Crisis (1946) User Reviews

Solid, Unspectacular from the Swedish Master

[thenewbohemian · 6/10 · 17 February 2006]

Though this film only hints at the psychological explorations Bergman will make into his future characters, it does, in some ways, predict the care and thoroughness to come in future masterpieces like "Wild Strawberries" and "The Seventh Seal". The themes of human desire for change, lost innocence, intense longing, and other existential themes are apparent at the surface, but do not reach the intense depths with which we can analyze the main characters from the films I just mentioned.

I found the character Jack, Jenny's boyfriend/lover to be the most interesting and think he is worthy of a more detailed analysis. Though we later learn that his words are completely contrived (he says the same thing to all women) we see that he has a talent of making women sympathize with him, and he possesses a special ability to say what women want to hear, thus revealing his unique understanding of the female psyche. He is something of a broke down Don Juan, if you will, but he is also the most deeply passionate and complex character in the film. Perhaps it would be easy to write his character off as a wolf who preys on women, but I think he reveals more about human desire and an intense longing for life that plays out in his lust for women and his joy in wooing them. Jack does not know where to direct his passions, and the pure, young and innocent Nelly is simply one of his targets in his misappropriated releases. Despite his selfishness and apparent callousness, he is eventually unveiled as a horribly tragic and lost figure, a man incapable of reconciling his passions with reality.

If you have not seen this film, there is no reason to enthusiastically run out and buy or rent a copy, but the simple fact that this is his directorial debut should hold enough curiosity for any Ingmar Bergman fan, or burgeoning fan, one of European cinema's great masters.

A wispy breeze hints at an impending storm

[ian_harris · 7/10 · 15 April 2003]

Bergman's adaptation of Leck Fischer's play behaves like a stage play that has been slightly adapted for the screen. It is essentially a chamber melodrama and it makes little use of the cinema's expanded scope. The film is watchable and the cast is competent. Almost everything about it is competent. It was Bergman's first go at directing a film. He was 27/28 years old at the time.

Bergman is clearly influenced by Ibsen - I say "is", because the old master (nearly 85 years old now) is still at it on the stage - I have the privilege to hold tickets to see his adaptation of Ibsen's Ghosts in London May 2003 - can't wait. Kris is clearly influenced by Ibsen, but while the piece has borrowed Ibsen's mastery of structure and development, Kris lacks depth. If Ibsen is grand opera, Kris is operetta. Bergman had not yet acquired the skill to turn a minor play into a major film.

There is the odd hint of greatness to come, in particular the railway scene between Jack and Ingeborg. There is also the odd interesting camera angle. But some of the cutting is amateurish and the music is ghastly.

If the weatherman tells you that there is going to be a tremendous storm, you do not need to be a genius to recognise that the wispy breeze is a prelude to that storm. In the absence of that weather forecast, you could be forgiven for not recognising the breeze as an early hint at the big one. So it is with this film. Because we know it is Bergman, we see hints of greatness to come. Otherwise this would seem like an (admittedly above average) ordinary 1940's film.

Bergman aficionados will enjoy it, but it should be quite a way down the list for people who want to start discovering the greatness of Bergman's work.

For Bergman completists

[gbill-74877 · 6/10 · 3 July 2019]

The narrator at the beginning of this film mentions it's a comedy, and while the film which follows is hardly that, maybe he's referring to the laughable choices we sometimes make in life when young, because that's what this crisis seems to be about. It's either that or the crisis Bergman himself was facing as a struggling first-time director. Anyway, in the film, a young woman has been raised to the age of 18 in a small town by her adoptive mother, and is being courted by her mother's lodger, who while annoying, boring, and older, at least seems like a decent guy who cares for her. Enter her birth mother, who wants to take her to Stockholm to work in her beauty salon, as well as her birth mom's younger boyfriend, who is a creepy and disturbing lothario. The choice is thus between town/adoptive mom/nice guy, vs. city/birth mom/ladies man, and the film sets it pretty much up in those black and white terms.

One exception to that is how the film shows selfish vs. selfless love, and we find that most of it (or maybe all of it?) is at least partially the former, which was interesting. I also appreciated how the film confronts adoptive vs. birth parent rights, with the adoptive mom asserting herself, though that doesn't really develop much from there, since the young woman is old enough to make her own decisions.

Most of the scenes felt pretty generic and not all that compelling, but there were some exceptions. I loved the scene at the ball when the youth rearrange the furniture in the next room, then improvise some modern music and dance wildly, to the consternation of the older folks trying to listen to an opera singer. There is also a lovely scene when the adoptive mom is lying sleepless on a train, and remembering moments from the past. Bergman also gets a little zinger in on men when a woman in the beauty parlor quotes Catherine the Great as saying once you've had 10,000 men, you find that there isn't a whole lot of difference between any of them.

