Bergman's paranoia runs dementedly and tediously out of control. A melodrama that never quite makes any connection to the characters within it. The movie is a cry of pain and protest, a loud and jarring assault, but it is not a statement and it is certainly not a whole and organic work of art. Ingmar Bergman comes very close to camp in this study of life or lack thereof in the decaying Berlin of the 20s. Well worth forking out for if you are a Bergman aficionado, or even just if you're interested in seeing the factors that led to World War II represented in a crime theatre scenario.
There are moments of genius and profound insights when you scratch below the surface. It takes some work though. Bergman's magic lantern now documents horrific experiments. It's an awkward, damp and barren film with miscast stars and filled with pretentious dialogue. The Serpent's Egg was Bergman's only English-language film, and it's also one of his most bitterly depressing and impenetrable.
A heavy film, but lacking the insight of much of Bergman's other work. By now ripe for rediscovery and reappraisal as an intensely personal work unlike anything else in Bergman's filmography. A rare Ingmar Bergman film that leans on plot over characterization, "The Serpent's Egg" is an atypical melodrama set in Berlin. Inflation is catastrophically high money value is measured by weight rather than denomination , and growing anti-semiticism foreshadows the coming Nazi regime. After nostalgic opening credits that suggest the creative synergy between Bergman and Woody Allen flowed both ways, the film begins with American-in-exile trapeze artist Abel Rosenberg David Carradine discovering brother Max's grisly suicide.
He delivers the news to Max's ex-wife Manuela Liv Ullman , now working in a sleazy cabaret, and soon moves into her room. From there, Jewish Abel fends off a local detective Gert "Goldfinger" Frobe hoping to frame him and puzzles over Manuela's second job with a ominous, secretive medical organization. The final act turns quite Kafka-esque, and is strangely flamboyant and unsubtle by Bergman standards. The director casts recognizable American actors Carradine, James Whitmore and Glynn Turman for international appeal the latter two's scenes are wholly trivial , but this compromise is a fatal mistake: Detached, wooden Carradine just isn't equipped for his part's challenges.
Unable to suggest any depth to his character's emotional life, the late "Kung Fu" star leaves a frustrating hole at the film's center. Commonly regarded as one of Bergman's biggest flops, "The Serpent's Egg" is not likely to benefit from contemporary reappraisals. I am really not quite sure what really is "The Serpent's Egg" more weighing flaw: The whole alienating premise of the film or David Carradine's robotic performance.
But basing my choice on my better judgment, I'm gearing more towards the latter. Throughout this whole Ingmar Bergman-directed feature, aside from that final, pseudo-scientific revelation, the film really felt nothing but an aimless exercise in existential angst.
The Serpent's Egg () - IMDb
With our disillusioned and hapless protagonist roaming the decaying streets of 's Berlin that is completely unaware of a governmental take-over being led by someone named Adolf Hitler, I think that the groundwork as to why he's slowly being consumed by despair was not properly established, resulting with us being left with a main character that is both underwhelming and emotionally plodding. I just don't think that David Carradine, a cult actor known for roles such as "Caine" in "Kung Fu" a bit unrelated but it's interesting to note that his character here is then named "Abel"; a sort of an unconscious biblical allusion and later as "Bill" in Tarantino's "Kill Bill", fits these kinds of roles.
He's just relatively too tough-looking to really make his character believable and empathetic. Even Liv Ullmann, an actress of great emotional depth, is a bit out of place playing a forgettable character. But then, there's Sven Nykvist's calculated cinematography that constantly puts dread and bleakness even in the most joyous cabaret settings and at the same time, finds emptiness even in a crowd. This is particularly evident in the film's impressive and disturbingly ambiguous opening scene that is, until the climactic final exposition where Nykvist has shot a scene of people of different ages and walks of life descending a stair with deeply melancholic and exhausted faces in stark, grainy black and white.
At certain points, the film's flimsy hands seem to let go of my already fleeting attention, but there's no doubt about the uncannily fascinating impression that the climactic 'explanation' scene, pulled off rather brilliantly by Heinz Bennent who played an experimentation scientist who knows the core secret as to why people like Abel are slowly slipping off from sanity, has left me.
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Yes, it does felt that that crucially revelatory sequence looked and sounded more like a scene that you may see from those 'mad scientist' movies rather than from 'art' films like this, but for it to prophetically foretell the Nazi revolution's supposed 'New Society' and at the same time highlighting and comparing its idealistic superiority to an old one founded by the goodness of man is truly unnerving and, in a way, very brave.
