Word: bergmans
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Directed and Written by Ingmar Bergman...
This is not the sort of creativity one expects to find preoccupying an austere and sober artist like Ingmar Bergman. Yet it must be said that his liveliest attentions in The Serpent's Egg are lavished on the marvelous Berlin city block, circa 1923, that Producer Dino De Laurentiis provided him for this picture. The thing comes complete with a real working streetcar, which the director sets to clanging at every possible opportunity. When he is not busy with that, he is filling his street with crowds in all kinds of moods, showing it at all times...
Nevertheless, The Serpent's Egg is really quite a bad film. Bergman wishes to explore the roots of Nazism-"the al ready perfect reptile" that could be discerned, as one of the characters says, in the egg to which the title refers. And so once again the audience is treated to views of Germany in the early '20s-inflation rampant, democracy feeble, sex decadent, anti-Semitism emergent, National Socialist bullyboys beginning to feel their oats...
...very stale stuff, and, sadly, Bergman makes no more of it than the musical Cabaret did. It all comes out more picturesque than terrifying. Bergman, too, shows the developing monster through the eyes of an innocent, though this one lacks the lively intelligence of the young man in Cabaret. Bergman calls his hero Abel (David Carradine). He is an American circus performer of Jewish descent, stranded in Berlin because his brother and partner has hurt his arm and they cannot continue their trapeze act. The picture opens with Abel discovering the brother's suicide. This places him under police...
...view of the challenge he set himself, Lumet deserves pardon for a few tactical mistakes. He has come up with a film sufficiently slick and commercial to avoid the stigma of a pseudo-Bergman exploration of the soul, yet without cheapening the gravity of the questions that arise from the struggle between Dysart and his young patient. Much of the credit for this achievement must of course go to Shaffer's extraordinary script. But such a nod to the playwright in no way lessens the triumph of the man behind the camera...