Unfortunately, despite solid performances from the cast, the film suffers mainly because of its script, which is melodramatic and simplistic. The craziest thing was the signature move we find that the playboy puts on women. He tells them he's killed his girlfriend, wants to turn himself into the police, and may shoot himself ... and apparently this is an approach that gets them into bed. (What?) The film also suffers from a lack of clarity and a wandering in tone, complete with an oddly jaunty soundtrack in places, and the young director is to blame for this. He himself commented in 1973 that "If someone had asked me to film the phone book, then I would have done it. The result might have been slightly better. I knew nothing, couldn't do anything, and felt like a crazy cat in a yarn harness," and the result was the studio sending in Victor Sjöström to help supervise him through the chaos. As Bergman idolized the man, that must have been very tough for him. Despite all of this, the film is not awful or anything, but it is decidedly average, and for Bergman completists only.

Ingmar Bergman, making his directorial debut, presents a lovely story that begins light and grows darker

[J. Spurlin · 11 September 2009]

Ingeborg (Dagny Lind) is a small-town piano teacher who raises her foster daughter, Nelly (Inga Landgré), into young adulthood. When Nelly is eighteen, she is shocked by the arrival of Jenny, her mother, whom she calls "Auntie." Jenny wants to take her to the big city and teach her to be a beautician in her salon. This is devastating news for Ingeborg, who is ill and does not expect to live long. Ulf, the stolid 30ish man in love with Nelly, begs her to stay; but she is not in love with him, considering him much too old. Instead, she is attracted to Jack, a new arrival in town. She doesn't guess that this strange young man with the striped suit and dashing mustache is her mother's lover as well.

Ingmar Bergman, making his directorial debut working with his own script adapted from a play by Leck Fischer, presents a lovely story that begins light and grows darker. Although he gets some beautifully composed shots from his cinematographer, Gösta Roosling, the movie is not put together in a particularly exciting or interesting way. His most impressive work is with his actors, who bring out all the shades of their multifaceted characters.

Those Shakespearean characterizations are what strike me the most. I don't know if they come from Fischer or Bergman. We see Jack (Stig Olin) as a dangerous lover, mischievous young man, laughable weakling, brooding intellectual and manipulative seducer. Jenny (Marianne Löfgren) appears as a selfish intruder, silly airhead, vain older woman and compassionate mother. 400 years after Shakespeare and over 60 years after this movie, we still don't often see characters like these.

The Grass is Always Greener...

[Xstal · 7/10 · 4 February 2023]

Nelly is far too contained, metaphorically tethered and chained, until Jack makes connection, Jenny sets defection, breaking habits for which she's been trained (or brainwashed as most of us are during our formative years).

Jack's clearly a bit of a lad, a deceiver, a liar, a cad, sneaky opportunist, loves to arrange a tryst, perpetually out on the gad (a stereotypical chancer who's been around for as long as woman have accommodated such characters).

Jenny likes to be among others, solitude is a feeling she smothers, but Nelly's deserter, has come to reclaim her, from Ingeborg who loves and still mothers (she wants her legacy to continue now she has the means, and Jack's attraction is wearing thin).

Ingeborg's overcome with emotion, a lifetime of love and devotion, now she's all alone, since Nelly's left home, a boat cast adrift in the ocean (alas, all children fledge sooner or later) .

Ulf has been patient and slow, waiting for Nelly to grow, now he's been rejected, not what he expected, full of seed he's unable to sow (in modern parlance, a groomer, how times change).

If you were in Nelly's small shoes, what would you do, who would you choose? The one thing I'd say, appreciate today, in the past, as a woman, you lose (although far too many still lose out today but there are better options or choices available).

The First Steps of a Future Master of the Craft

[jacu0444 · 6/10 · 14 May 2020]

Crisis marks Bergman's first film in the director's seat and serves as a promising, if often stumbling, showcase of the director's future prowess as a filmmaker. Guided under the steady mentorship of Victor Sjöström, a legendary Swedish director from the silent era, Bergman quietly made his appearance on the world stage with this melodramatic coming-of-age story on the loss of innocence. A layout of many of Bergman's future motifs is established here, with the conflict between family generations, the psychological tension that lies between men and women, and themes on existential despair being peppered throughout the film's run time. Some of his visual flair also begins to take root here, most famously of which being his refusal to capitulate to the classic shot-reverse-shot technique for scenes of dialogue. Bergman, with his fascination with the human face, would prefer to simply focus in on the face of a single actor throughout the length of a conversation, often to great dramatic effect. While these elements of the film definitely appeal to a student of Bergman's work, they do not necessarily translate into a must-see masterpiece.

