Ingmar Bergman in exile takes on the "horror" of encroaching Nazism and psychological deterioration with the big budget THE SERPENT'S EGG, on Blu-ray from Arrow Academy.

Berlin, 1923: "A pack of cigarettes costs four billion marks, and most everyone has lost faith in both the future and the present," among them Abel Rosenberg (David Carradine, THE WARRIOR AND THE SORCERESS), an acrobat who came to Berlin just months prior with his brother Max and sister-in-law Manuela (Liv Ullmann, PERSONA) when his brother injured his wrist and they had to take leave from the circus. Returning to the inn one night, he discovers that his brother has blown his brains out. The suicide is devastating but not unexpected, as Max had separated from Manuela, taken up with another woman, and his behavior had become increasingly erratic since taking a job that paid well but the details of which he withheld from Abel. Although Manuela has been away from Max and taken a job at a local cabaret, she too feels as if she let her husband down and tries to atone for the spiritual pain she feels by helping Abel who has become an alcoholic. Abel also repeatedly resists the seemingly benign overtures of Dr. Hans Vergarius (Heinz Bennent, POSSESSION), once a precocious child Max and Abel played with as children who even at a young age had a morbid scientific fascination. After reporting his brother's death, Abel becomes a person of interest to Inspector Bauer (Gert Fröbe, THE 1000 EYES OF DR. MABUSE) because of a string of seven mysterious deaths of people who associated with Max and, by extension, Abel. When Manuela's savings are stolen, her landlady (Edith Heerdegen) abruptly objects to Max staying with her, and Max's money is held by the police since dollars are illegal (the exchange rate of dollars to marks in the billions), Abel feels like a trap is being set for him and forces are pushing him towards accepting the help of Vergarius which includes a job at St. Anna's Clinic in the archives where he begins to suspect human experiments are being conducted and that he is one of the unknowing test subjects.

Ingmar Bergman had directed roughly a dozen films before he achieved international notice with SUMMER WITH MONIKA and SMILES OF A SUMMER NIGHT – which was turned into the musical A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC by Stephen Sondheim and inspired Woody Allen's A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S SEX COMEDY – and his name would become synonymous with the arthouse with THE SEVENTH SEAL and WILD STRAWBERRIES before his "Silence of God" trilogy IN A GLASS DARKLY, WINTER LIGHT, and THE SILENCE and his horror trilogy HOUR OF THE WOLF, SHAME, and PERSONA. He still had individual hits but was moving more and more into television an back into the theater by the mid-seventies with the likes of SCENES FROM A MARRIAGE when a scandal involving errors in his tax return had him quitting Sweden and resolving never to go back. After trying Paris and finding it too bright tonally, he made the acquaintance of producer Dino De Laurentiis (DIABOLIK) and met Rialto Film's Horst Wendlandt in Berlin, the pair entering into a co-production with a budget that allowed Bergman a greater degree of creative freedom than he had previously encountered. This freedom, however, came at an expense of the intimacy one normally associates with Bergman's character studies, with the psychological deterioration of his characters here taking a back seat to the meticulous period recreations of an entire street set, homages of G.W. Pabst (DIARY OF A LOST GIRL) and expressionism, an international cast including Fröbe, Bennent, and James Whitmore who are not so much squandered as deployed. The pacing feels more lackadaisical than meditative, spending way too much time on the desperate circumstances of the characters and overall to have it summed up as people willing to do anything or misplace their trust in people who might harm them in exchange for money and a warm meal. The rise of fascism is constantly in the background, with the numbness of Carradine's Rosenberg suggesting that many Jewish people were just as preoccupied as Germans with day-to-day survival and emotionally paralyzed by being unable to conjecture a future to take such threats seriously. When the main villain does expound upon the circumstances that will give rise to "revolution" in the coming years – with the increasingly recognition that "romantic ideas of man's goodness" do not match reality – it feels like a heavy-handed summing-up rather than an organic development. What is left is a glum film that looks gorgeous thanks to the lighting of Sven Nykvist (THE PASSION OF ANNA), the realization of the period by production designer Rolf Zehetbauer – who worked on everything from German epics like DAS BOOT to co-productions like CABARET, ENEMY MINE, and THE NEVERENDING STORY – big band music of Rolf Wilhelm (DR. MABUSE VS SCOTLAND YARD) that might have influenced Woody Allen's Bergman-esque title sequences, and Ullmann given the chance to do Dietrich-esque cabaret acts in costumes by Charlotte Flemming (FEDORA). While it is as much a horror movie as any other Bergman film to have that label, it perhaps deserves its reputation as lesser Bergman.

Released theatrically in the United States by Paramount Pictures and then on VHS by Lighting Video, THE SERPENT'S EGG came to DVD through MGM in 2004 as part of a six-disc boxed set with Bergman's PERSONA, HOUR OF THE WOLF, SHAME, THE PASSION OF ANNA, and a disc of bonus featurettes. The DVD featured a non-anamorphic letterboxed 1.66:1 transfer that was an improvement over the dingy cassette but still subject to the subdued colors and low-lighting of Nykvist's photography. It was not until this year that the film finally made its Blu-ray bow, twice, as one of thirty discs in Criterion's mammoth limited edition INGMAR BERGMAN'S CINEMA set and in a solo edition here from Arrow Academy (it remains to be seen whether Criterion will put out their own single disc edition but they have already announced a standard edition of SHAME). Criterion's master was sourced from a 2017 restoration while Arrow's 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.66:1 widescreen Blu-ray is derived from MGM's older high definition master. The colors are still subdued apart from some pop in the cabaret scenes, but detail is better delineated in textures and features from Nykvist's lighting, and close-ups also better reveal the underlying strain and stress in faces while grain is heightened in underexposed areas. By comparison to Criterion screengrabs, the Arrow looks a touch warmer in skin tones although which also invests the reds with a bit more punch but the Criterion's colder look perhaps results in more realistically sickly pallor in the faces. The LPCM 1.0 mono track is clean and most of the main actors provide their own voices – with Abel being American justification for German actors who can understand him speaking English – while some incidental German dialogue is not translated or transcribed by the optional English subtitles.