The Serpent's Egg (1977)

Rated R for a myriad of reasons.  The movie starts off with a pretty matter-of-fact suicide.  The movie spirals from there.  There are multiple scenes of nudity, including a scene that involves dead bodies.  There are scenes of sexual assault and prostitution.  The language gets intense at times.  Because the movie is filmed before PETA started getting invovled with movies (and because it is a Criterion release), there's a scene of a real horse being butchered.  Take all of this into account and we're looking at a story taking place during the Weimar Republic setting up elements of the Holocaust.  R.

DIRECTOR:  Ingmar Bergman

When you are down in the dumps and the world feels like a pretty bleak place, it might not be healthy to be knocking out Ingmar Bergman films. I have a stack of essays that need a quick grading (they aren't being handed back), but I know those will be done in a timely fashion.  Instead, I don't know when else I can write about The Serpent's Egg, a movie that a lot of Bergman fans call an outright failure.  While I can't say that The Serpent's Egg is a necessarily great film, I also find it oddly to be something more watchable than a lot of Bergman fans give it credit for.

I think the reason that most Bergman fans are fairly dismissive of it is because it really doesn't feel like a Bergman film.  From what I understand, The Serpent's Egg is Bergman's only real Hollywood film.  As such, boy-oh-boy does it look different.  Now, different isn't necessarily a good thing.  For me?  It's a great thing.  I'm really burned out on Bergman movies.  Every rational person out there is probably screaming for me to stop watching these movies and to come back to them fresh.  I also know that might be years before I ever finish the box set so I'm trying to watch these movies objectively, despite the fact that my sheer exhaustion from this set is obviously getting to me.  It doesn't feel like a Bergman movie.  Okay, let's look at the positives from that perspective.  Before I go too deep, there are elements that absolutely Ingmar Bergman.  Shy of the historical setting and the money just thrown at making sets seem legitimate, which includes extras in German outfits galore, you could probably recognize Bergman just from stills.  Part of what is more odd about these films, at least when keeping Bergman's entire canon, is the notion that he almost might thrive of minimalism.  It feels like a producer came in here and started dressing up the sets to make the film feel a little bit more marketable.  I wouldn't be surprised if that happened.  I'm sure someone was really rooting for an Academy Award.  After all, Ingmar Bergman --THE Ingmar Bergman --came to Hollywood to make a big budget movie discussing the Holocaust.  Yeah,  I don't know how to stick another buzz word in there.  I bet someone was relaly pissed that this movie kind of was considered a stinker.

The odd thing about the movie --and it's the same thing that scratched my brain --is that it is a challenging film.  Persona is the next movie in the box set.  I, infamously, did not understand Persona. I know that Bergman gets weird sometimes.  Sometimes he gets a little too weird.  As a guy who tends to dislike the incredibly avant-garde, The Serpent's Egg is about how much I can handle.  Honestly, the last act of the movie reminded me a lot of The Trial. We get that there is more than what we are seeing on screen.  Characters act in surreal ways, especially considering that much of the first first half of the film's bleakness is terrifyingly grounded.  I took a chance making a commentary on Persona and it bit me in the butt.  Well, you can yell at me for not learning my lesson because I'm going to put myself out on the ledge here.  The climax's weird tone I think is a commentary on what we dismiss as absurdism. The first two thirds of the film feels very much like a Bergman piece.  We have a completely unlikable protagonist played by David Carradine.  Abel, Carradine's character, is a Jew struggling to find himself after his brother dies and he has no circus to return to.  Okay, disparaging circus performer is very Bergman.  Instead of doing anything even remotely healthy, Abel gets drunk every night and frequents cabarets (Honestly, the first half of the film is almost a serious-as-a-heart-attack version of Cabaret) and seduces his brother's wife.  That's all on brand.  Once again, Bergman gives us an unsympathetic protagonist because it's Bergman.

