It's certainly not very good, but I'd still rate it above, say,
Crisis or
Music in Darkness.
The fact is that all of Bergman's pre-
Summer Interlude films are flawed in some way, as he cheerfully acknowledged himself. Which is why I was so pleased that the BFI included
Torment and
Eva - Bergman didn't direct them, but he did write them, and the combo of a Bergman script and a (then) more accomplished director generally produced stronger work than neophyte Bergman directing someone else's material.
Anyway, I dug out the review what I wroted when I finally caught up with
This Can't Happen Here...
This Can’t Happen Here (Sånt händer inte här, 1950)
A spy thriller with the alternative English title High Tension sounds like an unlikely project for Ingmar Bergman to take on, and he later wholeheartedly agreed. Summer Interlude (1951), the film regarded as the first true Bergman masterpiece, was already in the can, but thanks to financial problems on the part of both Svensk Filmindustri and Bergman himself (two divorces + five children = a lot of compulsory commitments) they decided that the most sensible course of action to restore their fortunes would be to make a thoroughly commercial film in a genre with proven popular appeal that might even become a bona fide international hit – to this end, the film was shot in both Swedish and English, with a lead actress (Signe Hasso) who’d spent a decade in Hollywood.
It did achieve international distribution, but no more than that. According to the Monthly Film Bulletin, the English-language High Tension “has obviously been badly cut [to 67 minutes from 84], the continuity being, at times, quite chaotic”. And they were no kinder about the film as a whole: “This very confused production may be termed a Swedish contribution to the current ‘anti-Red’ cycle. The agents are the usual hard-faced thugs who resort to violence at every possible moment, and the story follows the familiar pattern of chases, secret plans and sudden deaths.” A critical and commercial disaster everywhere it played (in Sweden, where the names of Bergman and writer Herbert Grevenius carried considerable weight, some critics wrongly assumed that it must be a satire but then confessed that they didn’t get the joke), it was also openly loathed by its director to such an extent that he later actively colluded in its suppression (“Few of my films do I feel ashamed of or detest for various reasons. This Can't Happen Here was the first one; I completed it accompanied by violent inner opposition.”).
Despite this, Bergman was too much of a professional for this to be apparent from the film itself. Much like his previous purely bill-paying assignment, Music in Darkness (1948), This Can’t Happen Here is a perfectly competent piece of work that’s retrospectively more interesting than the average Cold War spy thriller for its treatment of local Swedish-Baltic political issues that tended to be ignored by more sweepingly generalised West-versus-East confections. Granted, you’d never guess its director without advance warning, and there are times when it seems that Bergman’s regular composer Erik Nordgren is consciously trying to liven things up (most likely with the director’s enthusiastic encouragement), but the retrospective impression that Bergman gives of having been totally detached from the creative process throughout seems to have been a tad exaggerated.
The plot goes something like this. Leading spy Atkä Natas (Ulf Palme) is attempting to defect to Sweden (and therefore the west) from his native Liquidatzia, which we can probably safely assume is a fictional Baltic state of a kind that, like Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, had been forcibly annexed by the Soviet Union a decade or so beforehand. This comes as decidedly unwelcome news to his wife Irmelin (Hasso), who has settled down in comfortable exile with a new boyfriend (policeman Björn Almkvist, played by Torment’s Alf Kjellin) and an important job as a forensic chemist.
Even less welcome is the discovery that, far from being a defector opposed to his government, Natas is in fact one of their agents, sent to stir up trouble between the Liquidatzian refugee community and their Swedish neighbours in the hope that something worse than the occasional harsh word might break out. This aspect of the film, sadly, has scarcely dated at all, and it seems that one of the reasons for Bergman’s antipathy was his conscience-wrestling about casting actual Baltic refugees with genuine problems vis-à-vis the USSR (not least their enforced inability to contact relatives back home) for greater “authenticity” in a film that by its very nature wasn’t authentic at all. Bergman also felt that their real-life stories were more interesting than the one that he was filming.
Swedish critics’ belief that the film was more of a satire than it actually is may have stemmed from Bergman’s uncharacteristic use of running gags. One involves interrogations (that in some cases encompass torture) being staged to incongruous background sounds, sometimes played deliberately as a drowning-out tactic (one particularly obtrusive use of a big-band jazz record attracts the attentions of an irritated neighbour), sometimes occurring incidentally, such as a crucial moment of tension between Vera and her understandably suspicious fellow refugees taking place to the squawking accompaniment of what sounds like a Donald Duck cartoon playing in an adjoining cinema. A chloroformed kidnap victim is peremptorily dismissed as a dissolute drunk, a gun changes hands with comical rapidity, Stockholm’s famous statue of Sweden’s King Charles XII is politely thanked after it inadvertently inspires a crucial brainwave on Almkvist’s part, and parts of the Liquidatzian language seem to be written backwards (“Natas” is too obvious to need translation, and the first word of the name of the pivotlal Liquidatzian ship Mrofnimok Gadyn becomes “Kominform”, while Google Translate confirms that “ny dag” is Swedish for “new day”). This, albeit absolutely nothing else, foreshadows the invented language seen in Bergman’s The Silence thirteen years later.
Sadly, the murky VHS-sourced dupe that was the only way I could get to see the film wasn’t an ideal showcase for Gunnar Fischer’s location photography, which was highly praised at the time (it was the only aspect that the MFB’s reviewer had any time for) and which I daresay is even more interesting now for its treatment of what are still highly recognisable Stockholm locations nearly 70 years on. Fischer also pulls off some great noirish lighting effects in the studio interiors with distinct (and possibly intentional) echoes of Fritz Lang. One would have to take contrarianism to extremes rejected even by the likes of Armond White to hail This Can’t Happen Here as an undiscovered masterpiece, but I’m glad I’ve had the chance to see it.