In 1938, a major Hollywood producer stumbled across Swedish icon Ingrid Bergman and lured her to America to help prop up his countrymen’s growing obsession with polished blue-eyed pin-ups (and to mimic the success of fellow Swede Greta Garbo). Before she made her permanent migration, Ingrid had one last picture to complete for the Scandinavians: a kind of farewell to that old land of Aryan innocence. That final film was Juninatten [1940], a film so pumped with Stockholm you can practically taste the pacifism. The drama of Juninatten is prophetic of the themes that would dominate Ingrid’s future career: the loose connections of lovers, passion leading to its inevitable destinies. Whilst everyone in sinful Stockholm gets laid behind the screen-doors of self-delusion, the city reveals itself for what it is: a city unsure of how to deal with the consequence of passion. Ingrid’s talent for expressing these themes, as well as the purity of her beauty, is what provoked and sustained the Western audience’s obsession with her.

In 1942, her name was secured as she appeared opposite Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca. For Americans, she was a symbol of the exotic: a strange accent, carrying a beauty that could make even the most red-blooded male specimen feel guilty. But compared with her contemporaries, the romance of Ingrid Bergman extended beyond appearance. She was not big tits and loose morals. She had passion and charisma. She was a figure for the public to fall in love with, not simply to desire. As she appeared in more American and British flicks, the public infatuation with her grew internationally and interest was diverted towards her personal life. In 1949, her own life would begin to mirror something of what she had been representing. It was the year she performed in Hitchcock’s surprising period drama Under Capricorn, the year that the public learnt of her affair with Italian director Roberto Rossellini. Suddenly, the obsession turned cold. The film flopped, landing Hitchcock in trouble with the banks, and Ingrid in trouble with the stiff American temperament. Like her characters in all three films, the difficulty of love across boundaries defined her even in person. In Juninatten, it was the destructive consequence of desire; in Casablanca, the impossibility of forgetting past love; and in Under Capricorn, the difficulties of marriage and class. To all her characters, Ingrid brought the same passion, intensity and empathy, as someone who had lived understanding that love is too complicated for the camera.

As the British Film Insitute concludes its Ingrid Bergman tribute season, I am left wondering after each showing how much the film’s success is dependent on her. It is her zeal, her range of ability and her pure appearance that transforms films like Juninatten into cinematic spectacles and cements films like Casablanca as classics. They are films defined by Ingrid Bergman, almost about Ingrid Bergman and are made memorable because of her. Our obsession with her, like the leading men in all of these films, seems unquenchable. It is the obsession of women who desire her finesse, and men who are just trying to work out why they can’t bring themselves, as they look at one of the most radiant figures in cinema, to use the word ‘fit’.

Words > Joe Bedford

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