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"We all have our ups and downs," sunrise at Gothenburg is interrupted by a maiden lost in despairing thought, angrily rescued after numbly ambling off a pier. (The opening echoes Sternberg's The Docks of New York, and there's a cameo by Destiny's mechanical claw from The Salvation Hunters.) The "goddamned reformatory tramp" (Nine-Christine Jönsson) is next seen jitterbugging at the crowded dance hall, lets herself be picked up by the returning sailor (Bengt Eklund), and in the next morning scrawls "alone" with lipstick on her mirror. Pleasures are fleeting in the town of hard-faced dock workers and stringy authority figures, a comedy enjoyed at the local theater is only a preamble for a scuffle in the alley outside. "Now that I know what happiness is, it'll only be worse later." Ingmar Bergman in his sorcerer's-apprentice period, trying on neorealism for size. Bickering parents, various flings, stints at schools for wayward girls—the clod learns of this and reacts about as well as Angel Clare to Tess Durbeyfield's confession, "why couldn't you have kept your mouth shut?" (Soaking in booze and self-pity, he picks a fight with a black Yank who drops in from Rossellini's Paisà and returns in The Serpent's Egg.) The old generation no longer has much use for books, the future one hemorrhages out of the heroine's friend (Mimi Nelson) following a botched abortion, swimming (or at least staying afloat) is the metaphor of choice ("just so you're not pulled into a whirlpool"). A grain of uplift is scrounged for the finale, though the lingering image is that of an anguished protagonist mirroring a young filmmaker, thrashing around in the dark. With Berta Hall, Birgitta Valberg, Sif Ruud, and Harry Ahlin. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |