Miss Julie

The number of English, French, and Italian films imported into this country in the last few years has been so great that it is easy to forget anyone else in Europe is making any pictures at all. But the few Swedish movies that have trickled in the great flood prove that the big three don't have the same monopoly over quality which they seem to possess over quantity. Such films as Torment and The Great Adventure reveal the Swedes as masters of photographic technique with a special flair for subtle psychological themes.

Because it is basically a psychological study, August Stindbergh's play Miss Julie would seem to be uniquely suited to the talents of the Scandinavian film-makers. Yet the adaptation written and directed by Alf Sjoberg and filmed in 1952 is still rather disappointing. The weaknesses of the picture, however, lie in the original play.

Miss Julie chronicles the descent of the last member of a degenerate noble family into the open arms of the ambitious and amoral family coachman. Today, 67 years after the play was first produced, the social implications of such a liaison have lost much of their urgency. Sjoberg realized that and emphasized Strindbergh's nearly Freudian character study. Unfortunately, he did not quite succeed--Julie still remains, if not actually dull, at least somewhat remote.

Anita Bjorg, playing the title role, deserves much of the credit for keeping Miss Julie from becoming the complete bore that it might have been. She and director Sjoberg have conceived Miss Julie as a character balanced on the edge of madness. Bjork's performance is particularly impressive in those moments when the balances seems to be lost altogether.

A subtle and rather dream-like atmosphere of madness does, in fact, seep into most of the scenes of the film because of its unusual photographic technique. The camera seldom remains still for more than a moment before tilting upward to some tricky angle or plunging in for a close-up shot. A purist might well object that Strindbergh, a believer in the strictly life-like, naturalistic technique during the period in which he produced Miss Julie, would not have tolerated such an approach to his play. In the light of contemporary tastes, however, the film adaptation is still an improvement over the play on which it was based.