Was Ing­mar Bergman a spy?

Ing­mar Bergman is a colos­sus of world cin­e­ma. Lit­er­al­ly: his blown-up image, com­plete with beret and vision­ary gaze, is cur­rent­ly embla­zoned on the side of London’s BFI South­bank as part of a cen­te­nary ret­ro­spec­tive of his career, from the ​’40s to short­ly before his death in 2007. Through mas­ter­works such as Cries & Whis­pers, Wild Straw­ber­ries, The Sev­enth Seal and Per­sona, Bergman estab­lished him­self as a mas­ter of art­ful gloominess.

Not includ­ed in the BFI sea­son is the director’s lit­tle-seen spy thriller, This Can’t Hap­pen Here, from 1950. Its omis­sion is unsur­pris­ing con­sid­er­ing Bergman active­ly sab­o­taged its release by with­draw­ing it from cir­cu­la­tion. Long thought lost, a ver­sion has been known to inter­mit­tent­ly wash-up on that shore­line of for­got­ten cin­e­ma, YouTube. He was mis­er­able and ill at the time of film­ing. He only made it, he lat­er recalled, because he had two ex-wives and five chil­dren to sup­port. Yet the effort Bergman went to to destroy the film sug­gests some­thing deep­er than pro­fes­sion­al embarrassment.

Not for the last time in Bergman’s career, the behind the scenes sto­ry begins with a tax row. In response to high­er enter­tain­ment tax­es the Swedish film indus­try ground to a halt for a num­ber of weeks in the win­ter of 1950 – 51. Keen to bank a hit before the start of indus­tri­al action, Sven­sk Fil­min­dus­tri head Carl Anders Dym­ling pro­posed a film about a ring of Sovi­et-backed spies oper­at­ing under the radar of the Swedish state.

Although thrillers were atyp­i­cal for Swedish cin­e­ma of the ​’40s and ​’50s – this was long before Scan­di­noir became a thing- Hol­ly­wood was hooked on the idea of Europe as the play­ground of secret agents (Amer­i­ca, after all, did not offi­cial­ly have an intel­li­gence agency until 1946). Thanks to adap­ta­tions of Gra­ham Greene, Europe pro­vid­ed pos­si­bil­i­ties for noir beyond the crim­i­nal under­bel­lies of urban America.

There is some­thing delib­er­ate­ly con­vo­lut­ed to the plot of This Can’t Hap­pen Here. Atkä Natas (Ulf Palme) is a spy for the Baltic state of Liq­ui­datzia plant­ed with­in the émi­gré com­mu­ni­ty in Swe­den. His loy­al­ties, how­ev­er, are up for grabs as he intends to defect to Amer­i­ca, buy­ing his pas­sage in exchange for a list of under­cov­er agents. A vis­it to his estranged wife Vera (Signe Has­so) com­pli­cates mat­ters as he con­fess­es to her that he has sent her fam­i­ly to a labour camp. Vera poi­sons Natas while he is asleep and makes off with his spy list.

Natas is dis­cov­ered by fel­low Liq­ui­datz­ian agents who hap­pen to have devel­oped an anti­dote to Vera’s tox­in. They also uncov­er his plans to defect and spare his life on the con­di­tion that he retrieves the stolen list. Vera mean­while alerts the émi­gré com­mu­ni­ty of trai­tors in their midst. Events cul­mi­nate in a series of set piece chas­es as Liq­ui­datz­ian spies turn on Natas and then assail Vera.

If Dymling’s aim was to pro­duce a Greene knock-off mar­ketable to Amer­i­can and British audi­ences it is curi­ous that the film deals with a sub­ject that is unlike­ly to have res­onat­ed out­side of North­ern Europe. This Can’t Hap­pen Here is sit­u­at­ed in a par­tic­u­lar polit­i­cal moment. Out­side of NATO and nom­i­nal­ly neu­tral, Swe­den occu­pied a pecu­liar gate­way point between the Sovi­et sphere and the West. There were a num­ber forces in Swedish soci­ety that want­ed the gov­ern­ment to take a hard­er line on com­mu­nism and be more par­ti­san in its West­ern align­ment and equat­ed the com­mu­nist threat with the country’s wartime trau­ma. Accord­ing to his­to­ri­an Lars Fredrik Stöck­er the Baltic refugee com­mu­ni­ty became the poster child for one of the most impor­tant anti-com­mu­nist lob­by groups of its kind in Post-war Sweden.

