Eva

'I have written this as a protest against myself and the new influences I feel within me,' is how Bergman prefaced the screenplay he sold to Svensk Filmindustri, who assigned it to solidly professional Molander. In the event, it comes across like a Bergman film in all but name, since protagonist Malmsten is paralysed by guilt over a childhood incident when he drove off in an unattended steam locomotive and caused the death of another child. Although he works through that trauma via a renewed relationship with boyhood sweetheart Stiberg, the couple then succumb to serious foreboding when an island idyll is shattered by the corpse of a German soldier washed ashore. Molander's handling knits together the flashback structure and seething emotions with rather more assurance than the still developing Bergman might have managed, if, perhaps, without quite the same sense of personal investment.