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The Serpent's Egg

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In The Serpent's Egg, Ingmar Bergman uses Hollywood dollars to create a creepy 1920s Berlin that is both homage to the masters of German Expressionist film and a comment on the conditions that led to the rise of Nazism. Released in 1978, the movie wasn't a commercial success. Some critics blamed the script, particularly the dialog, which had a one-level-removed literalness to it. (This was one of the few films Bergman made in English.) Liv Ullmann, always a perceptive analyst of the director's work, thought the scale of the film overwhelmed him; the focus on crowd shots and lavish sets took him away from his central strength, which was the unflinching examination of the human personality under stress.

The movie isn't completely captivating, but not because it's written in English or because a lot of money was spent on sets. The main problem seems to be Bergman's limited emotional insight into the moral and social ambiguities of 1920s Berlin.

Abel Rosenberg, an American Jew, has been wandering through Europe as part of an acrobatic troupe with his brother Max and Max's wife. (Abel is played by David Carradine, an American actor best known for his role as a Kung Fu master on American TV.) Injury breaks up the troupe, and his brother's marriage. They land in Berlin, where Abel drifts through his days while the political situation deteriorates around him. One night he comes home to the room that they share and finds Max's brains all over the wall. The external action turns on Abel trying to find out why his brother killed himself. This leads him into ever darker encounters with the police, Nazi thugs, and an enigmatic scientist he knew back in Philadelphia.

The emotional center of the movie is Abel's relationship with Manuela (Liv Ullmann), his brother's ex-wife, who works as a cabaret performer. In an interview, Carradine said that although he felt privileged to work with Bergman, the real reason he wanted to make this movie was to work with Ullmann, who at that time was the "hottest actress on the planet." As a woman adrift in a strange city, looking for something or someone to grab hold of, Ullmann gives her usual nuanced, emotionally honest performance. Manuela feels she must take care of Abel, and soon they're living together and struggling to survive on the hyperinflated currency of the time. (Bergman was having difficulties in Sweden over his taxes when he made The Serpent's Egg, which may explain the fetishistic handling of dollars and marks throughout the movie.) Abel, in typical Bergman fashion, both wants and fears the intimacy Manuela offers. Abel drinks, the situation deteriorates, Manuela falls ill. Suffice it to say, there's no happy ending here.

Bergman's metaphor for this dark social period is the serpent's egg, which allows you to see the shape of the snake through the thin membrane of the shell. Nazism was there to see, he's saying, if you chose to look. Of course, many didn't, preferring to spend their time in that other symbol of pre-WW II Germany, the cabaret. A good portion of this movie is shot in the cabaret where Manuela works, and it's here that Bergman' imagination fails him, I think, because he doesn't seem to grasp the nuances of the cabaret metaphor, which was much more richly used in Bob Fosse's 1972 movie Cabaret, which grew out of Christopher Isherwood's book, Berlin Stories.

Bergman's cabaret is one dimensional, a tawdry troupe of actors offering second rate diversions. It stands in for a society that refuses to make individual commitments to impose its collective will to block the spread of evil. At the end of the film, the Nazis wreck Manuela's cabaret, brutally beat the owner, and set the place on fire. Art, Bergman seems to say, isn't powerful enough to oppose focused political will.

In Fosse's hands, cabaret life cuts in many directions. It was a defiant response to the hardship and misery of the times; a willed refusal to give in to despair; an affirmation of the power of the imagination to transcend circumstances. It was also about moral weakness, based on self-delusion and self-indulgence. And it collaborated with the coming evil by creating a distraction that allowed fascism to take root and flower - singing louder to drown out the stomp of the jackboots. Fosse, the Broadway song and dance man, seems better able to portray the willed self-deception of this decadent time than Bergman, the clear- eyed Swedish nihilist.

In the Serpent's Egg, Bergman transfers his usual preoccupation about the disintegration of an individual personality under social pressure from a personal to a political context. See The Serpent's Egg for the intellectual and aesthetic pleasures you'll get from any Bergman movie - there's always something astonishing to be pulled from Bergman's fevered imagination. See it also for the lurid and mesmerizing Expressionist nightmare created by master cinematographer Sven Nykvist. If you want to empathize with entertainers caught in history's vise, and to understand why the German people got hypnotized by the Nazis, see Bob Fosse's Cabaret.

