Smiles of a Summer Night

If anyone imagines that the export of The Sorceress, One Summer of Happiness, and Ingrid Bergman has emptied the Scandinavian fleshpots, he has only to go to the Brattle and taste Smiles of a Summer Night.

Ambitiously billed as starring Sweden's four most beautiful women, the film is a rather lengthy erotic comedy. It concerns the diversion of a lusty lawyer, played knowingly by Gunnar Bjornstrand. While he has affairs with an actress and with the wife of his rival for the actress, his maid, who is attracted to him but succeeds only in seducing his son (an erstwhile divinity student), carries on with a groom. The simplicity of these relationships is, however, complicated by the lawyer's virginal wife's elopement with her stepson, who has finally warmed to his work and abandoned all priestly pretensions.

Director Ingmar Bergman has succeeded in giving Smiles of a Summer Night a gay, satirical flavour which at times is all that saves it, for not all the characters act as well as Ulla Jacobson and Harriet Anderson look. What is most disappointing is Bergman's failure to make the most of his material, since many tiresome moments could be redeemed with more candid photography. The best performances are given by Bjornstrand and by Naima Wifstrand, who plays an aged courtesan with charm and familiarity.

The accompanying subtitles are inaccurate, incomplete and overly modest. On several occasions, as during a discussion of virginity, several minutes elapse with no subtitles whatever, and as the Swedish becomes more animated, the subtitles grow thinner.

But even this cannot obscure the show's succulent caprice, and as if this were not enough, a Magoo cartoon provides the maraschino to the sundae.