Music in Darkness (1948)

Recommended

Sweden

Feature Film

Original Title: Musik i mörker

Director: Ingmar Bergman

Writers: Ingmar Bergman, Dagmar Edqvist

Cinematographer: Göran Strindberg

Composer: Erland von Koch

Cast: Birger Malmsten, Mai Zetterling, Bengt Eklund, Rune Andréasson, Gunnar Björnstrand, Ulla Andreasson, Hilda Borgström, John Elfström

Generally dismissed as a commercial venture, Bergman’s Hollywood-like romantic melodrama – in which a handsome young musician, blinded whilst attempting to save a cute puppy at a shooting range (no, really!), slowly finds his place in the world – is actually rather entertaining and certainly more adult and progressive in its attitudes towards sex, faith, nudity, and pre-marital cohabitation than its American rivals, but never the less it’s hardly probing. Iain.Stott