CRISIS

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.