Word: serpents
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...SERPENT...
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...
...horny faun who spends his afternoon chasing-and being rejected by-nubile nudes; a serpent whose proffered apple is spurned by Adam and Eve and who makes the mistake of swallowing it himself, only to be driven to despair by modern society; a spilled drop of Coke that becomes the primal seed for an army of fantastic monsters; a tidy bee whose neat little world is crushed by the love thrashings of a monstrous (to her eyes) human couple...
...Radcliffe undergraduate ever to be produced at the Loeb, the big dating service in the sky made a mistake with Adam and Eve. While Eve thinks she was sent to earth to meet her mate. Adam thinks he was promised a maid. With such a beginning, an irresistibly slimy serpent, and a chorus of nine animals misnamed by Adam, complications of course, develop. Set to Ravenal's jazz-rock music, the sometimes ironic, often humorous Sin does not exactly tell an original story, but it certainly looks at an old problem in a new way. Performances are tonight and tomorrow...