Image My Life in Film

by Marianne Ruuth

  In Waiting Women I took my first real stab at comedy. The elevator scene with Eva Dahlbeck and Gunnar Bjornstrand is based on a real-life experience. My second wife and I decided to be reunited in Copenhagen after a marital row, and we planned to stay at the home of good friends who had gone off to the country. We ate an excellent dinner at a restaurant and went back to the apartment in high spirits and rather excited. I brought out the key, put it in the lock, and then it broke off and got stuck in the lock. We were forced to sit in the stairwell all night until the superintendent deigned to get up the following morning. But the night was not wasted because we suddenly received an unexpected opportunity to really talk to each other.

  I made note of the fact that, without a doubt, herein lay the basis for a solid comedy situation.

  During this time Eva Dahlbeck and Gunnar Björnstrand both had contracts with Svensk Filmindustri. So it seemed natural that I write a script for them.

  A Lesson in Love: “In a scene meant for farce, Eva tries to hang herself. In that same moment Gunnar declares his love for her.”

  There was something fateful about the meeting between the three of us: me, Eva, and Gunnar. Both of them were talented and creative actors. They felt immediately that although I had perhaps not yet written a spectacular text, the collaboration offered them great opportunities. On my part I was panic-stricken as I attempted for the first time to make a comedy. With overt confidence in me and great tact, they taught me how I should go about it.

  They played off each other so perfectly in the elevator sequence that I came to write it as a fully developed comedy, A Lesson in Love. In a scene meant for farce, Eva tries to hang herself. In that same moment Gunnar declares his love for her. The ceiling collapses, and the whole incident becomes funny. When we went to shoot the scene, I got cold feet. I told Eva and Gunnar that I had reread the scene in the script and found it totally impossible, boring, poorly written; we would have to do it some other way. Eva and Gunnar protested in unison. They asked me to leave the set, go into town, and find something else to do. “Give us an hour or so to work on it. When we are ready, we’ll play the scene for you.”

  That is how it happened. And all at once I had a revelation: ah yes, it is possible to do it like this! I could not have received a better lesson. The trust, the security, the lack of tension, and the professionalism were forever established between us and became a stable foundation for the comedies we did together, not the least of which is

  Smiles of a Summer Night.

  I went to the premiere of A Lesson in Love. On edge, I paced back and forth in the foyer of the movie theater Röda Kvarn, like a lost soul. Suddenly I could hear from inside the theater one roaring wave of laughter after another. And I said to myself: It’s not possible! They are laughing. They are laughing at something I have created.

  Smiles of a Summer Night began to form inside me at the beginning of 1955. I had directed Molière’s Don Juan and The Teahouse of the August Moon by John Patrick at Malmö City Theater and had also done Wood Painting in March.

  I went to Switzerland to stay at a gigantic luxury hotel with the weighty name of Monte Verità. It was preseason. I soon discovered that there were only about ten guests and that they had kept the large hotel open despite the fact that renovations were being done before the tourist season began.

  The mountains depressed me, especially since the sun dropped quickly behind the Alps at three o’clock in the afternoon. I did not talk to anyone, but I did take long walks and tried to establish a daily routine. Nearby was a very chic nursing home for aristocrats with syphilis. The patients took their daily walks at the same time as I did. It was an incredible sight: these people arrived, half dead, in varying stages of deterioration. Each one with his valet or nurse staggered along the road in a landscape quivering with the coming of spring.

  Out of desperation I rented a car and drove to Milan. I went to La Scala and sat in the last row to see a terrible performance of Verdi’s Sicilian Evening Song. When after this excursion I returned to Monte Verità and the mountains and the lunatics, I was sinking fast.

  I have often toyed with the idea of suicide, especially when I was younger and my demons threatened to overtake me.

  I surrendered myself completely to the idea that the moment had arrived. I was going to get in my car, take my foot off the brake, and drive over the edge of the serpentine roadway leading up to the hotel. This way it would look like an accident. Nobody would have to feel sad or guilty.

