Cabaret Act

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

THE SERPENT'S EGG

Directed and Written by Ingmar Bergman

In Hollywood it is called "working the set." It happens when a producer has ordered up some costly and elaborate make-believe edifice that he wants on the screen constantly, shot from as many angles as possible, in order to justify its expense. Far from resisting this demand, the director will typically respond with bursts of enthusiastic inventiveness--a kid playing happily with a splendid new toy.

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 of day and night in every variety of weather. One imagines Bergman lighthearted, free of the tax troubles that drove him from Sweden, free too of constraints imposed upon him by the cramped studio and the equally confining island location where so many of his films were shot. It must have been fun for him to work with a big budget for a change. Considering the gifts he has given us over the years, one must also be happy for his happiness, and for this lavish demonstration that even the greatest of artists is only human, that is to say, capable of self-indulgence on a grand scale.

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.

It is 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 suspicion because a number of people he has known have died similarly violent and mysterious deaths. While the cops investigate, Abel takes up desultorily with his brother's widow (Liv Ullmann). They are befriended by an acquaintance of their youth, now a doctor (Heinz Bennent) doing some sort of secret research at a nearby hospital. Since he carries himself in the manner of Helmut Dantine when he was playing Gestapo officers some 35 years ago, one can guess that the doctor's work is not going to earn him the thanks of a grateful world.

Sure enough, it develops that all those nasty deaths are the by-products of Bennent's work on mind-bending, and breaking, drugs. When Ullmann becomes his last victim, Carradine unmasks the dastard, who promptly kills himself, by heavy-handed irony, on the very day that Hitler's beer-hall putsch is put down. Bergman makes colorful, melodramatic stuff out of all this, but that is all. He adds nothing to the basic popular understanding of modern German history. The characters have no intrinsic interest, although Gert Frobe does a nice turn as a police inspector-existentialist who seems to have wandered into the film from a Camus novel, or maybe it was only a Simenon. Poor James Whitmore has the unhappy lot of doing Bergman's standard blather about the distance of God but may count himself luckier than the leads. Whitmore at least knows what he is supposed to represent. Ullmann and Carradine are simply cast adrift with nothing much to do but lend scale to the street scenes and the vast historical forces that Bergman comprehends only fitfully. His true province is the soul, not history. One can forgive his honorable artist's ambition to deal with the latter, but one can also hope for an early return to the former.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.