clanciai Ingmar Bergman didn't always make good films. He generally scripted his films himself, and he obviously didn't notice or care when his scripts were not very good but filmed them anyway. Although not a bad film, this is not an altogether good script.David Carradine as Abel Rosenberg, an American Jew, comes to Berlin in October 1923 and finds his brother Max dead in his bed having shot his brains out. That's how it begins.The brothers were circus trapeze artitsts and out of work, and the dead brother had a girl friend (separated, Liv Ullmann,) who tries to take care of Abel, which is not very easy, since he is constantly misbehaving and spends every day and night drinking. The local police inspector, (Gert Froebe) with whom he got in touch concerning his brother's suicide, consults Abel over a number of mysterious and atrocious murders, and Abel gets into a paranoic state believing himself to be a suspect, which doesn't make his own situation any better.The character of the film is consistently depressive, and the occasional interesting moments are the insights into the extreme and absurd conditions of Berlin and Germany in 1923, which gave rise to Hitler. This makes it a fascinating time documentary. The cabaret scenes lift the show to a bizarre level of gleeful decadence, but they also gradually go from bad to worse, especially when they are interrupted by power cuts and brutal razzias by hoodlums.Bergman made this film in Germany while he was in exile from Sweden, chased out of the country by clumsy tax authorities, and he admits himself in his autobiography that he like many Swedes were ardent Nazis before the war. So there are some interesting explanatory excuses and motives for the film.It emanates into a Kafkaesque nightmare into an archive of terrible human experimentation, definitely heralding Nazism, and ultimately into a very dramatic finale with Heinz Bennent, another cavalier of Liv Ullman's, which gives the film its meaning, but you have to wait for it through many long and absurd scenes, many without reason or meaning.

ferdinand1932 The design, locations, photography and minor character actors all are excellent. Ullman seems unsure of what she is doing and Carradine just wanders and when he speaks it's unconvincing.The real problem is the script as Bergman made an elementary scriptwriting error, the sort of basic thing that is criticized at a first draft stage: the protagonist is not interesting and does not change but seeks information and so he goes from place to place all documenting the sordid life in Berlin in 1923 and making portentious allusions to Nazism, but as such he has little or no dramatic action until the end when he and the audience are told exactly why and what is going on. In a book that structure might have worked but not in film.

Cosmoeticadotcom When Ingmar Bergman was in self-imposed exile from Sweden, in the late 1970s, over a flap where he was accused by the Swedish government of tax evasion, he made several films abroad. One of them was The Serpent's Egg (Das Schlangenei-Örmens ägg), an English language film (his second- The Touch was the first) made in 1978, in West Berlin studios, for legendary film producer Dino de Laurentiis, who was reeling from the financial disaster that was his 1976 remake of King Kong. This film did nothing to change the producer's fortunes, as it is easily the worst Bergman film I've yet seen. This is a reputation that most other critics agree with, as well. That said, it is not really a bad film- merely a muddled and poorly edited one, and by Hollywood's dim standards, especially considering this is a horror film, it is quite complex and superior to films in that genre that had mass appeal, such as the Hollywood fare of the day, like the remake of Invasion Of The Body Snatchers and Coma.But, die-hard Bergmaniacs who have never seen it will be as repulsed as those to whom this film is an anomolous monstrosity. It is jagged, non-fractal, and often a totally disorganized mess. Yet, despite all that, it does come together quickly and cohesively in the last twenty minutes to provide a chilling and well acted end. If only the opening hundred minutes were even half as good this film might rank as a horror classic along the lines of Stanley Kubrick's The Shining. Yet, as poor as the bulk of the film is, what is even more astonishing is that Bergman, himself, is listed on IMDb as having written the screenplay. It seems hard to believe, as this is easily his worst screenplay- far worse than noble failures like Cries And Whispers, although the look of the film is unmistakably a Bergman film- from the musical score to the lighting and photography by Sven Nykvist.But, there are many problems besides the script…. All in all, The Serpent's Egg is to the Bergman canon what a film like Mr. Arkadin, that bizarrely brilliant abortion of a film, is to the Orson Welles oeuvre. That's to view it at its best. At its worst it is a bad sub-Kafkan work of art attempting to deal with the craziness that threads about the edges of individuals and societies. What is truly odd is that it narratively is 180° from the way most bad films unfold. Instead of fraying apart from a promising beginning, it is a mess that only near its conclusion seems to find its focus. The last twenty minutes are truly excellent, and Bergman at his best. Interestingly, it is also the only time the film really gets really 'personal' with its until then undeveloped lead character. Until then, it is off the rack and unspun. Bergman fans should watch this film, though, for in failures one can see the architecture that great artists use successfully in their great works, but which the greatness hides. Here, a faltering Bergman has the curtain pulled back, and we see him not as The Wizard Of Oz, merely as odd. Shiver.

nstro3zy Let me preface by saying that I love Bergman films; Persona, Shame, and The Passion of Anna are among my all-time favorites. This is probably his weakest effort. There are so many things wrong with this film, but most of them are rooted in the underdeveloped characters. I had no feeling for Abel, whereas I should have identified with him fully; his character felt like little more than a vehicle to display the images that Bergman had in his head. The characters are secondary to the plot, which isn't a problem when the storyline is interesting and absorbing, but in this case there is very little to speak of in the way of a story. What it basically boils down to is that bad things happen to some Jewish guy with an American accent who is living in Germany. This somehow translates into a statement on the early warning signs of Nazism in Germany and the futility of life. The characters and story aren't fleshed out enough to carry the weighty themes that Bergman is trying to hoist on the viewer.