In The Serpent's Egg Ingmar Bergman is given what producers think every director wants, a giant budget and total freedom. Bergman's choice of subjects turns out to be a grab-bag of concepts borrowed from German Expressionism ... not your garden variety, but the hardcore film Expressionism of the middle 1920s with titles like The Joyless Street. Instead psychological evil, heroes with deteriorating minds and scenery limited to staring faces and tortured eyes, Bergman externalizes the threat and comes up with a blanket evil in the not-too-original form of proto-Nazi medical madness. What begins as a story of the gutters rather nicely morphs into a science fiction prediction of the frontiers of inhumanity. Instead of broadening his canvas, Bergman's personal themes are diluted. It's pictorially impressive but emotionally inert.

David Carradine might as well be Max Von Sydow, as Bergman uses the actor almost identically. It's not very flattering to think that Carradine's casting was possibly prompted by his soulful Zen routines in television's Kung Fu show. Carradine is actually rather good, giving the impression that he was flattered by the invite and strived to give Bergman everything he had. He vaults over railings in stunts guaranteed to shatter his ankles and tries his best to do things he's not noted for, like simple sincere smiles. Smiling is so atypical of the grim actor, it looks like he's wearing false teeth. Bergman's script insists that the Abel Rosenberg character be a piece of spineless flotsam in the film's many moral confrontations, so it's impossible to identify with him.

Liv Ullmann also stretches her screen persona as the Manuela, breaking the sameness of the sensitive-neurotic characters she always played for Bergman before. Seeing her as a floozie on a cabaret stage is certainly impressive and reminds us that when Bergman got into his intense personal line of psychodramas, his core actors (the quartet in The Passion of Anna) were really playing parts of his own personality. Ullmann was surely humiliated by the disastrous Lost Horizon, but Manuela shows a range Bergman usually didn't allow. She's a survivor with problems, but also a sensitive and caring individual. When she flips out toward the end, we eventually find out that the cause may be some weird experiments and not any personality disorder of her own.

Pulp fantasy doesn't seem to be Bergman's natural material. He presents two very warm characters we care about and then abandons them to a variant doom from his seemingly bottomless closet of despair. Poor Carradine just stands there and soaks up all of Vergerus' filmed horrors without a defined reaction. It's a thriller situation but Bergman refuses to follow through, as this is a job for Lemmy Caution, not Abel Rosenberg. We can't help think that the director evoked the same helplessness and anguish over human misery and Nazi politics in Persona by simply having Ullman stare at one evocative photo of a traumatized ghetto child.

According to Ullmann, Bergman thought himself out of his depth on a large-scale picture but he stages action well and places his camera with consistent precision. The expertly-shot and directed picture provides only one good supporting role. Gert Fröbe is wonderful as the gruff yet compassionate detective, but James Whitmore isn't particularly compelling as a priest who counsels Manuela. Brothel bum Glynn Turman bets that he can fornicate with a prostitute and then can't deliver in an okay scene meant to conjure the depraved atmosphere in Berlin. If the idea of having Carradine, Ullmann, Fröbe, Turman and Whitmore in a quasi-fantasy about an abstract reading of German Expressionist movies of the 20s seems a little indigestible .... it is.

Yet the picture is a beauty to watch and yet another unique curiosity. The best praise for The Serpent's Egg is that it creates a grim little genre all its own, Politico-Film History-Paranoia.

MGM's DVD of The Serpent's Egg looks terrific, and would only have been improved if the studio embraced the policy of doing 1:66 transfers with 16:9 enhancement. The original audio is in English.

The documentary this time has a lot of interesting back-story to tell. David Carradine joins Ullmann and critic Marc Gervais, giving us an extra point of view on Bergman's wild big-budget German escapade. Ullmann reports that the director saw Egg recently and thought it turned out pretty good after all. Carradine gives a sincere and thoughtful account of being yanked from his American TV and action career into this bizarre auteur effort in a foreign country. Both actors express their amazement at the sets De Laurentiis built for the show.

A second docu called German Expressionism is actually one discourse, several minutes long. It's a hopeless muddle of convoluted talk that Gervais could have boiled down to a simple sentence: Bergman's film uses a theory from German Expressionist film culture to create a new statement about fascism, social collapse and technological terror.

A relaxed and friendly David Carradine provides an informative commentary. He treats the experience as if he were an explorer returned from a strange land with a story he barely expects people to believe. I wasn't expecting such insights from this year's Kill Bill, and the track makes me want to revisit older Carradine performances, like his interesting cop in the oddball monster movie Q The Winged Serpent.

On a scale of Excellent, Good, Fair, and Poor, The Serpent's Egg rates:
Movie: Good -
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent
Supplements: Commentary by David Carradine, Away from Home featurette, German Expressionism featurette, Photo gallery, trailer
Packaging: Keep case
Reviewed: February 26, 2004