Sawdust and Tinsel

A travelling circus arrives in a provincial town. Albert, who owns it, left his wife and children years ago; they live in that town and he is thinking of going back. At the circus there is Anne, his lover, who is interested in an actor from the theatre company and thinking of leaving. Both are caught between staying and going, and the evening's performance holds it all together. Ingmar Bergman writes and directs. Åke Grönberg plays Albert and Harriet Andersson plays Anne. Its best known passage is the flashback at the start. The wife of Frost the clown walks into the sea in front of soldiers and he has to carry her out through the crowd. The sequence was shot silent, with distorted sound and overexposed image, and is among Bergman's most cited scenes as the visual form of humiliation. The subject is humiliation. Every character is brought low in front of an audience at some point and the film says it is unavoidable. The contrast between the circus and the theatre is the idea: one coarse and poor, the other haughty and respectable, and both doing the same work. It was harshly reviewed in Sweden on release and failed commercially, and was later counted among the most important of Bergman's early films. Who it is for: viewers who like Bergman and circus narratives. Who it is not for: the tone is dark, the characters are treated without mercy, and the film provides no relief anywhere.