This film suffered from a tedious and tumultuous production, with pressure from a studio that had little faith in Bergman at the time holding sway over the director's approach. Bergman was known for being an even-keeled, highly professional director to work with, but he has admitted that this was a reputation that he had to earn through many trials. In the production of this film he retained little popularity with the ensemble he had assembled, with a cantankerous, explosive attitude ruling over the young perfectionist. This would produce strenuous tensions between Bergman and the staff during filming. One famous incident involved Bergman's insistence that the crew continue filming after a cameraman had been injured from taking a fall. As Bergman's confidence in his storytelling would grow, so would his professionalism and capability as a director, something that this film reflects.

From a story standpoint, Crisis presents a narrative on the loss of innocence for a beautiful eighteen-year old girl by the name of Nelly (played by Inga Landgré), her relationship with her foster mother, Ingeborg (Dagny Lind), and the arrival of her estranged biological mother, Jenny (Marianne Löfgren). Jenny's lover, Jack (Stig Olin) also has a crucial role to play in the moral crisis that Nelly comes to face, as he seduces her to the whims and whiles of city-life and leads her further astray from the child-like innocence of her youth. The film carries commentary on motherhood, urban culture, and the naivety of the innocent. The success with which it pursues these themes is done with varying degrees of success. Towards the end, some of the plot developments feel sudden, and rash character actions appear out of place, making a compelling psychodrama teeter onto the edge of becoming a melodrama. This flirtation with becoming a hackneyed, overacted stage play transitions to the other elements of the film, particularly the acting and cinematography. The film is bolstered by strong performances by Stig Olin and Dagny Lind, with Olin playing a conniving, manipulative young man to great success (up until the film's end) and Lind portraying the saintly foster mother who does her best to protect Nelly. Otherwise, the performances in the film were middling in comparison to these two. Likewise, the cinematography can at times show a great sense of creativity that serves our understanding of the characters. The focus on one character during dialogue, as previously mentioned, and Ingeborg's dream sequence aboard the train are excellent examples of Bergman's future prowess. But much of the rest of the film has little flair going for it, and often feels as though it was shop fairly cheaply. This does not mean that the film was shot poorly, but that it lacked the steady guidance and beautiful compositions that would be found in Bergman's later work (often thanks to the support from Bergman's two key cinematographers during his career, Gunnar Fischer and Sven Nykvist). Thus, the clashing of these components of brilliance and mediocrity meld together to form a flawed, albeit strongly compelling psychodrama.

Bergman would describe this film as a, "complete disaster," in his later years, dismissing his earliest film with severe criticisms that were mostly directed at his capabilities and personal failures at the time. With Bergman being the perfectionist that he was, one would be remiss to take heed of his criticisms. While definitely one of Bergman's minor works, it is essential if one aims to view the first steppingstone in this filmmaker's journey. It also evokes a gripping narrative that hints at what was to come from the young director.

Bergman's Crisis is a solid debut

[jamesjustice-92 · 7/10 · 12 January 2019]

I'm not a big fan of Bergman's directorial style but his "Wild Strawberries" I adore with all my heart which was a good enough reason for me to get acquainted with his filmography more closely. After watching a couple of uninteresting and weird movies of his I was beginning to lose hope and that's when I decided to dive into his early stuff and start with his debut body of work. 1946's "Crisis" shows only a hint of a future genius of Ingmar as a great playwright and a director. And precisely his remarkable script makes you want to stick with the movie for a while. It tells a story of fallen angels with their demons inside and how just one person can influence so many lives, make them do the things they don't want to do, lie and deceive and remain a human being after all. "Crisis" is a dark and psychological drama where there isn't any character you can really relate to or sympathize with but the plot and its characters will lead you to the ending with your mouth open. This is a good movie that stood the test of time and even 70 years later looks fresh, a bit too theatrical at times but this is Bergman we are talking about.

