If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

Excellent but underrated film

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

Watching it is like watching the spectacle of a class clown at their best: you laugh at their jokes, instigate their defiance, and "ooooh" when they get in trouble.

If you're never watched a film directed by Ingmar Bergman and decides to do it by watching "The Serpent's Egg", it might be a great choice for you but it will you make you hate all of his brilliant masterpieces. My perception of this film is very awkward, considering that I've watched ten of his films (including "Persona", "Wild Strawberries" and "Fanny and Alexander"), all of them magnificent, but then he comes with an American project which is very difficult to relate with since it is different than anything the Swedish master ever done before. It is faster than his previous classics, not much philosophical or methaporical, and instead it's quite meaningless for the most of its entirely until we reach the conclusion (and even faster than his other films it is tiresome at parts). Bergman is present in the beautiful cinematography by Sven Nykvist and the opening titles, a trade mark that Woody Allen used to present his films.The story of a American trapezist (David Carradine) in German investigating the reasons behind his brother suicide, during Weimar Republic's inflation crisis of 1923, might be a excellent material for a talented director/writer like Bergman but here, in his way of trying to built a suspense, create horror and disgust in our eyes something got lost in the middle. A better construction of characters or make them interesting in some way, anything. The historical background is very interesting but these characters are so driven by the automatic pilot that gets very difficult to really feel something for them and we should felt something for them. After all, they lived during troubled times, no jobs to find, no food to eat to the point of eating horse meat (yes, one was killed off-screen but the corpse's presented in the film), and there's brutality here and there (in one of the most violent moments a Nazi officer beats a Jewsih cabaret owner by smashing his head on a table. Bergman is a master in not showing us the event, we can only hear the head hitting something hard and we as audience get very uncomfortable, feeling this guy pain). If the performances of Liv Ullmann and David Carradine keeps going like a switcher from good and bad each time they appear and disappear off the screen, James Whitmore in just one scene gives a memorable moment playing a priest. Some of the supporting roles were more interesting than the main ones.The point made by the film at its conclusion was excellent but it came a little late. The idea of the seeds of 2nd World War being created in a horrific and strange experiment looked real, very believable, but Bergman could have explained more about it, it sounded something weaker than what we were expecting from what Carradine wanted to discover about the other characters deaths, which reminds of a important topic to be debated: what in the world happened to the villain? Noises on the screen of police wanting to enter in his room, then he looks into sort of a mirror, then collapses and die? I really didn't get it! And to reach the brilliance of this film is to wait and wait, and see strange and pointless scenes (the funny brothel scene is one of them), a lousy investigation made by Gert Frobe's character which includes arresting Carradine without evidences, and more.I'm sounding a little bitter about "The Serpent's Egg" but in fact I enjoyed. The bitterness comes from my fears of giving the first thumbs down in a Bergman's film while watching it. When you see the whole picture you realize that it works, it's well made, has its flaws but it's not as great as his other classics. I can't complain much about this film because the director had many problems at the time (tax evasion and things like that which made him get out of his country), and a director must live of his films, he needs to write and direct, and this was a nice work for him, he made the best of what was available to do for another kind of audience. Of course, when you see Bergman + Carradine + Ullmann + Dino DeLaurentiis as producer you really want to see a spectacle of film and not a minor work, almost forgettable. The potential for being great was there at everyone's hands but it's good anyway. 7/10

The title, The Serpent's Egg, had me wondering for a moment until I realized that it did not refer to the the Doctor and his bizarre experiments nor to Abel and his misery, but to the encapsulated Germany of the 1920s and the environment that led to Hitler's ascent in the 1930s. That is, Germany being the 'egg', Hitler and the Nazis as the 'Serpent', and the environment as the embryo of the egg.In many ways, this is a cynical film, in that it attempts to show that degradation, fear and loss of life and livelihood is sometimes stronger than humanity and even love. Isn't this true about Germany in the 1920s, and other nations at other times as well? We only have to look at ourselves after the attacks of 9/11 to see a time when fear overcame reason. Fear allowed us to meekly accept the chipping away of our own civil rights and privacy, and also government sponsored torture.It also gives us a glimpse at one of Hitler's truisms, which is that if he could have a person at age 7, then that person would be a Nazi for life. The experimenting Doctor re-states this in his observations that the sons and daughters of the defeated German populace will be the ones who create the new German society, of which he already is a part with his inhumane human experiments.Of course, all this is done with hindsight, so how can it be wrong? It can't, but then it's still a good review of a period in Germany that many Americans know nothing about, and should learn if they want the answers to the question of how Naziism came to be. It wasn't just some sort of aberration never seen in history before nor repeated.

I can't quite understand these alleged Bergman "fans" who say that this film is somehow lacking. Whereas "The Serpent's Egg" is not on par with say, "Fanny and Alexander" or even "Scenes from a Marriage," and even though it is, admittedly, not "Bergmanian" in the sense that the director's strength lies in acute insight into the emotional complexities of his characters, it is NOT, in any way whatever, an inferior film. Here we find Bergman writing and directing a film that steps briefly away from his norm. The fact that this film is better than, for comparison, anything from Polanski (who's "element" is the long-winded suspense film) makes it worth much regard. In fact, I am moved to say that "The Serpent's Egg" is a display of writing/directorial versatility that remains unsurpassed to this day.This being said, no film should really be rated in terms of previous works of its own writer/director. It should be rated in comparison only to other films. Bergman is a superior director and one of the most talented writers at that. Whereas Bergman himself always strove to be better than Bergman, we should be fair for a second and admit that he is almost always better than anyone else.

Let me preface by saying that I love Bergman films; Persona, Shame, and The Passion of Anna are among my all-time favorites. This is probably his weakest effort. There are so many things wrong with this film, but most of them are rooted in the underdeveloped characters. I had no feeling for Abel, whereas I should have identified with him fully; his character felt like little more than a vehicle to display the images that Bergman had in his head. The characters are secondary to the plot, which isn't a problem when the storyline is interesting and absorbing, but in this case there is very little to speak of in the way of a story. What it basically boils down to is that bad things happen to some Jewish guy with an American accent who is living in Germany. This somehow translates into a statement on the early warning signs of Nazism in Germany and the futility of life. The characters and story aren't fleshed out enough to carry the weighty themes that Bergman is trying to hoist on the viewer.