But then the second half is unpacking the world of St. Anna's.  St. Anna's mirrors the look of the police station.  Because of Abel's connection to a dead body and the fact that he's always drunk, he's in-and-out of a police station a lot in this movie.  I mean, it's always fun to see Gert Frobe playing someone other than Auric Goldfinger, so there's that.  But the job that Abel finally gets mirrors the prison.  As bleak and miserable as his life is on the outside, it seems even more hellish --and like a ghetto --on the inside.  The world of St. Anna's seems impossible. To a certain extent, it is.  Abel is attacked in an empty elevator.  He decapitates the man and then is clean for the next scene.  He's allowed to view some of the inhuman experiments that Vergerus (again, a Vergerus) does in the bowels of this building.  But as the movie implies that Abel is going insane in this world that doesn't want him, there is something incredibly sane keeping in mind dramatic irony.  We know that the Nazis would perform insane experiments on the Jewish people.  We know that these kinds of things would be done.  From Abel's perspective, everything here seems too barbaric to even consider. But history would show that Vergerus was an archetype for Mengele.  Yeah, Abel is going nuts from the world around him.  He's hard to believe because nothing seems real.  But that's why when Vergerus kills himself at the end, it's so absurd that there's no way out of that scenario.

So why do people hate this movie so much?  I mean, the easy answer is that it is far more heavy-handed than other Bergman movies.  There are moments in Bergman where he hits his audience on the head with a sledgehammer.  I don't deny that.  But my goodness, Bergman is really not trying to hold back on the psychosis that this movie presents.  That's probably an answer.  I'm going to be a little bit of a turd and say that I don't love David Carradine in this or in a lot of movies.  I'm sorry to David Carradine posthumously and to Keith Carradine who probably doesn't want to read this.  I get why Bergman cast him.  I mean, it's very ni line with the stuff that I see coming out of Bergman (although Elliot Gould claims that he was supposed to play Abel Rosenberg and it was the studio who thought that David Carradine was a better draw).  It's just that Carradine really plays the movie with one note.  There's the always a little withdrawn and depressed that Carradine brings to the role.  That's something that I've seen with Carradine with a lot of the stuff that he does.  

But between Bergman always being a bummer, the Holocaust and the Weimar Republic, and not a moment of happiness, I run into the problem that I have with both Eli Roth movies and The Passion of the Christ.  I can only go so low before it feels like you are offering nothing that can be used as juxtaposition.  There's a scene in the movie where Abel is drunk. He has alienated himself from his brother's wife and is walking the street.  He sees the name "Rosenberg" in a shop window, so he smashes it with glass. When the old couple come to accost him for breaking their shop window, he beats the old man down and forces himself on his wife.  We're bleak enough.  This doesn't actually add to the story.  There's this silk-thin narratve that Bergman explores that says that just because there are bad people that are Jewish, it doesn't meant that the Jewish people are bad people.  The thing is, I don't think that the movie reinforces that.  Abel verbalizes that notion early on.  He says that he won't be an idiot...and then spends the rest of the movie being an idiot.  

I read somewhere that Bergman's worst impulses coincided with Hitler's.  It's a Reddit page, so please take it with a grain of salt.  But what if that is true.  I mean, I don't have enough data to say that is or isn't true.  Like, if Bergman was a Nazi sympathizer at points in his life, that whole narrative of Abel being representative of a culture is even weirder.   Maybe Manuella Rosenberg is a positive representative because she does believe in taking care of Abel, despite his sins.  But even Manuella is a bit toxic.  I don't know.  I don't think that this is the movie where Bergman is subtly implying that Abel deserves everything that comes to him and that he demonizes an entire culture.  But I also don't think that the movie is a slam dunk for bringing new light to atrocities.

But all that into consideration, I have to say why I didn't hate the movie, besides the fact that it was slightly different from other Bergman movies.  While I think the story is muddy and its weirdness can get in the way of what is trying to be accomplished, it is saying something.  It is a Hollywood film that has a strong poltiical bent and is meant to be a voice of dissent against injustice.  Yeah, it's bogged down by, once again, a bleak Bergman.  But I also regularly need reminders that, at one point in recent history, speaking out against fascism is important.  There's a great line in the last minute of the movie where Gert Frobe catches Abel up on what he missed when he was unconscious.  He talks about an inept Hitler who failed in a government coup, saying that there was nothing to worry about.  I mean, again, this movie was made in 1977 and now I'm sitting in 2025 and miserable about every news report that comes out.  So, yeah, maybe The Serpent's Egg flies harder in the face of the second Trump administration.  Or it's a bit of a mess and David Carradine isn't great here.  Both, I guess, can be true.