While he went on to better things, Crisis is a promising directorial debut for Sweden's greatest director

[TheLittleSongbird · 7/10 · 18 February 2013]

Crisis is neither among Ingmar Bergman's best or worst films, but despite Nelly's return to Ulf being somewhat of an anti-climax, some of the writing being a little too talky and apart from Jack the characters being not as compelling and a little more cardboard than what we expect from Bergman, Crisis is a most promising directorial debut. Even so early on in his career, there are signs of Bergman's trademark directorial touches with the use of mirrors, dreams and expressionistic symbolism. It is overall a disciplined and intelligent directorial debut indeed. Crisis is very well made, with beautiful settings and cinematography is skillful while not giving the melodrama feel of the story a stage-bound feel. The music fits the atmosphere perfectly, apart from some too-talky moments the dialogue is at least thought-provoking and the story like the directing has flashes of Bergman's distinctive style if more thoroughly explored in the very best of his films. The acting from Inga Landgré and Stig Olin is very good as well if not among the greatest performance from a Bergman film.

Overall, promising for a debut but Bergman did go on to even better things since. 7/10 Bethany Cox

He Certainly Got Better

[Hitchcoc · 6/10 · 29 October 2009]

I guess it is forgivable for a first film to be maudlin, with cardboard characters and silly dialogue. This is the story of a young woman who decides to get out of town because there is no future there. She lives with her dying stepmother, her real mother leaving her behind for 18 years. She just kind of flits through things because she has pretty much been adored. She is impetuous. I haven't seen such a tear jerking woman as her loving stepmother, maybe Mrs. March in little women. She goes to be a hair stylist and gets hooked up with some bad ones, including a wolfish playboy. Meanwhile some big lunk with a silly name, Ulfe, carries a torch for her. In fairness, it has lots of very good shots and is pretty polished for a first film. It's just a bit dull and silly and very predictable.

While neither brilliant or a must-see, a very competent directorial debut by Bergman

[planktonrules · 7/10 · 23 April 2011]

"Kris" ("Crisis") is a very competent film and one worth seeing. However, despite being written and directed by Irgmar Bergman, it is neither a must-see or brilliant film. However, compared to debut efforts by many famous directors, this one is much better than you'd expect.

The film begins in a small Swedish town. The very mundane life of a woman and her 18 year-old daughter is suddenly changed when the daughter's biological mother returns. This woman and the child do not know each other at all--and yet the biological mother wants to take the daughter to the city and establish a mother-daughter relationship. The daughter agrees and you really have to feel sorry for the foster-mother as she's both ill and too proud to tell the girl this to keep her there. Considering that there are LOTS of clues that would lead the viewer to think bad will come of this, what happens next isn't all that surprising.

The acting, direction and every other aspect of this film are all quite competent. However, the story itself is a bit ordinary--not bad but nothing spectacular or unexpected. Worth seeing for Bergman fans and a decent time-passer.

The execution just isn't there yet in Bergman's first film

[davidmvining · 3/10 · 26 November 2019]

Ingmar Bergman's first movie has a handful of charms, but it's ultimately an unfocused bit of over-assured storytelling that never comes together. It's the work of a young artist convinced he's more in control of his narrative abilities than he actually is.

The problem at the movie's core is that it's really unclear whose story this actually is. We really have three choices. There's Nelly, the waifish young girl, Mutti, her guardian who has raised her since infancy, and Jenny, Nelly's mother. Until the end, I would include a fourth character in that list, Jack, a distant relation to Jenny, but his fate makes it clear he's not the main character, though up to that point there's question about it.

The assertion that any of these three characters could be the main character is interesting from the outside, however, from the inside of the film, it's really just frustrating. No one character really dominates the movie, and they're all going through different emotional journeys that involve the other two but don't actually mix with the journeys of the other two. So, you have Nelly caught between two mother figures, but the mother figures' arcs are less about being different ends of a single struggle and more about their own demons. Mutti is dealing with an undefined terminal illness (that disappears from the movie about halfway through) and questions about whether she loved Nelly for Nelly or for herself. Jenny is dealing with lost youth and her desperate effort to cling to it. Even before Jack kills himself with about ten minutes to go in the film, he takes up about as much screentime as the other three characters with two separate soliloquies about how much he hates himself.

The actual plot of the film involves Jenny coming to the little Swedish town where he left Nelly with Mutti in order to reclaim her daughter. After Nelly causes a small scandal involving the mayor under the influence of Jack, she runs away with Jenny to work in Jenny's salon in the big city (presumably Stockholm). Nelly's leaving seems to have nothing but good effects on Mutti (oddly enough) until Mutti has a nightmare that leads her to take the train to the city and visit her adopted daughter. There she finds that Nelly lives a very nice live and doesn't seem to need her before going back home. That night, Nelly gets seduced by Jack, an act that Jenny watches. When they are done, Jenny chastises the young girl for falling for Jack's tricks. Jack walks out and shoots himself. Nelly then takes the train back home to Mutti where she finds her old life willing to take her back.