"The newspapers are black with fear, threats and rumours. The government seems powerless. A bloody confrontation between the extremist parties appears unavoidable. Despite all this, people go to work, the rain never stops and fear rises like vapour from the cobblestones". These phrases, said by an unknown narrator, are a clear description of the dark mood that permeates this film.

The main character is Abel Rosenberg (David Carradine), an American circus artist who is stranded in Berlin along with his brother Max and Max's former wife Manuela (Liv Ullman), due to an injury that rendered Max unable to perform their trapeze act. Things deteriorate as they run out of money, as the general situation for all those living in Germany worsens too. It is the 1920's, and the whole country suffered from inflation, unemployment, and periodic outbursts of Anti-Jewish sentiment. Berlin wasn't a good place to live for anybody at that time, but the situation for the Rosenbergs was even worse, because they were poor, unemployed, Jewish and foreigners.

"The serpent's egg" (1977) begins with Max committing suicide, as an act of utmost desperation. After that, Abel is left with Manuela as his only ally in a place that steadily becomes fulls of omens presaging misfortune. To endure the mere fact of being alive when his brother is not, Abel gets drunk every day. The irreality that alcohol offers offers him is the only way of fighting fear, fear of what is happening in Berlin, and of what he sees looming in the horizon. In Abel's words, "I wake up from a nightmare, and find that real life is worse than the dream".

Evidently, Abel Rosenberg is an unlikely main protagonist, because he doesn't do much, merely existing in an unfriendly environment, taking in all that is happening without doing anything to change it. But maybe that is the task that the director, Ingmar Bergman, gave to him: to act as an eyewitness of times to come.

Near the end of the movie, we get an explanation regarding the title of this film. One of the secondary characters, a crazy scientist bent on experimenting on human beings, says that "... anybody who makes the slightest effort can see what is waiting in the future. It's like a serpent's egg: through the thin membranes, you can clearly discern the already perfect reptile". I think that Bergman tried to point out that the germs of Nazism were already in place long before Hitler seized power. The serpent's egg was there, and nobody tried to destroy it.

On the whole, I heartily recommend this movie. It is certainly gloomy, and doesn't get better near the end. Nonetheless, it is a masterpiece, because through a simple story, dark colours, metaphors, and flawless performances the director managed to convey what the mood of 1920's Berlin might have been like, and the kind of situation that can pave the way for a totalitarianism. After watching "The serpent's egg" you won't feel like singing, but you will certainly feel like thinking...

Belen Alcat

The only thing I want to add to the many insightful comments of others is that this is one of the greatest horror films ever made. Yes, I know it doesn't have any of the stock supernatural props we associate with that genre, but it has the trapped-forever-in-a-nightmare atmosphere of the deepest nihilistic horror. It will haunt you.

Favorite moment: Protagonist is approached in the night by a prostitute:

Protagonist: "Go to Hell!"

(Prostitute, laughing): "Where do you think you are?"

The story behind this film is almost as strange as the film itself. Bergman had become good friends with famous Hollywood producer Dino de Laurentiis, and after his self-imposed exile from Sweden, decided to finally marshall some financial muscle to make a film he'd long been thinking of, based on a dream he had of Berlin in the 1920s. This was his second and last English language film. It stands alone in Bergman's canon; its a large production, with lavish sets and hundreds of extras, and an American film star. Critics and fans have always given this film mixed, or even ambivalent, reviews, but I've always liked it. The common reaction to this film (the one I had the first time) is that its "unBergman" in some way. Its a mistake, I believe now. Its just Bergman on another scale. The drama of two American circus performers caught in pre-war Germany; a place where penny-prophets and revolutionaries thrive in a chaotic pit of poverty, self-destruction, and lechery; delineates brilliantly into a mad expressionist nightmare. The pacing in this film is spectacular -- its great to see that a huge production didn't damage Bergman's narrative gifts.

