A French review by the budding film director Jean-Luc Godard declared that Sommarlek (1951) was "the world's most beautiful film".
A minor detail of special interest to Swedish audiences concerns the film's animated sequences, which were made by a very young Rune Andréasson, creator of the hugely popular cartoon character Bamse, the world's strongest bear.
Sommarlek (1951) premiered on 1 October 1951 at the Röda Kvarn cinema in Stockholm. The reviews were highly enthusiastic, and it was Bergman's first critical success as a film director.
The film had its US premiere in 1954. It was given the somewhat seedy title "Illicit Interlude", and in the first version the distributor had freely and indulgently spliced in unrelated scenes of naked bathing filmed at a nudist colony on Long Island.