The whole thing is pure melodrama in the most base and pejorative sense. It's heightened displays of emotion taking place of actual character work. Nelly, arguably the central fulcrum of the film, is the least well drawn of the three characters, feeling more like a cipher than a woman.

As a film on its own, Crisis has little to offer, but as the first film of Ingmar Bergman as both writer and director (he had written a few films before this, but never directed), it carries some importance. The movie is strongest visually, a pretty obvious influence of Bergman's mentor, the famous Swedish silent film director Victor Sjöström, who would play Dr. Borg in Wild Strawberries. However, the shots of two characters in frame speaking to each other is always just off in terms of executions. Faces fall in and out of focus pretty consistently, implying that the action wasn't blocked out very well and the cinematographer chose the wrong lens for what Bergman wanted. There's even a long dance shot that's dominated by the back of Nelly's head and nothing else at one point, and it's obviously because they didn't block the shot well enough to account for how the two characters were going to move several feet in the camera's direction precisely. There are also hints of Bergman's later thematic focuses, like the concentration on women and their perspectives on things. Beyond that, though, if Ingmar Bergman had just been another studio director in the Swedish film system, Crisis would have rightfully been long forgotten. As the first film of the man who made The Seventh Seal, it's important to keep this in mind in terms of Ingmar Bergman's overall career.

Fabulous early Bergman melodrama with many pointers to later masterpieces.(possible spoilers)

[the red duchess · 8/10 · 25 July 2001]

Like much of his pre-'Seventh Seal' early work, Bergman's 'Crisis' has been called a melodrama. One can see the attraction of the label - the largely cramped theatrical settings; the plot, with a prostitute coming to a sleepy provincial town for the daughter she abandoned 18 years earlier, taking her back to the big city and a young lover-coded-pimp; the squalls of over-emphatic music at key moments; the accumulation of narrative tension finding release in sexual violence and death; the contrast between the sophisticated, but corrupt ethics of the city, and the decent, but dull values of the country, coded in costumes and architectural space; the 'doomed', morally impotent young anti-hero.

But if 'Crisis' is a melodrama, it belongs to the work in that genre by those great directors who, like Bergman, began their careers in the theatre, Max Ophuls and Douglas Sirk. Like them, Bergman takes a form dependent on moral certainties to create a world where such certainties have cased to exist. This is not to say Bergman has contempt for the genre he works in - like all great melodramatists, he gives vivid dramatic form to oppositions, for instance, the cramped, interior world of Ingeborg, and the fresh, location shooting in which we first find Nelly; or the young people's jazz intrusion of a fusty mayor's ball. He respects the melodrama's focus on women, their stifling in set social roles - prostitute, mother, spinster, lover, daughter, illegitimate child, ideal, whatever.

But what Bergman cleverly does is milk the expectations of genre, only to totally confound them. When Jenny comes to abruptly collect a daughter she simply dumped on Ingeborg, followed by a young man clearly coded as a pimp, we imagine the sordid horrors into which Nelly will be flung, especially as she's seduced by Jack with drink, fine words and jazz. Her mother, dressed in black, and shamelessly free with her body as she takes a foot bath, all suggest a licentiousness into which the 'innocent' will be trapped. The huge elision between her leaving Ingeborg, and the latter's visit to the city, marked only by a letter of dubious provenance, contribute to the bad omens. And yet, as Ingeborg discovers, Nelly is quite respectably working in the beauty salon as her mother had promised; she has new clothes and friends. The young man is no pimp, but an aimless sponging egoist.

This isn't mere leg-pulling on Bergman's part - it's a way of forcibly shaking us out of lazy assumptions. The supposed haven of the village is shown to be repressively conformist and culturally dead, while Nelly's aunt's house combines lassitude with penury. The location shooting that seems to express Nelly's authenticity become a Skakespearean stage, where Jack seduces here, and the prosaic Ulf beats him up, in a heavily stylised and brilliantly artificial masque.

Bergman from the opening narration emphasises the fictiveness and theatricality of his story, where his marionettes are continually placed in transposed theatres: his framing, as with Ophuls and Sirk, is elaborately intrusive, capturing characters in boxes or behind bars; the sequence shot at the ball, the camera moving from the kids jiving to the old folks' pretentious horror is a masterpiece of concise visualising of themes, catching these two seemingly disparate groups in the one trap.