It'd be hard to reduce this film to a concise intellectual statement. The traditional Bergman themes of a distant God, indifferent Man, and a foundationless destructive nature in man and community, are all represented. But beyond that, Bergman doesn't add new dynamics. I think this is because the aim of this film was different than his others -- he was trying to capture the essence of his dream, a feeling, not a statement. The problems with the presentation arise because Bergman throws in too much context, historical foreshadowing, and an awkward plot resolution. This film would've done better to have disposed of its logic and any pretentions it had to an intellectual statement, operating solely as a cinematic poem. I think Bergman realized this when he criticized the film in his Images: My Life in Film, when he stated that he'd made the actual Berlin, rather than the one in his dream.

The transfer here is beautiful. This is the best I've ever seen the film. Liv Ullmann is absolutely incredible, but Carradine is stiff, and his performance is too stagey and American to really fit in. But his physical prowess did add a new dimension to the film, particularly since the sometimes too-static Bergman needs all the help he can get in that departement.

*Extras:
"Away From Home" is an interesting segment of interviews with Ullmann, Carradine, and Bergman (the latter interview from 1970, seven years before this film was made). Carradine, in particuar, is interesting to hear for his sheer egomania. "German Expressionism" is Marc Gervais trying, painfully, to relate his realization of this films referential nature to German expressionism and Noir. It takes him 10 minutes to spit it out. Trailer is beautiful. Carradine gives the film commentary, which is rife with factual errors, and mostly deals with his own acting style and career (what an ego this guy has!). Toward the end, he stops commenting for entire segments. However, its still very interesting and a welcome change from Gervais.

Not Bergman's best by a longshot. But Bergman fans will like it, and others should find it extremely interesting.

Ingmar Bergman's "The Serpents's Egg" was met with critical derision and popular indifference when it was first released. Some thought cynically that it was an awkward attempt by Bergman to crack the commerical American market (it's in English, unlike all his other films other than "The Touch.") And it was on a trendy subject (Nazism) and in an unfamiliar genre for the director (the thriller.) As the years have gone by, however, we as the audience have become more used to post-modernism and genre self-reflection in movies, like the self-conscious referentiality to other films of the "Star Wars" series; or the work of Quentin Tarantino. It's now possible to see "The Serpent's Egg" more clearly as Bergman's homage to German Expressionist horror cinema. It's like "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" or "M" filtered through Bergman's own unique vision. It's a master critique of a genre by a master filmmaker who deploys his usual obsessions in a startlingly different way. Later films bear the same imprint as "The Serpent's Egg", like Steven Soderbergh's "Kafka", David Lynch's "Eraserhead" and "The Elephant Man", or Woody Allen's own "Shadows and Fog."

But maybe it's not such a big departure for Bergman as some thought. He had made genre films before. "Hour of the Wolf" and "Cries and Whispers" had elements of horror. "Shame" was a larger-than-usual-scale war film. "The Silence" is about political upheaval. It's thrilling to see Bergman's version of a more sleazy, horrific "Cabaret". David Carradine is oddly passive as the hero, the Jewish acrobat Abel Rosenberg, but his victimization fits the film's theme. One can argue that Bergman's unpleasant encounter with the Swedish tax collectors that led to his exile to Germany gave him a new appreciation of the dangers of totalitarian impulses even in a supposedly "benign" welfare state like Sweden. "The Serpent's Egg" is a terrifying portrait of the human hubris that eventually led to Nazi experiments of human beings in the concentration camps. And despite the "mad scientist" trappings, it's a convincing, despairing examination of the fascist world view. Bergman fans should definitely take another look at this film. It really is a neglected treasure.

Fear, Loathing, and Despair in Berlin, November 1923

This film universally considered "the master's failure" but I don't agree with the statement. It is very different from the rest of Bergman's films I've seen but that does not make it failure for me. It is only Bergman's second film in English and it boasts an unusual for his films large budget (Dino De Laurentis was a producer) with enormous and elaborate sets. Bergman was able to recreate on the screen Germany (Berlin) of 1920th exactly how it was seen in the films of 1920th German directors - Fritz Lang's films come to mind first. Another film that The Serpent's Egg reminded me of was Bob Fosse's Cabaret - the theme of the Feast during the Time of Plague sounds very prominent in both films, and the cabaret's musical numbers in Bergman's film could've came from Fosse's. I was very impressed by Liv Ullmann's singing and dancing in the beginning of the film - she can do anything.