  Right then a telegram arrived from Stockholm with the message that I must call Carl Anders Dymling at Svensk Filmindustri immediately.

  I had written Dymling an optimistic letter from Ascona in which I told him that I was working on Smiles of a Summer Night. There would be important roles for both Eva Dahlbeck and Gunnar Björnstrand. It was to be a very commercial piece. A finished screenplay would be ready in April. We could definitely begin shooting by midsummer.

  When I got hold of Dymling on the telephone, he asked me to return home — not to continue working on Smiles of a Summer Night but in order to work with Alf Sjöoberg. The screenplay was called Last Couple Out (after a children’s game). It had been floating around Svensk Filmindustri for a long time in synopsis form. For my efforts, they would pay me more than required by my current slave contract. They were also in a hurry. Relieved, I postponed my suicide and returned home.

  Working rapidly, Sjöberg and I started churning out the script for Last Couple Out, from which Sjöberg later wrote his own version. I did not care one whit about Last Couple Out. But if Svensk Filmindustri and Sjöberg wanted to film it, I was happy to take the money.

  And I graciously spent my extra income at a tourist hotel in Dalecarlia, called the Siljansborg. I had often gone there and stayed in a small double room on the top floor with a view of Lake Siljan and the elongated mountains. I packed up my yellow manuscript paper, two sweaters, a dark suit, and a tie. At this hotel they liked the guests to dress for dinner.

  It was like coming home to a sudden and unexpected security. My work on Smiles of a Summer Night had gotten blocked among the syphilis victims. All I had done was sketch out the different characters and their relationships to one another. I had established the equation, and I even knew the solution. But then I had gotten stuck.

  Staying at the same hotel were not only the author Sven Stolpe and his lovely wife, Karin, but also a young girl who had suffered shock from a severe poisoning from the penicillin prescribed for her allergy complications. We were two solitary figures who found each other. In the afternoons we went driving through the early spring days past places from my childhood around Lake Siljan and along the riverbanks. All at once it became a merry game to write.

  When I returned to Stockholm in the middle of March, I had the finished manuscript in my suitcase, exactly as I had promised. It was immediately accepted by the studio.

  At that time there were no long preparations before a film took flight, but, starting at the planning stage, this film became expensive. It was to be a period piece, which involved more days of shooting in the schedule than usual. Including the time spent traveling to film on location, it would require close to fifty days.

  Smiles of a Summer Night further develops themes from A Lesson in Love. It explores the frightening insight that it is possible for two people to love each other even when they find it impossible to live together. It also contains a bit of nostalgia, looking back at my own life and my relationship with my daughter, full of great confusion and sorrow.

  We started shooting around midsummer. Immediately, my old stomach demon acted up. I was sick during the entire shooting and was apparently in a rotten mood. Evidently I did not bother the actors whom I have always tried to protect from my unpleasantness. But those who remember insist that I carried on like the devil himself with the production people, the lab, the sound department, and especially the administration.

  My assistant, Lennart Olsson, took copious notes in a voluminous but unpublishable
notebook during the filming, in which he accounted for every scene with sketches of the sets and stage directions.

  Smiles of a Summer Night: Ulla Jacobsson and Eva Dahlbeck. Vila Jacobsson. Björn Bjelfvenstam, Harriet Andersson, and Ulla Jacobsson. Jarl Kulle, Gunnar Björnstrand, and Margit Carlqvist.

  It is as ambitious and boring as Xenophon’s Anabasis. But in the middle of the technical accounts that fill page after page after page, it says: “Everyone is now exhausted. Katinka bursts into tears if you just tell her to shut up.”*

  The filming went on uninterrupted, and we were lucky enough to have good weather. The actors enjoyed what they were doing, and the film became a success in spite of my bad temper, my sickness and depression. The last day of filming I weighed only 57 kilos (a little more than 125 pounds). Everyone, including me, thought that I had stomach cancer. I was checked into a hospital and was thoroughly examined. The diagnosis: I was unbelievably healthy.