The heavily contrived finale is not only introduced by a glaring narrative elision, but is soundtracked to the noise from an adjacent theatre. Add to this the dreams and anxious visions of Ingeborg, which, like the young hero's in 'Fanny and Alexander', seem to seep into the narrative itself, so that it is difficult to tell whether what we are watching is objectively happening within the narrative, or the subjective projection of a lonely woman's nightmares, and you have a structural ambiguity, with which Bergman not only transcends the limitations of traditional melodrama, but points forward to the impulses of his finer later work.

Good debut

[dangeroussway · 6/10 · 9 January 2024]

Ingmar Bergman's directorial debut, this features many elements that would later become trademark of his work, including dark, brooding characters and strong female-lead performances.

This reads very much like a play, because it's based off one, but Bergman makes it as cinematic as possible, especially with use of real outside locations.

There always seems to be an undercurrent awareness of the dark sides of humanity, even when not explicitly showing it.

This movie displays an emphasis of it being a slice of life story of a small town- depicting those values of the comfort of traditional family life vs. The evil of modern big city life.

Early on it shows teens playing what sounded like rock n Roll (almost ten years before it was a thing), while the adults listen to a woman singing opera, showing the divide of the children from the adults.

Bad, Early Bergman

[SpaaceMonkee · 4/10 · 26 January 2021]

Crisis opens with a narrator laying some background for the viewer to learn that Nelly - a pretty, small-town girl with dreams of a more exciting life - is about to meet her birth mother for the first time in 18 years. Until that time, for unexplained reasons, Nelly has lived with Ms. Johnson, who has served as her "real" mother, the woman who raised her and has taken care of her. After fending off yet another advance from the much older tenant, a lumbering character named Ulfe, Nelly leaves for the big city with her birth mother and experiences life there while working in a salon.

This movie is boring, the characters are largely one-dimensional (in addition to frequently unlikable), the dialogue often veers towards pretentious monologues, and it's all set against a bombastic score. I think this movie scores as highly as it does on IMDB because it's directed by Ingmar Bergman, possibly leading reviewers to think that it's not a bad movie, they just must have "missed" something. It's not a good movie, though you occasionally see flashes of the insightfulness and creativity that made Bergman famous. Unfortunately, those interesting moments flicker and quickly disappear.

The upshot of Crisis is that it proves you can make a terrible first movie and still become one of the all-time great directors.

The young Bergman learning his craft

[frankde-jong · 7/10 · 17 October 2022]

"Crisis" (1946) is the debut film of Ingmar Bergman as a director. I have read the story that Bergman was not a "natural talent", in stead it took time for him to learn his craft. So as a fan of Bergman I wanted to see this film but my expectations were not very high.

The film is about a stepmother (Ingeborg played by Dagny Lind) and a daughter (Nelly played by Inga Landgré) living in a sleepy little village. When the daughter is 18, the biological mother (Jenny played by Marianne Löfgren) appears to claim her daughter. Because the daughter falls for the young lover of her biological mother (Jack played by Stig Olin) see goes with her to Stockholm.

The film obviously is about the distinction between the big city and the countryside, and strongly takes side for the countryside. It so does resemble "Sunrise" (1927, Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau). In "Sunrise" a femme fatale seduces the man. In "Crisis" the dandy Jack seduces the daughter.

Of course "Crisis" cannot stand a comparison with a masterpiece such as "Sunrise", but that comparison would not be honest to the beginning Bergman. To be honest, given my modest expectations, I was pleasantly surprised by "Crisis". The film contains a number of scenes / characters that must have been daring at the time of release.

Take for example the love scene between Nelly and Jack, which must have been very nude for that time. Or the monolgue of Jenny at the end of the film, through the mirror she looks straight into the camera. This is an unusual camera angle, used again by Bergman at the end of "Summer with Monica" (1953).

The character of Jack is unusual, almost cartoonlike. The little tramp with a suit on. Not only does he plunge Nelly into a crisis, but all the main characters, including himself.

"Crisis" does not contain any actors or actresses that would later be regarded as "Bergman actors". Inga Landgré (1927) however did appear as supporting actress in various later Bergman movies. She acted until old age and is still alive at the time I wrote this review (2022). Stig Olin (1920 - 2008) also appeared in some later Bergman movies. From the 60's onwards he was mainly active as a music composer.

Although I was pleasantly suprised by the end result, the production proces was at times very chaotic. Finally the experienced Victor Sjöström was brought in as a producer. A blessing in disguise, because Sjöström would be the mentor for the beginning Bergman in the years to come.