Rushed into pro­duc­tion a year before the gov­ern­ment for­mal­ly end­ed its NATO neu­tral­i­ty in 1951, could it be that This Can’t Hap­pen Here was a part of some­thing big­ger than its mak­ers were imme­di­ate­ly aware? One of the film’s recur­ring motifs is the con­trast between the per­il inflict­ed on the film’s refugees and the benight­ed igno­rance of much of the Swedish pub­lic. Bergman milks this irony for all its worth, deploy­ing sev­er­al jux­ta­po­si­tions of lev­i­ty and jeop­ardy. In one of the more grip­ping scenes a meet­ing of Liq­ui­datz­ian refugees takes place at the reverse side of cin­e­ma screen. As they weed out the mole a Don­ald Duck car­toon is being screened for a room of gig­gling chil­dren. If the point weren’t clear enough a sin­is­ter hench­man spells it out: Swe­den is a coun­ty of ​“beau­ti­ful, slum­ber­ing peo­ple” bliss­ful­ly unaware of the hor­ror that is to come.

We know from the director’s sub­se­quent rejec­tion of the film that This Can’t Hap­pen Here was not the film that Bergman want­ed to make. But if it wasn’t pro­pa­gan­da, what was it? Pri­or to pro­duc­tion he had met with sev­er­al Baltic refugees and was deeply affect­ed by their plight. Speak­ing in 1968 he makes clear that what haunt­ed him was his inabil­i­ty to do jus­tice to the ​“humil­i­a­tion” felt by the refugees. This, he says, ​“is some­thing I’d real­ly like to take up some day.” Bergman would explore the idea of humil­i­a­tion on many occa­sions through­out his career, not least 1968’s Shame that sees a cou­ple from a war-torn island forced from their home and disgraced.

Clos­er still to the con­cerns of his 1950 thriller is The Serpent’s Egg which was, inci­den­tal­ly, made dur­ing Bergman’s self-imposed exile from Swe­den due to a polit­i­cal­ly-moti­vat­ed inves­ti­ga­tion into his tax affairs. This 1977 films depicts an immi­grant cou­ple who dis­cov­er the sin­is­ter work­ings of a shad­ow state in Weimar-era Berlin. Its vivid open­ing – a slow mov­ing black and white crowd trudg­ing silent­ly onwards leads into a title sequence set to live­ly rag­time – harks back to the iron­ic jux­ta­po­si­tions that struc­tured his 1950 film. Here as then, Bergman is point­ing to a soci­ety obliv­i­ous to the creep­ing men­ace that is to engulf them.

What This Can’t Hap­pen Here reminds us is that, for all his acclaim as a direc­tor of aus­tere cham­ber pieces, Bergman was an eclec­tic film­mak­er who chal­lenged him­self by work­ing in a vari­ety of gen­res, from hor­ror (Hour of the Wolf) to slap­stick (All These Women). It’s like­ly that the thriller genre appealed giv­en his admi­ra­tion for Alfred Hitch­cock, in par­tic­u­lar how he shot long sequences in con­fined places, ​“weed­ing out every­thing that is irrel­e­vant”. We see this at work in This Can’t Hap­pen Here when Vera poi­sons her hus­band. Rest­ing the cam­era above Natas’s body Bergman lets the moment play out as Vera dis­pos­es of the evi­dence in the back­ground. By hold­ing the shot Bergman gives the scene the pecu­liar eeri­ness of unfin­ished busi­ness. He would use a sim­i­lar tech­nique for a dis­turb­ing scene in Face to Face when Liv Ullman’s char­ac­ter is attacked in her home. The cam­era, at a dis­tance from the event, remains still and help­less as the hor­ror unfolds.

This Can’t Hap­pen Here may be Bergman’s only spy film, but his inter­est in espi­onage is evi­dent across much of his fil­mog­ra­phy. The inter­cept­ed let­ter or diary is a recur­ring plot device, reveal­ing a con­spir­a­cy against the pro­tag­o­nist. The cam­era itself takes on the role of the spy, clos­ing in on aggriev­ed faces in a way that can give his films an uncom­fort­able inti­ma­cy. In Autumn Sonata, a char­ac­ter tells the view­er that he likes best to watch his wife when she doesn’t know he’s there. By break­ing the fourth wall in this unusu­al way Bergman makes us com­plic­it in this act; but is it admi­ra­tion or is it more like voyeurism? Cin­e­ma is an act of inter­lop­ing on the most inti­mate moments in the lives of oth­ers. Few film­mak­ers probed the moral dis­com­fort of this phe­nom­e­non as com­plete­ly as Bergman.