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Music in Darkness
1948 Drama / Romance
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Credits
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Director: Ingmar Bergman
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Script: Ingmar Bergman, Dagmar Edqvist
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Photo: Göran Strindberg
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Music: Erland von Koch
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Cast: Mai Zetterling (Ingrid),
Birger Malmsten (Bengt Vyldeke),
Rune Andréasson (Evert),
Ulla Andreasson (Sylvia),
Gunnar Björnstrand (Klasson),
Hilda Borgström (Lovisa),
Åke Claesson (Augustin Schröder),
Bengt Eklund (Ebbe)
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Country: Sweden
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Language: Swedish
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Runtime: 87 min; B&W
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Aka: Music Is My Future; Musik i mörker; Night Is My Future
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Summary
Whilst attempting to rescue a puppy, Bengt, a young army cadet, gets himself shot on a
rifle range. Awaking from a coma, he discovers that he is blind. Rejected
by his fiancée, he finds comfort in the friendship of a peasant girl, Ingrid.
Bengt’s hopes for a career as a musician are shattered when he fails to enter the Royal
Music Academy. Instead, he finds work as a pianist in a cheap restaurant, which
he gives up when he realises he is being swindled by his boy helper. As Bengt’s
fortunes decline, Ingrid’s take a turn for the better. When they next meet, Bengt
has a poorly paid job in a school for the blind, whilst Ingrid is about to start a career
as a schoolmistress. By this time, Bengt realises that he is hopelessly in
love with Ingrid, but it is too late. She has another man in her life, and he is
not about to let her go...
Review
With three films under his belt, Ingmar Bergman’s prospects as a film director were not
looking all that promising. The failure of his first film
Crisis (1946) had lost him the confidence
of his first backer, Svensk Filmindustri. Two further flops for independent film
producer Lorens Marmstedt and Bergman was definitely heading for the door marked "exit".
Fortunately, Marmstedt wasn’t ready to give up on his protégé just yet and
gave him one more chance to prove his worth. However, strings were attached...
Insistent that the next film should be a commercial success, Marmstedt coerced Bergman
into making an adaptation of Dagmar Edqvist’s popular novel "Music in Darkness".
Whilst Bergman had little sympathy with the subject, he agreed to collaborate with Edqvist
on the screenplay. He also had to put up with no end of interference from Marmstedt
whilst making the film, suffering constant reminders that his job was to make money, which
meant giving the Swedish public what they wanted. Bergman may not have enjoyed the
experience but the film was a great success. Marmstedt had a shrewd idea of the
kind of film that would attract an audience, and Music
in Darkness was made to a recipe which would virtually guarantee a healthy return.
Not much place for the auteur in this scheme
of things.
Today, when one considers the whole body of Bergman’s film work, Music
in Darkness stands apart as a pretty flagrant departure into populist movie making.
From the opening scene, which looks like All Quiet on
the Western Front remade as an advertisement for a well-known brand of lavatory
paper, it’s obvious that what the audience is about to be offered is lowbrow schmaltz,
of the kind that would embarrass many a Hollywood film producer.
But Bergman is
never this straightforward, even when his paymaster is holding a gun to his head and saying
"make it sell". The fluffy puppy dog intro is immediately followed by one
of the most incredible sequences of any of Bergman’s films - a stunning series of surreal
images making up a bizarre Dali-esque dream. Of course, it’s the mother-of-all comedowns
when these remarkable images fade away and we end up back in pack-in-the-crowds melodrama
for the remainder of the film.
Music in Darkness
is certainly not Bergman’s greatest hour but the young filmmaker does put in some
touches of brilliance, even though it’s painfully obvious he’s not really enthused by
what he’s doing (compare this with the sustained intensity and poetry of his subsequent
films). Occasionally, the contrived melodrama does give way to genuine pathos as
Bengt (played very convincingly by Birger Malmsten) struggles against not just the disability
of his blindness but also the prejudice and malice of those he encounters.
Stylistically,
the film resembles the French poetic realist films of the 1930s (which Bergman admired
greatly and frequently emulated in his early films), with a number of scenes which pay
obvious homage to Marcel Carné et al. After the dream sequence at the
start of the film, the highpoint is the long sequence at the end of the film where the
solitary Bengt falls deeper and deeper into the mire of despair and hopelessness.
This is the one part of the film where Bergman appears to be genuinely inspired by his
subject, and the sequence is so intense, so bleak, that it is almost too painful to watch.
Of course, what follows - the crowd-pleasing ending - is as predictable as day following
night, and feels like a dollop of tomato ketchup has just landed on your favourite Cordon
Bleu dish.
The popularity of Music in Darkness
made Ingmar Bergman a far more attractive proposition for Svensk Filmindustri,
who immediately commissioned him to direct
Port of Call (1948). In later
years, Bergman recognised the immense debt he owed Lorens Marmstedt, without whose moral
and financial support his filmmaking career would most probably have been strangled at
birth.
© James Travers 2007
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