Crisis

[CinemaSerf · 6/10 · 28 November 2022]

His debut, I know, but I actually found this to one of the more accessible Ingmar Bergman films - maybe that's why it isn't actually that great. It follows the young "Nelly" (Inga Landgré) living with her kindly foster mother "Mutti/Ingeborg" (Dagny Lind) who teaches piano in their small town. This peaceful existence is suddenly turned on it's head, though, when her real mother "Jenny" (Marianne Löfgren) shows up intent on reconciling with her long estranged offspring. She doesn't show up alone - her rather lively and mischievous friend "Jack" (Stig Olin) comes along too, and at a charity ball he and "Nelly" cause a bit of a stir that causes consternation for her friend "Ulf" (Allan Bohlin), gets someone a wetting and causes tongues to wag to such an extent that poor old "Nelly" has to relocate to the city. Things there aren't a bed of roses there either, and pretty soon the young woman must make some difficult choices. This is a solid ensemble effort with decent efforts from all concerned as the rather unlikeable group of characters have to deal with their self-induced and conflicted predicaments. There is a bit of chemistry between Olin and Landgré that at times raises a smile and/or makes you cringe, but for the most part the narrative is a bit wooly - too many people cluttering up a story that somehow lacks focus. Still, I did understand it which is more than I can say for many of this director's later, more impenetrable, works.

Crisis

[Michael_Elliott · 29 February 2008]

Crisis (1946)

** (out of 4)

Ingmar Bergman's first film as director is also the first film of his that I haven't enjoyed. A young girl, living with her foster mother, learns the truth to the world's ugliness when her real mother shows up after eighteen years. Being this was his first film, Bergman's directorial touches aren't quite in place and the screenplay bounces around a little too much to keep this for going for very long. The film becomes way too overly dramatic and the annoying music score doesn't help matters either. The performances are decent but nothing too great.

Lousy first film

[zetes · 7/10 · 30 April 2007]

Well, they don't all start out as geniuses. Ingmar Bergman's first film is very weak. It's an adaptation of a play about an 18 year old girl, Nelly (Inga Landgré), who leaves her adopted mother to live with her real mother in the city. The story itself isn't too bad, but the situation is so black and white. Nelly's mother is depicted as utterly wicked, and the adoptive mother as a saint. Every aspect of the city corrupts you; it is the country where you belong! It really is a boring little film and not even really worth seeing. Landgré gives a good performance, and there are a couple of other decent actors, but that's about it.

A master's first film, but by no means a masterpiece

[pauleskridge · 6/10 · 14 March 2024]

Six stars. Some directors explode out of the gates (Welles, for instance). Bergman did not. Crisis has some great nuggets, that presage the brilliance to come. But it's a mediocre film. I think the audience is supposed to view Ingeborg and Ulf as protagonists. But they are both selfish and witless. For that matter, so are Nelly, Jack, and Jenny. And the message is? The city is dangerous? Don't dream big? Just stay in your hick town and marry who ever is most available? I basically hated the story.

That said, there was a LOT of good acting, and a lot of good camera work. But, like all the Bergman I've seen that's earlier than Summer Interlude, it seems like a parody of a mature Bergman film. I'm going to end on an upbeat though, extolling those breathtaking noir shots at the climax. This was the starting point of a brilliant career. It's not a brilliant movie, but it's not a bad starting point either. 6 June 2022.

11.14.2023

[EasonVonn · 7/10 · 13 November 2023]

Early Bergman, one can see shades of later.

Like most of Bergman's films this one centers around women, and it seems that Bergman enjoyed depicting women's suffering, which is especially precious in the lens of a male director.

See a little green, such as the camera and even sometimes very incongruous trans-axis, and so on, and the last "Love Happens in the Rain" even worse meaning, after all, this time the narrator we do not see the fourth wall is also firmly constructed.

There is a little bit of Imitation of Life.

Early Bergman, one can see shades of later.

Like most of Bergman's films this one centers around women, and it seems that Bergman enjoyed depicting women's suffering, which is especially precious in the lens of a male director.

See a little green, such as the camera and even sometimes very incongruous trans-axis, and so on, and the last "Love Happens in the Rain" even worse meaning, after all, this time the narrator we do not see the fourth wall is also firmly constructed.

There is a little bit of Imitation of Life.

My brief review of the film

[sol- · 9/10 · 20 September 2005]

For a directional debut, this is very solid stuff, not only skillfully directed but also set to a brilliant original music score. I would however identify one weakness with Bergman's directing here: it is very much tailored to the script, with dialogue or narration almost all the time, and this leads to it being too talkative, with limited breaks in which one can stop and admire the way that the story is being told. The film is in this sense very different to the style that Bergman would later adopt, and although perhaps somewhat weak, Bergman's skills do shine through. There are well-framed shots, an effective stream-of-consciousness sequence, great camera angles and excellent camera movement. The inclusion of some more non-dialogue bits possibly would have improved this film, but there is little else to complain about, with quite a good story behind the material too.

