Le conte du pont au moine

This is a great one. It is so enjoyable. It is Ingrid's first-ever movie. And it is such great fun. Gurkan is fantastic, as is the Count, and Adophson is very convincing as well. It's just good fun and leaves you feeling all good inside. Sorry that it can't be more eloquent than that. But if you saw the smile on my face...

What we have here is a mildly amusing crime comedy involving some booze hounds that may remind you of Steinbeck's denizens of TORTILLA FLAT. There is also a suspicious looking young man hanging around hotel maid Elsa (Ingrid Bergman), a blind man tapping his way around the Old Town, some belligerent cops, and a widow looking for a new husband. The old town has been plagued with a number of robberies lately, and Elsa thinks her new young man may be involved. See if you can figure it out, but don't take anything at face value!

Actually, this is a fairly routine little B pic, but it surely has one good thing going for it. That's Ingrid in her first film, and looking like she was born for the business. Some cavilling critics have said she was too plump, but to my discerning eye she was just right.

...from director Sigurd Wallen, which also marks the proper screen debut of Ingrid Bergman. In a rundown neighborhood of Stockholm known as Old Town, a motley assortment of characters go about their days getting into light mischief. There's the "Count" (Valdemar Dalquist), an old and affable man always on the hunt for a drink; Gurkan (Sigurd Wallen), the Count's pal and the henpecked partner of fishmonger Amalia (Tollie Zellman); innkeeper Borstis (Eric Abrahamsson) and his young cleaning girl Elsa (Bergman); and mysterious newcomer Ake (Edvin Adolphson) who may or may not be a wanted thief and bank robber.

This lightweight affair about poor but pleasant people making the best of the lives while also working and hoping for more reminded me a bit of the Marseilles Trilogy from Marcel Pagnol, the French film trilogy about workers along the waterfront. The characters are vivid and likable, even if the situations are at times a bit too regional. For instance, much is made about needing ration books to obtain liquor, but this isn't explained in any detail, so I'm not sure why there was rationing in pre-WW2 Sweden. I watched this for Ingrid Bergman, and she's not bad. Only 19 when this was filmed, she has quite a substantial role, and even gets to sing a few lines.

By all rights, this film should be lost. It's not a bad film, but it's mediocre to the extreme. A rare movie that ends up as being both confusing and predictable simultaneously. But it exists still because it was Ingrid Bergman's first speaking role in a film. And, well, she's great. She's much chubbier here than she was in later films, but as attractive as ever. She won a Best Newcomer award for the role in Sweden - deservedly. There is a nice musical number, which is reprised by Bergman later in the film. Also, the cinematography is very nice. Sweden developed that art quite nicely in the silent era, and the photography here is far nicer than is necessary. Other than that, though, the film is nothing special.

A former writer called this a B-movie, well it's actually not, it's the kind of movie that we made tons of in the 1930's, light entertainment with crooks slightly overdone, and therefor easy to point out. This movie would have been totally forgotten if it wasn't for the debut of Ingrid Bergman, and she is young and charming in this one. This kind of folksy commedies was very popular with the audiences at the time, but set wrath on critics who labeled this kind of movies Pilsner-movies (Pilsner was a non sparkling beer back then in the 1930s).

The alcoholic jokes in this movie dates back , like in USA they wanted the citizens to be sober once , and in Sweden we had something called the Mot-Book, that restricted any citizen to take out more than his or her ransion of alcohol per month.