene she stood singing in the uniform of the Salvation Army.” – Vilgot Sjoman on Bergman’s original script for Prison.

Watching Prison (1949) for the first time, one is immediately struck by the striking imagery that Bergman seeks out – a lone figure walking along windswept hills kicks the film off. He also seeks it out in a more creative manner than the rather straightforward shooting of his first five features. There are zooms, pans, close-ups and much more than we have seen from him previously. There are a number of possible explanations for this. Firstly, the budget of the film was exceedingly tight, so Bergman may be going to more creative lengths to try and make the film look good. Whilst this is part of it, I think the main reason is a heightened ambition on display from the great director. He seems to be challenging both himself and his audience with this film.

DVD cover of Prison.

This ambition earned some goodwill from me toward Prison, but it only lasted so long. Unfortunately after the exhilaration of the first 15 or so minutes’ ambitious musings, the film becomes overly complicated and pretty underwhelming in general. The film is essentially a film within a film. Or at least I think it is. This device of a film within a film serves to distance the audience from what is occurring onscreen, resulting in scenes that should hold a lot of weight – the birth of new love and the tearing asunder of old – lack an emotional punch. When Bergman begins adding in flashbacks within the film within the film and dreams within the film within the film, things in the film just get altogether too dizzying to follow. I will not spoil the end of the film for those who wish to see it. But I will say that the ending mentioned in Sjoman’s summary above does not come to pass. Bergman was reputedly talked out of his original ending, convinced that it was too sentimental. I think this lack of conviction perhaps shows throughout the film, as it is a genuinely unfocused work.

As great a director as Bergman would go on to become, at this stage of his career he does not seem up to the challenge of handling this storyline. There is just too much going on here. The director in the film looks a lot like Bergman which suggests that the work is at least in part autobiographical. Add to this the scene involving a cinematograph, a favoured childhood toy of Bergman’s, and these suggestions grow even more overt.  The storyline is attempting to be quite self aware and self referential in its construction. And the thematic concerns are not integrated as well into the core love story narrative as in a number of his other early works. Mortality, famously one of the director’s core thematic concerns, is much more prominent here but it also just feels a little out of place in many of the sequences. Again Bergman is confronting, here the exploration of abortion in Port of Call (1948) becomes an examination of infanticide. It is telling that whilst this part of the film shocks, as well it should, it does not have the resonance that it should.

This is Bergman’s best looking and most interesting film thus far, but it is also my least favourite them. The start of the film makes you suspect that he is going to deliver something great for the first time in his career. By the end though, you will just be unengaged and unenthused.

Verdict: Schooner of Carlton Draught

 ‘The Bergman Files’ Leaderboard

1. It Rains on our Love (1946)
2. Crisis (1946)
3. Port of Call (1948)
4. Music in Darkness (1948)
5. A Ship Bound for India (1947)
6. Prison (1949)

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“The adult world is, with few exceptions, cruel hypocritical or at best indifferent” – Birgitta Steene writing about the worldview of Bergman’s early films.

Ingmar Bergman’s third directorial feature A Ship Bound for India (1947) tells the story of Johannes, a young man confronting the cruel adult world that Steene mentions in the quote above. In this film, that adult world is personified in the immensely unlikeable character of Captain Alexander Blom, Johannes’ father. In the film, Johannes returns to his home town after seven long years away. The early part of the film reveals a past love that had gone awry and the bulk of the film is a long flashback sequence which details how this occurred. Johannes lived on a salvage boat with his mother and father as well as a few other men who worked for his dad. Into this life comes Sally, Captain Blom’s mistress. That a man would so openly flaunt his mistress in front of his son and long-time wife, shows what kind of a character Captain Blom is. To put it bluntly he is an unmitigated and irredeemable prick of a man. It is not giving too much away to say that Johannes and Sally come to fall in love, and the film recounts the efforts of this young man to escape the cruel clutches of his father and make his own way in the world.

Ingmar’s father Erik Bergman

The early parts of the flashback establish the two main male characters by contrasting them against one another. Johannes is kindly and quiet, exceptionally self-conscious of a small hump in his back. Conversely his father is a drunken jackass who gets into bar fights and cheats on his wife. This early part of the film shows that for all of his amazing talents as a director, shooting fight scenes was definitely not Ingmar Bergman’s strong suit. Captain Blom is not just a mean and cruel man, but a sadistic one. He loves the power he wields over everyone else in the film – his long-time crew, Johannes, his caring wife and his mistress Sally. He treats them all terribly for no other reason than he thinks that he can. However, gradually throughout the film, this hold that the Captain has over all of these people begins to weaken in one way or another. This manipulative man, who stirs up Johannes about his hump knowing full well how self conscious about it his son is, is truly one of the most unlikeable characters ever committed to film. It is well known that Bergman himself had a complicated relationship with his own father, so one has to wonder if that explains at least in part the character of Captain Blom. In many ways the emotional centre of the film is Alice Blom, Johannes caring mother and long suffering wife of the Captain. She is publicly humiliated by Captain Blom when he brings his mistress aboard. All she has ever dreamt of is a cottage in the country with her husband, and now that dream is being torn away from her. She illustrates her grief by recounting the heartfelt and symbolic story to Captain Alexander of when they first started out in the salvage industry and she operated the equipment that kept him alive underwater. She was literally responsible for him being able to breathe. Predictably, the Captain is entirely unmoved by the emotional pleas of this wonderful woman.

Johannes and Sally, who find love under the strangest of circumstances in this film. © 1958 Nordisk Tonefilm. All Rights Reserved

For me, A Ship Bound for India did not reach the heights of Bergman’s first two films. It is by no means bad, it just does not have the same heart running through its core. The love story between Johannes and Sally is rendered in a much more melodramatic manner than in the other two films which feature slow burn relationships that really build. My favourite aspects of the film thoughwere its nautical elements. The first real image of the film that we see is a ship being battered by a storm, and much of the film takes place on boats and the surrounding docks. There are plenty of shots of shipyards, boats and close-ups of ropes and propellers early in the film to set the scene. Success in this world is measured by one’s success as a seaman. Captain Blom puts his hunchbacked son down by scoffing at his assertions that he will one day be a successful captain himself. Johannes is lauded upon his return at the beginning of the film though because this is exactly what he has made of himself. This whole environment is a real change to the more urban or at least landlubber settings of the other Bergman films I have reviewed. The nautical aspect of the film also plays host to the film’s most riveting moment. In a Hitchcockian moment of tension, Captain Blom attempts to murder his son whilst he is underwater using the very old school diving apparatus. Great stuff!

 A Ship Bound for India is an interesting, but minor early Bergman flick. Overall, whilst I did definitely enjoy this film, it is a touch more obvious and does not have the same delightful subtleties that pervade both Crisis (1946) and It Rains on our Love (1946). By all means though, the film is still worth checking out to see Bergman’s film journey continue.

Verdict: Stubby of Reschs

‘The Bergman Files’ Leaderboard

1. It Rains on our Love (1946)
2. Crisis (1946)
3. A Ship Bound for India (1947)

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