Walpurgis Night

Tonight, April 30, is Walpurgis Night, which is nominally a celebration of Catholic St. Walpurga (feast day celebrated on May 1), but in most of the places in northern Europe that celebrate, also a celebration of the coming spring and the concomitant fertility, much like Easter is co-opted from fertility rituals in other parts of Christendom. This being a big tradition in Sweden, it's unsurprising that a film would have been made called Walpurgis Night. The movie stars a young Ingrid Bergman, and was run by TCM on Ingrid Bergman's day in Summer Under the Stars this past August. But it's also on the Eclipse Series (from Criterion) box set of Ingrid Bergman in Sweden, so I deliberately waited to watch it until I could do a post on Walpurgis night itself.

The movie is set -- or at least starts and ends -- on Walpurgis Eve, or the day of April 30, at the offices of the Morgenposten newspaper. Fredrik Bergström (Victor Sjöström) is the editor in chief, and runs pieces every April 30 about the coming spring. But there's also a perceived fertility crisis in Sweden, in that people are getting married later and putting off having kids, with the fear of a coming demograph crash, a fear that's a much bigger thing these days than I would have thought it would be in the 1930s. The Morgenposten has unsurprisingly stepped into the social debate over how to increase the birth rate, with various ideas put forth. As for Fredrik, he didn't have a fertility problem, with he and his late wife being parents to seven children.

The youngest of those children is Lena (Ingrid Bergman), who works in a bank as the executive secretary to Johan Borg (Lars Hanson). Lena loves Johan, and the feeling eventually becomes mutual. But Johan is trapped in a loveless marriage to Clary (Karin Carlsson), one which has produced no children, that being important because the birthrate is a major theme of the movie. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Lena has decided to quit her job, as she knows she'll never get Johan, and continuing to have an affair with one's boss is a big problem. Johan is disappointed since Lena is really pretty darn good at the job she's paid to do. Dad obviously doesn't know about Lena's relationship, although it's going to come out when one of Lena's nephews finds a photo of Borg when the whole family gets together for a birthday party for the elder Mr. Bergström.

I was getting ahead of myself talking about the Borg relationship, but it turns out that it's technically not so childless, as Clary has gone to her doctor and found out that she's pregnant. She doesn't want the child, however, as it's going to interfere with her happiness and ability to live a free life without being tied down. So she plans to get an abortion, even though reputable doctors won't perform the abortion. So she's sent to a place in the countryside where the procedure will be performed and she can stay for a couple of days for observation to make certain she doesn't bleed out in a botched abortion. Unfortunately, the cops discover what's going on, and a gangster informs the doctor the police are coming. The gangster also finds the admission card for Mrs. Borg, and takes it so that he can later blackmail Mrs. Borg.

Needless to say, all of the subplots come together, and when evidence points to Johan having possibly paid to obtain the abortion, Mr. Bergström thinks it was for his daughter. That of course isn't the case, but Johan has to keep the real truth from coming out.

Walpurgis Night is an interesting movie that compares fairly well with a lot of the pre-Codes Hollywood would have made, especially the social issue dramas at Warner Bros. Those were more frank than what was made at the other Hollywood studios, but Walpurgis Night's discussion of abortion is even more frank than anything Americans would ever have gotten, even from Warner Bros. That by itself makes it interesting, never mind the presence of a young Ingrid Bergman, who is pretty good, as is the rest of the cast.

The movie, however, has problems with the scripts. It felt to me as though about two-thirds of the way in, the movie couldn't figure out how to resolve all of the problems it had set up to that point, so the writers start throwing us a series of ever more extreme curveballs to twist the plot over the final third of the movie. These don't quite work, and that's a shame since the movie has a really interesting premise.