The Count of the Old Town

One of the DVD box sets I mentioned getting was Criterion's Eclipse Series set of Ingrid Bergman's early Swedish movies. