Skepp till India land

Alexander's a terrible parent, his attitude completely aberrant, treats Alice a slave, gallivants misbehaves, believes Sally can make him content (he's never come to terms with his son's affliction).

Alice's dream has been shattered, the cottage and pension in tatters, her husbands' new hopes, leave her on the ropes, their love, devotion, all but scattered (treated like a second class person and casually discarded).

Sally reached for the hand proffered, escaping surrounds she'd been coffered, didn't reckon on Johannes, or her saviour's menace, has to live with the choice going forward (who wouldn't latch onto something that can pull them from the depths).

Johannes back from seven years, at sea to wash away all the tears, finds Sally alone, isolated and prone, sets his sail to remember past fears (afflicted from birth, both physically and psychologically).

Exploring past events between a son and his toxic father, the events leading up to the son's departure and the love he left behind under challenging circumstances. Sincere and great performances in a truly engaging tale.

But it's not one of his best. The characterizations of the film's protagonists are inconsistent from scene to scene and some of them leave a viewer with many unanswered questions (like the mother's motivations.) Beyond that, the cinematography is pretty dowdy, particularly the exterior footage.

Still, it has elements that Bergman fans will recognize from his more famous films, and it contains sequences of despair and anguish that can haunt a viewer days later. Birger Malmsten, who plays the lead character Johannes and who will be seen in several later Bergman films, is immensely likable and compelling as the hunchback son who finally stands up to his despotic father. While many of the early Bergman films are uninteresting at almost every level ("Port of Call," for instance) this one is well worth a look for the hard core Bergmaniac, if you can find it.

I'm not a movie expert by any means but I do really enjoy noir movies from the forties and fifties and especially foreign ones. Each week I search the internet to discover a good one I haven't seen. A Ship to India certainly satisfies the noir in me. However the morals of the 3 main characters are pretty shocking for a 1947 movie. Attempted rape, adultery, drunkenness, prostitution, and infidelity on two fronts. Also attempted suicide. If this is what you like you'll enjoy if but you're a Casablanca , Silence of the Sea kind of person like me, this will be too impure. I like to feel satisfied at the end of a movie but with this one infidelity wins.

Two men on a ship are fighting for the affections of a woman. In 1962 Roman Polanski had a breakthrough with this in the film "Knife in the water". In 1947 however Bergman was still learning and the quality of "A ship bound for India" in no way justified a breakthrough.

In "A ship bound for India" the two men are father and son, and by Bergman this signals an autobiographical element, the more so when the father is very authoritarian. The son resists the authority of his father and the woman "only" is a catalyst of this resistance. "Only" is however put a little too mildly because the woman gives the boy the needed self confidence to change his silent resistance into explicit resistance.

The film has some weak points. In the first place the father is too much the bad guy and the son too mucht the good guy. Secondly the father is authoritarian in a fysical way, in other words he is violent. I think the film would have been more interesting had the father been authoritarian in a spiritual way and the fight of the son was not to become as strong as his father but to develop his own personality.

In one scene Bergman shows his potential as the great director he would become. The diving scene, working magnificently with shadwos, is pure expressionism.

All the Bergman complexes are already here: the dysfunctional family, the tyrannical father, the struggling sex disturbances, the human decadence, the claustrophobia, the inferiority complex, it's all here bundled up in a rotten ship trying to salvage a wreck, with a few able seamen but a captain that constantly ruins everything, it's all sordid and dreadful, even the dialog is constantly strained, the emotional outbursts keep on rolling, but the whole thing is wonderfully filmed with Bergman's famous and unique sense of imagery. A failure of a captain has a hunchback for a son, whom he keeps as a slave more or less, he wants to become a seaman, but the father keeps him hard at work with dirty things, and so there is a constant conflict brewing up. The captain wants to go away and leave everything, wife and son and crew and ship, to escape with a variety girl, but she falls in love with the son, while the captain is going blind. What a mess! It's the son that ultimately goes away, but comes back after seven years to find the wrecks of his previous life and the girl, whom he imagines has been waiting for him for seven years, as he has been dreaming of her for seven years, but that romantic construction is not quite convincing. The assets of the film are the splendid photography and imagery, and a wonderful score by Erland von Koch.