All These Women (För att inte tala om alla dessa kvinnor) (Svensk Filmindustri, 1964)

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

Alas, the next film on the Turner Classic Movies schedule March 24 was even lamer: All These Women (1964), a rare attempt at comedy from Swedish director Ingmar Bergman. Alicia Malone, who hosts TCM’s weekly showcase for foreign films, said this was his attempt to do a box-office hit after his dour faith-based trilogy, Through a Glass Darkly (1961), Winter Light (1962) and The Silence (1963), which had been released to critical acclaim but not much of an audience. Its original Swedish title was a real mouthful, För att inte tala om alla dessa kvinnor, and Bergman not only directed but co-wrote the script with Swedish comedian Erland Josephson. For the first time in Bergman’s career he worked with color – Eastmancolor – and he used his regular cinematographer, Sven Nykvist. (American cinematographer Conrad Hall once said he was professionally jealous of Nykvist because of Sweden’s relative position to the sun, which gives it naturally indirect light.) All These Women is set in the 1920’s – as we learn from the elaborate cars of the period and the use of overly strident records of 1920’s songs like “Yes! We Have No Bananas” – and deals with an internationally famous cellist, Felix (we get a couple of glimpses of him but no one is identified on imdb.com as playing him); his biographer, Cornelius (Jari Kulle), who’s also a composer trying to get Felix to play a piece of his and hinting that the book he’s writing about Felix will make him look good, or not, depending on whether Felix plays Cornelius’s composition; and the harem of women Felix has assembled around him.

He calls them his “mistresses” and he’s given them names different from the ones they were born with: Bumblebee (Bibi Andersson, top-billed), Isolde (Harriet Andersson), Adelaide (Eva Dahlbeck), Traviata (Gertrud Fridh), Cecelia (Mona Malm) and Beatrica (Barbro Hiort af Ornäs). You’ll note that at least some of these characters are based after famous pieces of music – “Adelaide” is from a song by Beethoven which gets croaked by Jari Kulle as Cornelius in a raspy non-voice – though the main girl in Felix’s harem (Ghislaine Maxwell to Felix’s Jeffrey Epstein, as it were) is a heavy-set middle-aged woman named Madame Tussaud (Karin Kavli), named after the proprietress of the famous London wax museum (which actually gets name-checked in the script). Felix also has a long-suffering manservant and butler named Tristan (Georg Funkquist), who used to be a major cellist himself until Felix beat him at an international music competition, whereupon he withdrew from his career like Erich von Stroheim with Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard and devoted the rest of his life to serving the Great Man. There’s also Felix’s manager, Jilliker (Allan Edwall), who has to deal with Felix’s refusal to announce the programs for his concerts in advance (Felix insists that the audiences come to see him perform and don’t care what he’s playing) and who ultimately quits after he’s appalled at Felix’s open flouting of conventional sexual morality. The film actually begins at Felix’s funeral, in which all the women in his life parade past his coffin and say, “He looks just the same – only different.” Then it flashes back to the last four days of Felix’s life, in which we see one of the mistresses shooting at statues of Felix in his garden; it’s not clear just how Felix is supposed to have died, though the hint is that he was shot.

There are some clever gags in the movie, including a scene in which we get a title saying that because of censorship the director won’t be able to show Cornelius and Bumblebee actually having sex and then the scene cuts to a black-and-white shot of them doing a Valentino-esque tango dance. But for the most part it’s just a dismal assemblage of would-be gags. One irony is that Bergman had proven in his 1955 film Smiles of a Summer Night that he could do comedy, but Smiles of a Summer Night was a romantic farce while All These Women is slapstick, and badly staged slapstick at that. I had much the same feeling about All These Women as I’ve had for years about Wagner’s Die Meistersinger – both are the works of basically serious artists who tried to make us laugh and couldn’t (though at least Die Meistersinger has moments of genuine pathos and a few drop-dead gorgeous set-piece arias of the kind Wagner deliberately avoided in his other mature works) – and I’d be tempted to offer All These Women on a double bill with Woody Allen’s Interiors as a pairing of works by highly regarded artists each trying to play on the other’s turf. (Other examples I’d have in mind include a double bill of Bela Lugosi playing the Frankenstein monster in Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man and Boris Karloff’s one vampire role, in Mario Bava’s Black Sabbath; and a pairing of Alfred Hitchcock’s one musical, Waltzes from Vienna, with They Made Me a Criminal, a quite good 1939 thriller directed by Busby Berkeley.)