In spite of the film's obvious differences from Bergman's earlier work, it explores many of his favorite themes. It is in part a political film about the helpless, distressed and terrorized members of society that face the merciless and inevitable force of history and are perished without a trace in the process. Also like the earlier films, The Serpent's Egg explores its characters' self-isolation, inability to communicate, their attempt to cope with the pain of living, their despair, fear, and disintegration.

The Serpent's Egg may not be a perfect film and a lot has been said about the abrupt and heavy handed ending, the dialogs that don't always work, and David Carradine's performance as a main character. Perfect or not, I think it is an interesting, visually always amazing (cinematography by Sven Nykvist is above any praise) and very honest and thorough study of the human condition in the unbearable situation.

In the documentary 'Serpent's Egg: Away From Home' (2004), Ingmar Bergman, Liv Ullmann and David Carradine talk about making the film, how it started and how and why it was so different. Liv said that couple of years ago she and Bergman had seen The Serpent's Egg for the first time, and they both liked it. I am in a good company, then, because I believe that Serpent's Egg is an unforgettable film and everyone who was involved in making it should not be ashamed of it. I am yet to see a Bergman's film that I don't like.

This film usually gets terrible reviews. Many have said that it doesn't feel like a Bergman film (it's in English, and it was, at least for Bergman, an expensive production). Regardless, it is an incredibly dark, disturbing film, reminiscent of Pasolini's Salo. It's not sexually explicit like Pasolini's work is, but in terms of hopelessness and despair, it has much in common with Pasolini's film. Bergman called this his "horror" film, and I think he succeeds rather well. He handles English better here than in The Touch, an earlier English language film, and the performances are very good. The final 20 minutes are some of the most intense, troubling, and horrifying images committed to celluloid. A film filled with despair and hopelessness. If you like that sort of thing (as I sometimes do), watch this. If you like your films cheery and easy, stay away...

This is definitely one of those art films that few people will "get" and even fewer will like. I think it is worth watching in order to see what Bergman did with an unlimited budget, his first Hollywood producer, and an international cast.

Some people may not realize that when Bergman chose Carradine to star in THE SERPENT'S EGG he was fresh off the success of tv's KUNG FU and had 35 state plays, two tv series, and numerous starring and leading roles in movies under his belt. He was nominated for the Academy Award for his role as Woody Guthrie in BOUND FOR GLORY (1976). While researching Carradine's movies, over and over again I read the phrase, "Who would have thought that David Carradine could turn in such an excellent performance?" Yet he does, time and time again, and has moved under the radar of public and critical attention for over 25 years.

As Carradine says in his commentary, it's a hard movie to watch twice, yet I was fascinated by his insight into the production, Bergman's style and methods, and the plot. THE SERPENT'S EGG is a mixture of 1920's style German expressionism, human despair, psychothriller, political commentary, and science fiction. It tackles the subject of proto-Nazi human experimentation in a world where the government controls every detail of a man's life. When the opening scene involves a man discovering his brother's suicide, you know you're in for a bumpy ride.

I found the commentary sparing and insightful. I hate those commentary tracks where actors and others talk, talk, talk but say very little. It was refreshing that when he had nothing to add, Carradine was quiet and let the movie speak for itself.

The DVD Savant says of the commentary, "A relaxed and friendly David Carradine provides an informative commentary. He treats the experience as if he were an explorer returned from a strange land with a story he barely expects people to believe. I wasn't expecting such insights from this year's KILL BILL, and the track makes me want to revisit older Carradine performances, like his interesting cop in the oddball monster movie Q THE WINGED SERPENT. I never met an oddball movie I didn't like."

Neither have I. THE SERPENT'S EGG qualifies as one oddball movie, and I hope you'll see it and give the commentary a chance.

This movie has a notorious reputation for being Bergman's 'worst film.' His collaborators have stated that he was overwhelmed by the demands of supervising a large crew; additionally, Bergman had never made a film on anything approaching a typical Hollywood budget. THE SERPENT'S EGG was supposed to be Bergman's break-through to the mainstream film market. Indeed, even though the film flopped in America, it made decent money in Europe, and became Bergman's largest grossing film of all time.