Kris - a great debut for Bergman

[Dengoku · 8/10 · 20 September 2008]

Ingmar Bergman started off his productive career as film director with 'Kris', a fine little gem. As the comments on this film are rather mixed, let me explain how I came to like it.

Having seen already a few Bergman films, I decided to do a retrospective of his work as a film director. I gathered as many of his films as possible, and started now watching them in chronological order. This allows the viewer to observe the evolution in a director's style.

While being familiar with films such as 'The Magician' and 'Jungfrükällan', I picked out 'Kris' for take-off. The first film of a director is usually not the best - keeping this in mind is important when watching it. If you have seen some of the greatest movies of a director, it's unlikely that you will be equally impressed by his debut.

I enjoyed 'Kris' thoroughly because I tend to ignore the occasional mistakes or failures and seek for those indications that show us a (lurking) genius. Watching 'Kris' this way makes it simply joyful, as one can see clearly an upcoming talent. The theatrical dramatization gives us clear hints of Bergman's favorite subjects which he will continue to explore in many of his later movies, such as the doomed destiny of human desire, surrounded by existential pain.

'Kris' is categorized as a drama here on IMDb - the first half is full of cheerful comedy though. Bergman informs his audience about this at the start of the movie, in order to prepare them for what is to follow. That is also the way I recommend you to watch this movie, or as Bergman describes: "This is an everyday play, perhaps even a comedy."

Enjoy,

Certainly Dated in 2010, but Still a Great Directorial Debut

[claudio_carvalho · 8/10 · 4 December 2010]

In a small town in the countryside of Sweden, the piano teacher Ingeborg (Dagny Lind) has been raising her foster daughter Nelly (Inga Landgré) for eighteen years with a simple life, but full of love. Ingeborg's tenant Ulf (Allan Bohlin) is in love with Nelly, but the spoiled girl despises him since she considers Ulf too old for her. On the weekend of the local ball, Nelly's biological mother Jenny (Marianne Löfgren) arrives in town with the intention of bringing Nelly to the big city to work with her in her beauty shop. In the ball, the naive Nelly feels attracted by Jack (Stig Olin), but she does not guess that he is Jenny's lowlife lover. Nelly decides to travel with Jenny to improve her future where she learns how tough life can be.

"Kris" is certainly dated in 2010, but it is still a great directorial debut of Ingmar Bergman. The dark and melodramatic story has a confused message of ingratitude – Why couldn't Nelly travel to the big city to learn a profession and earn money and still write to her beloved Ingeborg and visit her every now and then? Or Why the thirty and something year-old Ulf would be the best husband for Nelly if she does not love him? But this is a 1946 movie made immediately after-war when the values of the society would be different from the present days. My vote is eight.

Title (Brazil): "Crise" ("Crisis")

Already you can see the masterpieces that would follow.

[MOscarbradley · 9/10 · 4 February 2019]

Ingmar Bergman's first film is like a Bette Davis/Miriam Hopkins melodrama as written by Henrik Ibsen. Nelly is an 18 year old girl, abandoned by her mother in a small Swedish town and reared by kindly, dull Mutti. Then mother comes back to claim her and lure her to the big city. Throw in a sweet, slightly older man and a sexier, younger rapscallion both vying for Nelly's affections and you have a classic tale of mother love and thwarted passions that once might have been made by Edmund Goulding. But this is Bergman and already the psychological depths he would come to display in his later masterpieces is plain to see. The film unravels in a series of short scenes that seem to end almost before they begin. We are drip-fed information about each character; even a murder plot is thrown away as something incidental and in typical Bergman fashion, it's happy' ending is tinged with unhappiness.

Review - Kris (1946)

[Maxence_G · 8/10 · 21 June 2021]

Bergman's film debut begins with an introduction, a love letter to an unnamed small and calm village in Sweden. Notice how the narrator specifies that there is no train. Except for the bus carrying bad news, the village is isolated from the tormented worldly lifestyle. That unnamed village is, in reality, Hedemora, the only medieval city of Dalarna County. At first, as the narrator tells us the film is a comedy. In fact, at first, it is more precisely a romantic comedy having as pinnacle the waltz scene. But, the genius of Bergman regarding Crisis is how he seamlessly transforms it into a film-noir. The train portrays both literally and figuratively that change to a darker, grimmer story during the "laughing" scene. And, suddenly, the trees of Hedemora transform into the lampposts of the effervescent city, the splendid medieval architecture disappears.