  The Devil’s Eye continues my line of comedies. The studio had bought the rights to a dusty Danish comedy called The Return of Don Juan. Dymling and I entered into a shameful agreement. I wanted to direct The Virgin Spring, which he detested. He wanted me to direct The Devil’s Eye, which I detested. We were both very satisfied with our agreement through which both could be made, and each one of us felt that we had fooled the other. In reality I had only fooled myself.

  Waiting Women had been made solely in order to earn money for Svensk Filmindustri. That it became a great, calculated gimmick from beginning to end is another story. In The Magic Lantern, I wrote: “Sometimes considerably more courage is required to put on the brakes than to fire the rocket. I lacked this courage and realized, only too late, what kind of film I should have made.”

  All These Women: without brakes on the bed canopy. >

  I WAS TWELVE YEARS OLD when I saw

  The Magic Flute for the first time at the Royal Opera House in Stockholm. It was a lengthy and unwieldy production. The curtain came up for a brief scene and then went down again immediately. The orchestra huddled in its pit. There was a commotion behind the curtain with stage technicians bustling about, hammering parts constructed earlier. After an interminable wait, the curtain went up for the next brief scene.

  Mozart wrote The Magic Flute for a theater using an interchangeable backdrop and movable wings, which facilitated rapid scene changes. That machinery still existed at the Opera House, but it was not being used. The revolution in set design that occurred in the 1920s had left disastrous consequences. The scenery became multidimensional, and well it should! It was solidly constructed — one could even hide out there — but consequently it was heavy, cumbersome, and hard to move.

  I had begun to attend the Royal Opera House regularly in the fall of 1928. If you sat in the third balcony on the side, it was relatively cheap. It was even cheaper than going to the movies. Sixty-five öre [approximately thirteen cents] at the opera. Seventy-five öre [approximately fifteen cents] for a movie. I became a frequent operagoer.

  I already had my puppet theater. I mainly performed whatever stories I could find in the collections of children’s fairy tales. There were four of us about the same age who were involved with the theater. My sister and I spent most of our time on it. My best friend and her best friend were zealous co-workers.

  It was a large puppet theater with a wide repertoire. We made everything ourselves: the puppets, the costumes for each puppet, the scenery, and the lights. We had a revolving stage, a set that could be lowered, and a curved panoramic backdrop. We became increasingly sophisticated in our choice of plays. More and more, I began to look for plays that required complicated lighting and frequent changes of scenery. Therefore, it seemed rather natural that The Magic Flute began to occupy a large place in the imagination of the head of this theater.

  One evening the director saw The Magic Flute performed and decided to do a production of the play. Unfortunately, the project fell through because it was too expensive for us to purchase a complete recording of the opera.

  The Magic Flute became my companion through life.

  In 1939 I was employed as a production assistant at the Opera House. In 1940 a revival of the old, heavy production was set into action. In my role of assistant to the director I stood in the lighting booth to the left of the stage in the first entrance of the wings. Working there were an old gentleman called “The Fire Chief and his son. Both of them looked as if they had grown up in the cramped corridor between all the levers. My job was to stand there with the piano score in my hand and signal them in the booth when it was time to change the lighting.

  Sometime later I went to the Malmö City Theater. On the main stage, at least two operas were produced each season, and I voted ardently for us to stage The Magic Flute. I was eager to direct it myself.

  That would probably have happened, had the theater not contracted with a German opera director of the old school for a whole year. He was around sixty years old and had directed during his lengthy career most operas in existence. It was natural that he direct The Magic Flute, a monumental mastodon of a performance with heavy sets. For me, the disappointment was twofold.

  There is another line that merges with my love for The Magic Flute. As a boy I loved to roam around. One October day I set out for Drottningholm [in Stockholm] to see its unique court theater from the eighteenth century.

