Dollar (Svensk Filmindustri, 1938)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Later my husband Charles and I stayed on Turner Classic Movies for the first of two foreign-language films featuring Ingrid Bergman: Dollar, made in 1938 in her native Sweden, directed by Gustaf Molander (who made the two best of Bergman’s Swedish films, the 1936 Intermezzo, later remade in the U.S. with Bergman repeating her role for her first English-language movie; and the 1938 A Woman’s Face, also remade in Hollywood but with Joan Crawford playing Bergman’s role and giving the performance of her career) from a script by Stina Bergman based on a play by Hjalmar Bergman (Stina’s husband) – so there were three people named Bergman involved with this film! From the synopsis on imdb.com – “Ludvig and Sussi Battwyhl (Håkan Westergren and Birgit Tengroth), Louis and Katja Brenner (Kotti Chave and Tutti Rolf), and Julia and Kurt Balzar (Ingrid Bergman and Georg Rydeberg) are upper-class millionaires. They don't seem to do any real work but still need a vacation in the mountains. Everybody seems to be romantically involved with everybody. A rich American woman joins them” – I expected Dollar to be a screwball comedy. For the first half I wasn’t disappointed, but then, like West Point (a film it in no other way resembles!), it turned into a rather dreary soap opera. The basic intrigues are that Julia Balzar is having an affair with Ludwig – or is it Louis? – and her husband Kurt is interested in Sussi. Julia’s paramour is wanted for embezzlement and/or gambling debts, and Julia wants to bail him out but secretly and without her husband finding out. The moment we had our first exterior scene – even though it was just a city street with most of the characters in cars – it was visibly snowing and I joked, “Now this looks like a Swedish movie.”

It starts to look even more like a Swedish movie when the three interchanging couples go for a vacation in the mountains and do a lot of cross-country skiing while waiting for their American friend, Mary Jonston (Elsa Burnett, who speaks a mixture of English and Swedish in a thick, risible accent entirely unbelievable as an American – but then that’s what a lot of audiences in other countries probably think as American actors vainly try to make their way through the language of the country their character is supposed to be from). Mary is properly horrified at the, shall we say, free-wheeling attitude towards marital fidelity taken by the Swedish characters, and she chews them out both from her morality – she explains that she was raised by Mormons and so if they want extra-relational partners, they should practice polygamy – and her knowledge of Freudian psychology. (She’s described as a polymath who went to several universities and got degrees in various subjects.) Mary happens on the scene when Sussi has fallen down a mountain during a skiing trip, and takes charge of the rescue (which featured stock shots of a herd of elk being driven by trained dogs – I couldn’t help but think of the W. C. Fields short The Fatal Glass of Beer; its catch line, “And it ain’t a fit night out for man nor beast,” and the snow that gets flung in his face every time he says it). When Sussi is brought back to the hotel (whose desk clerk is fat, middle-aged and had Charles wishing for Franklin Pangborn) she’s paralyzed from the waist down. Given that we actually saw her (or her stunt double, though given the low budgets available to Swedish filmmakers Tutta Rolf probably did the stunt herself) take the fall, it’s readily believable that she really was paralyzed and will have to use a wheelchair for the rest of her life. But Mary insists that the paralysis was purely psychosomatic and essentially wills Sussi to walk again. Eventually Dollar lurches towards a close and Julia and Kurt, at least, get back together.

One thing I was hoping for from Dollar was it would be an example of the greater sexual frankness available to European filmmakers that didn’t have to worry about the Hollywood Production Code. This was one of Bergman’s Swedish films that wasn’t going to get a U.S. remake, though quite frankly I wish it had, with Bergman repeating her role, Cary Grant playing her husband and Preston Sturges adapting and directing. The subtleties and indirections the Code required might actually have helped this movie! Oddly, TCM host Alicia Malone called the film a star vehicle for Bergman, which it really wasn’t; it was actually an ensemble movie, and the credits reveal that the “suits” at Svensk Filmindustri thought of it as one. Ingrid Bergman gets top billing, but below the title and as just one-half of one of the three couples at the center of the plot. Dollar is at least a well-produced movie; in 1938 Variety ran an article about Bergman that pleaded with someone in the U.S. to give her a contract because Swedish films were getting to be too good! The director of photography was Åke Dahlqvist, and his work is stunning and reminded me of the interview American cinematographer Conrad Hall gave in which he proclaimed his jealousy of Ingmar Bergman’s d.p., Sven Nykvist. Hall said he envied Nykvist because Sweden’s position on the planet relative to the sun gave him naturally indirect light. The production values are excellent and I could see why the Variety writer was worried that Swedish films might someday be as good or better than Hollywood’s. But the script is pretty clunky and some of the emotional transitions jar. Though Ingrid Bergman is watchable throughout she doesn’t really dominate, and when her husband starts cruising Sussi we do get the impression that he’s trading down!