It's true, from the outset, that you can sense this isn't a typical Bergman movie. The emotional intimacy present in his previous films is gone. Bergman, who visualized things microscopically, was being asked to visualize macroscopically. The expansive vision of this film seems antithetical to the introspective Berman. His talent was most evident when he worked in small, manageable environments, focusing on individual actors. Here, he is trying to recall a time and place that demands meticulous attention to detail: Weimar Berlin. Bergman was in over his head.

There are certain elements of the film that were almost certainly a bow to the financial realities of working with producer Dino de Laurentiis (whose production company ultimately went broke in the 80's). For instance, the film stars David Carridine, who was a hot commodity at the time, but seems lost in this film; he is unable to respond to Bergman's direction and equally unable to respond to the script's visceral material. It's worth noting that longtime Bergman collaborator Liv Ullman seems at a bit of a loss, too. She turns in a very lukewarm performance, rising to the occasion only once in the whole film.

Despite all of this, THE SERPENT'S EGG is a good movie. But they key to finding the film's merits is the understanding that you have to look at the film NOT as a typical Berman movie, but rather, as Bergman trying to create a piece of German Expressionist cinema. Many aspects of the production, including the sets and the cinematography, echo the work of directors like Fritz Lang, F.W. Murnau, and G.W. Pabst, who comprise the backbone of 1920's German film. THE SERPENT'S EGG is not so much an homage as it is a re-imaginging of the German Expressionist milieu.

The film coalesces in the last 20 minutes, and it is a bit of a slog to that point. But it is ultimately worth it. The numerous red herrings that Bergman throws in seem sloppy because they ultimately do not contribute to the film's coherence; they seem to work against the main storyline rather than add to it. The film seems overlong and lumbering at times, and it is hard to say if that is an intentional aesthetic element or just Bergman's uneven performance as director. The end, however, is as chilling as any you'll find in film noir, containing a twist that echoes both Kafka and Musil.

... especially since that actor was the central character Abel Rosenberg, over-acted by David Carradine. It's painful -- and if you're an American film fan , embarrassing -- to watch Carradine lurch and grimace in the fine ensemble of German actors cast in "The Serpent's Egg", let alone to see poor Liv Ullmann try her damnedest to connect with him dramatically. Carradine is no Max von Sydow or Erland Josephson, those superb Swedish actors who made Bergmann's scripts work. Carradine lacks their control of their faces, their moments, and their voices, in short their ability to express much with little. Carradine can't even make his American speech patterns sound authentic. He's a total dud in this film.

Nonetheless, the film came close to horrifying brilliance. It's set in Berlin in 1923, at the moment of Hitler's attempted Putsch in Munich, and it's as much a depiction of the debacle of German society as of the individual debacle of the man Abel Rosenberg, an American Jewish trapeze artist stranded without a job in hyper-inflationary Weimar Germany. Rosenberg slumps into drunken apathy approaching catatonia while Germany lurches toward ... well, you know what. Abel's circus partner Manuela (Ullmann) is working in a 'cabaret' with back-room services for paying guests. The ambience of the film will remind everyone of "Cabaret", but Bergmann's decadence-in-Berlin is nastier, tawdrier, bloodier than Bob Fosse's, and more horribly realistic. I have no doubt that Ingmar Bergmann was acquainted with the great German novelists of the 1920s and 1930s -- Joseph Roth, Alfred Döblin, Hans Fallada -- and "The Serpent's Egg" comes extremely close to their excruciating vision of impending calamity. If Hans Fallada had written a film script, it might have played out a lot like this film. The police inspector in "The Serpent's Egg" is a dead ringer for the detective in Fallada's "Every Man Dies Alone".

Bergmann's "neuen Sachlichkeit" portrayal of sleaze and anti-semitism gradually darkens in a Hitlerian nightmare of eugenic experiments and captivity in a labyrinth as surreal as one designed by Jorge Luis Borges. In other words, it spirals from grim to horrifying. Hey, meine Damen und Herren, films about Nazism are never going to be fun! This one concludes with a searing irony. Rosenberg's worst fears for himself and for Manuela are exceeded in nastiness, but the well-meaning Social Democrat police inspector congratulates himself and his German Democracy on the fiasco in Munich of 'that foolish little man Hitler'.