And considering that this is Ingmar Bergman's first and only Hollywood film, "The Serpent's Egg" should be remembered more as a testament of his unbounded audacity rather than as a disappointing speed bump in his otherwise flawless oeuvre. The Serpent's Egg is one of director Ingmar Bergman's most flawed and problematic pictures; the kind of film that impresses us with its grand ambition and incredibly intricate attention to detail, but seems to lack any sense of the pain, emotion and character examination that marked out his far greater works, such as The Seventh Seal , Wild Strawberries and Persona Of course, there are numerous references to these earlier films scattered throughout The Serpent's Egg, with the very Bergman-like notions of angst, catharsis and personal exploitation figuring heavily within this bleak malaise of abrupt violence, sleaze and alienation; as well as the familiar presentation of a central character who is a performer, thus leading to the usual self-reflexive conundrums that this particular structural device can present.
Within these confines, Bergman attempts to create a film that could satisfy two wildly differing creative view-points, only with both perspectives further muddied by the film's troubled production and by Bergman's perhaps misguided attempt to create a work that could be more acceptable to a mainstream, American audience.
On the one hand we have what would appear to be a straight, historical melodrama documenting the brutal decadence and oppression of the pre-Second World War Weimar Republic, and the struggle within this world of rising power, industry and an ever-changing political climate of the tortured artist attempting to make ends meet. With this angle, the film also attempts to chart the lingering air of violence and conflict left over from the First World War, whilst also prefiguring and foreshadowing the violence, guilt, hate, deceit and paranoia that would eventually follow with the inevitable rise of the Nazis.
This aspect of the film is perhaps less in keeping with the kind of work that Bergman was producing during this era, with the generic, historical aspect obviously showing through; taking the emphasis away from the characters and the duplicitous games that they play with one another when rendered in a claustrophobic, purely psychological state. This idea has defined the majority of Bergman's best work, with the simplicity of the story and the unpretentious presentation of two people simply existing within the same limited emotional space, which is too often lacking from the presentation of the film in question.
With The Serpent's Egg, Bergman attempts to open up his world, creating a fully functioning universe of characters and locations that jars against the ultimately personal scope of the narrative. Through punctuated by a couple of scenes of incredible violence, the earlier scenes of the film could be taken as a fairly dutiful stab at an almost Hollywood-like historical film, before adding this whole other narrative layer in the second act that seems to conspire to pervert the story into a tortured, Kafka-like nightmare of fear, paranoia and dread.
Here the film becomes interesting, because it gets to the root of Bergman's talent for exploring a path of personal despair and abject horror in a way that easy to appreciate on an emotional, psychological level. The film becomes more closed-in, as the locations are used more sparingly; the characters whittled down to the bare minimum, stressing the power games and confliction between the central couple and their seemingly perfunctory antagonist in a way that is reminiscent of a film like Shame As the story progresses further, we realise that the antagonist character is far from the token, mechanical villain, as Bergman introduces themes that tip the film into the realms of science-fiction, and yet, stories of this nature and urban legends are abundant when looking at the period leading up to the tyranny of Third Reich, and in particular the "work" of people like Josef Mengele and Horst Schumann amongst others.
This second half of the film ties the themes together in such a way as to overcome the central flaws of the film, which are numerous and seem to be the result of Bergman working towards the American market and in language that wasn't his own. There are some incredibly effective sequences, but too often, the script falls flat or the performances are allowed to wander.
Many also attribute the lead performance of David Carradine as a reason why the film doesn't quite work, and although I'm a fan of Carradine and his slow, laconic persona that was put to such great use in a film like Kill Bill , he does seem woefully miscast and at odds with the kind of expressionistic examinations that Bergman's work required I can't image the original choice of Dustin Hoffman working much better either. Ideally, the film would have definitely benefited from the appearance of, say, Max Von Sydow, but it's not like Carradine is terrible.
His heart and spirit are in the right place, and his continual appearance of pained confusion and eventual desperation seem to fit the continual stylistic juxtapositions of the script and are used well by Bergman, as both the character and the actor become puppet-like caricatures in a way that makes sense within the drama. Although The Serpent's Egg is, without question, a flawed work, it is not without merits. The period detail of the production and costume design and the atmosphere that Bergman evokes is fantastic throughout, while the second half of the film, with its lurid desperation and escalating sense fear and obsession makes sense within the context of Bergman's career as a whole.
Some of the images have the power and the potency to remains with the viewer long after the film has ended; while the significant horror of the film, and the roots with both pre and post war German history are, as far as I know, unique in contemporary cinema.
The Serpent's Egg
Often a rather ugly, brutal and depressing film, The Serpent's Egg is still required viewing for Bergman fans, even if it does pale in comparison to his far greater works. More Top Movies Trailers. DC's Legends of Tomorrow: Black Panther Dominates Honorees. Trending on RT Avengers: Post Share on Facebook. It is, however, his first completely non-Swedish production, made after his voluntary self-exile from Sweden over taxation issues.
Set in Berlin in the early s, it explores the fear and despair the city evokes in Manuela and Abel Rosenberg Liv Ullmann and David Carradine , two Jewish trapeze artists. The suicide of Manuela's husband Abel's brother , has stranded them in Berlin. Berlin is shown to already possess the sinister elements of cruelty and anti-Semitism which laid the groundwork for the later Nazi takeover. A series of misadventures gets them sent to a medical clinic for treatment. However, the clinic is actually a site for Nazi-type "racial" experiments on humans, which generally either madden or kill the subjects.
Das Schlangenei was savaged by the critics for its improbable-seeming story and more particularly, for casting David Carradine best known for his earlier appearances in the Kung Fu U. Liv Ullmann as Manuela Rosenberg. Abel asks why he is being shown all of these horrific bodies and is told that all of the mysterious deaths happened within the vicinity of his home.
He is told that he will have to remain in police custody until they are convinced of his innocence. Convinced that he is being set up due to his Jewish heritage he tries to escape the police station, but is quickly recaptured.
Manuela visits Abel in hospital where she informs him that all her money is gone but Abel does not confess. Abel is released due to lack of evidence and returns home with Manuela. However, on returning home Manuela is told by her landlady that Abel must leave because he and Manuela aren't married which the authorities do not approve of, so Manuela decides to leave with Abel.
As they prepare to leave, Manuela confesses to Abel that she actually works as a prostitute and merely made up her office job out of shame. November arrives and Germany has become ever more fearful that a bloody confrontation between extremist parties could soon plummet the country into another war. Abel and Manuela have found residence in another apartment on the outskirts of town.
Manuela leaves for work one morning but Abel secretly follows her, discovering that she has actually been going to church. She confides in the priest that she feels responsible for her husband's death and is struggling to maintain her new life with Abel as the two have become consumed by fear. That evening Abel discovers that Manuela acquired their new apartment by providing sexual favours to the owner of the brothel where she works.
He is initially disgusted and decides to leave and find his own place to live, but he soon returns and shares a passionate kiss with Manuela. One night while Abel and Manuela are enjoying a drink in the brothel and enjoying the cabaret, the brothel is over-run by soldiers who beat the owner to death before burning the building to the ground.
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Abel manages to secure himself a new job working as a clerk in a hospital, assisting with the archiving of patient cards while Manuela gains employment at the hospital clinic. They are also given an apartment surrounded by many derelict or empty buildings. One night Abel is alerted to files containing detailed reports of graphic and inhumane experiments conducted on patients at the hospital throughout the years. Suddenly Abel becomes even more fearful and paranoid to the point where he won't even allow Manuela to touch him and Manuela herself starts to suffer from extreme mood swings.
Abel gets drunk at a local bar and on his way home vandalizes a bakery and gets into a fight with the baker and his wife, but immediately has no recollection of why he did so. He is found in the street by a prostitute who convinces him to have sex with her which starts off normal enough but Abel soon becomes very sexually aggressive with her. Abel returns home to find Manuela dead on the kitchen floor and that the whole apartment is littered with cameras.
He flees the scene and soon finds himself in a mysterious, seemingly abandoned industrial building. Eventually he is discovered by an unknown attacker and the two fight in an elevator which Abel uses to cut off his attacker's head. He returns to the hospital and confronts the doctor about the inhumane experiments carried out at the hospital. This time Abel is shown footage of the horrific experiments which includes a woman left in a room for 36 hours with a brain damaged baby who will not stop crying, to the point where the woman was driven insane and smothered the baby.
The doctor claims that all of the subjects of these experiments were volunteers who he states "would do anything for a little money and a warm meal". Abel is then shown footage of a young man injected with a serum that drove him mad within the space of a few minutes, the effects of the drug wore off but the man committed suicide a few days later nonetheless. It is then revealed that Abel's brother Max was also a patient of theirs and in his desperation agreed to be injected with the serum as part of the experiment which later triggered his own suicide.
Abel then discovers that he and Manuela had been subjected to the hospital's latest experiments in which their apartment was regularly filled with a gas which caused their recent extreme mood swings. The doctor comments that he, his brother and Manuela were chosen randomly for these experiments and that their research was funded by "independent means" Implied to be Adolf Hitler. As the police arrive on the scene and attempt to enter the laboratory, the doctor swallows a cyanide capsule and states that Germany is in need of a revolution that ordinary people are too weak to carry out and that these experiments will benefit mankind in the long run, before dying.
Abel is later shown recovering from his ordeal in a psychiatric ward. The chief of police arrives to tell him that the circus have offered him his old job back and forces him to accept the offer to begin right away. He also mentions that the Nazi party's latest attempt to seize power has failed. In the film's closing moment a voice-over reveals that Abel escaped from police custody on the way to the train station and was never seen again.