CrisisFeature Film, 1946 Bergman's debut film. The foster daughter of a piano teacher in a small town is courted at a charity ball by the decadent lover of her real mother."A few days after the premier of Crisis, the telephone rang. It was Lorens, saying: "Dear Ingmar. That was an awful film, hard to imagining anything worse! I suppose your phone is ringing off the hook with offers." - Ingmar Bergman |
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Leck Fischer (1904-1956) was a Danish writer who not only wrote a number of plays that were highly successful both in Sweden and his native country, but was also a prolific screenwriter of Danish films between 1941 and 1950. His stage play The Maternal Heart was premièred in 1944, subsequently purchased by Svensk Filmindustri and renamed 'The Maternal Instinct'.
Another director was initially earmarked for the film, but in early June 1945 Ingmar Bergman was asked to develop a screenplay with which he could make his debut as a director. The outcome is best described in Bergman' own word in Images: My Life in Film:
Even before the filming of Torment, I had bombarded Carl Anders Dymling with pleas asking to be allowed to make my own film but had been turned down. Then one day they sent me a Danish play. Its title was Moderdyret (The Maternal Instinct), its author Leck Fisher. Dymling promised me that I would be allowed to direct the film if I could manage to write a good script from this grandiose drivel. Wildly happy, I spent my nights writing the scenario, at breakneck speed. After presenting it, I was forced to do two or three rewrites before it was decided that I could make the film during the summer of 1945. Inspired by the succes of Torment, I christened it Crisis. It turned out to be an apt title."
Ingmar Bergman, Images: My life in Film´
Svensk filmografi
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