SMILES OF A SUMMER NIGHT Movie Review

Sommarnattens Leende

Eight Swedish aristocrats become romantically and comically intertwined over a single weekend in Ingmar Bergman's charming, witty, and exceptionally graceful comedy of manners, sex, and blank cartridges. Bergman's elegantly worked-out screenplay keeps all of the simultaneous intrigues and bedroom farces spinning zestily, and keeps the overall effect uplifting, sweet, and sly. It's a razor-sharp, lyrical piece of filmmaking, which seems every bit as knowing and sophisticated today as it did when it was first released. Stephen Sondheim must have thought so too; he used Smiles of a Summer Night as the basis for his successful and widely admired Broadway musical A Little Night Music. Winner of a special Grand Prize for Comedy at the 1955 Cannes Film Festival.

NEXT STOP … Rules of the Game, Boudu Saved from Drowning, The Magic Flute

1955 110m/? SW Gunnar Bjornstrand, Harriet Andersson, Ulla Jacobsson, Eva Dahlbeck, Jarl Kulle, Margit Carlquist; D: Ingmar Bergman; W: Ingmar Bergman. VHS, LV HMV, DVT, CRC