TrueJoshNight Truly Dreadful Film

Ceticultsot Beautiful, moving film.

ChampDavSlim The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

Humaira Grant It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

Michael_Elliott Smiles of a Summer Night (1955) **** (out of 4) Delightful romantic comedy from Ingmar Bergman about various couples whom end up at an estate where love, relationships and sex are the topics. It took about ten minutes for me to warm up to the film but once the action (ala dialogue) got started the film just flew by with plenty of nice laughs as well as some terrific dialogue. The performances by the entire cast were terrific, especially Gunnar Bjornstrand and Ulla Jacobson. It's hard to believe that Woody Allen failed to capture much of this film's humor with his semi-remake A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy.

evanston_dad Ingmar Bergman lightens up considerably to deliver this romantic comedy of manners set in a magisterial country estate. The film contains all of the elements you would expect from a bedroom farce: young foolish lovers; older, wiser ones; arch rivals; a duel. It's by far Bergman's most accessible film and it makes one wish the super-sober director had let his hair down more frequently.Woody Allen aped "Smiles of a Summer Night" in "A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy," but that film does not do justice to the original material. Stephen Sondheim, on the other hand, improved greatly on Bergman's original film in his Broadway musical "A Little Night Music." It's more magical, more wistful and much funnier than Bergman's version.Grade: B+

sol- The bouncing music and rather silly acting inform us that what we are watching is a comedy. If it were not for those two aspects, it would be easy to mistake the film for a plain drama. The reason for this is that there are no jokes or gags as such. Bergman injects into the script a few witty lines, but I can only guess that some humour is meant to blossom from the film having a satirical viewpoint on love. A comedy does not have to be funny for it to be effective, but if it is not funny it makes the comic aspects redundant. The characters are all developed around love and desire, rather than their own character traits, and there are a few others thing that one could complain about, but either way the film nevertheless says a few things about love. As usual Bergman does a great job setting up all the shots. It is interesting stuff on a visual level, with fitting lighting choices and some long pans. And as with just about every Bergman film, it is worth a look. However, it is difficult for me to recommend this awkward comedy as one of his better films, even though it is the film that really brought Bergman into the spotlight.

writers_reign Having seen the Musical version of this film, A Little Night Music, several times I watched the movie with one eye on how faithfully it had been adapted and the other as if I were adapting it into a musical and looking for suitable places to 'spot' numbers. On balance I found the adaptation remarkably faithful to Bergman with perhaps the character of Desiree's mother enlarged slightly and all the names and most of the situations retained. Not being so informed about Bergman and his oeuvre as I might be I had somehow formed the impression that he made this light comedy quite some time after and as something of a break from and a contrast to his early dark work like Seventh Seal so I was surprised to read here that Smiles in fact preceded Seal. It should not, of course matter where a given title occurs in a filmmakers catalogue all that should matter is how well he made the film in question. Overall in this case I'd say pretty well. After a slight irritation of the clumsy exposition in which two of the clerks employed by the chief character, lawyer Fredrik Egerman, tell each other (and us) that 1) Fredrik has two tickets for the theatre where the star of the show, Desiree Arnfeld, used to be his mistress and 2) that he will be going with his new wife, Anne, who is half his age and leaving his son, Henrik, by a previous marriage, at home, it settled down into a well observed comedy of manners owing a little to a current American film, Baby Doll, in its central story of a child bride who refuses to consummate the marriage but then spinning off another series of lovers both star-crossed and otherwise. The cast reads like a roll call of the Bergman stock company, Harriet Andersson, Ulla Jacobsson, Gunnar Bjornstrand, Eva Dahlbeck etc and not unnaturally they play as an ensemble. As several other people have said here this is as good and as painless an introduction to Bergman as any.