  For some reason the stage door was unlocked. I walked inside and saw for the first time the carefully restored baroque theater. I remember distinctly what a bewitching experience it was: the effect of chiaroscuro, the silence, the stage.

  In my imagination I have always seen The Magic Flute living inside that old theater, in that keenly acoustical wooden box, with its slanted stage floor, its backdrops and wings. Here lies the noble, magical illusion of theater. Nothing is; everything represents. The moment the curtain is raised, an agreement between stage and audience manifests itself. And now, together, we’ll create!

  In other words, it is obvious that the drama of The Magic Flute should unfold in a baroque theater with the efficiency and incomparable machinery of a baroque theater.

  The seed was sown by the end of the 1960s. For years the Swedish Radio orchestra had performed public concerts at the Circus in Djurgården. For the musicians it might have been an uncomfortable locale, but for the music it was wonderful; the acoustics were great, with the music resounding from under the cupola. One evening I ran into the then head of the Swedish Radio music department, Magnus Enhörning. We sat chatting during the intermission, and I pointed out that this would be the perfect place to stage Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex. “Let’s do it,” he said.

  The Magic Flute with chimes.

  Before then I had directed a production of The Rake’s Progress. I had also done the folk musical The Värmlanders, as well as The Merry Widow at the Malmö City Theater — that was the total extent of my experience in musical theater.

  Enhörning asked if I had any other suggestions to propose, and I heard myself say, “I want to do The Magic Flute. I want to do The Magic Flute for television.”

  “Good. Let’s do that, too,” said Enhörning, and that’s the long and short of how we reached our decision. The Swedish television station estimated that a production of The Magic Flute would cost the dizzying sum of half a million Swedish crowns [about $100,000]. Furthermore, culture in general and the opera in particular were being hotly debated in the mass media, which since 1968 had become militant and anti-elitist. In this situation an expensive opera production was not a sure thing.

  Without the undying enthusiasm of Magnus Enhoörning, The Magic Flute would never have been made. He was untiring, and not having been born yesterday, he knew every trick in the book, and he also knew how to go about making the best decisions.

  First of all we needed a conductor. I asked Hans Schmidt-Isserstedt, an old friend. In his inimitable accent he replied: “Nein, Ingmar, nicht das alles noch mal!” [“No, Ingmar, for the last time, no!”]

  That was exa
ctly how to respond to the paradox of The Magic Flute: musically it is insanely difficult. Despite this fact, the conductor is seldom rewarded for his efforts.

  Next I turned to Eric Ericson whom I admired and respected as choirmaster and conductor of the oratorios. He responded with a definite no. But I did not give up. He possessed all the talents I wanted in a conductor: a tingling warmth in his approach to music, a passion for interpretation, and — most of all — a feeling for the natural voice, which he had developed during his fabulous career as choirmaster. Finally, he accepted.

  Eric Ericson conducts: “He possessed all the talents I wanted in a conductor. “

  Since we were not performing The Magic Flute on a stage but in front of a microphone and camera, we did not need large voices. What we needed were warm, sensuous voices that had personality. To me it was also absolutely essential that the play be performed by young actors, naturally close to the dizzy, emotional shifts between joy and sorrow, between thinking and feeling. Tamino must be a handsome young man. Pamina must be a beautiful young woman. Not to speak of Papageno and Papagena. I was totally convinced that the three women must be young, happy, and virtuous. Little darlings, dangerous flirts, with a true sense of comedy, but also fiercely sensual. The three young men had to be little rascals, and so on.

  After a considerable amount of time, we managed to assemble the entire group, a very Nordic ensemble. The singers and musicians then met for our very first rehearsal. I outlined what I wanted to bring out and emphasize in this production: an intimate atmosphere, a human quality, a sensualness, a warmth, and a close contact with the audience. The artists all responded with enthusiasm.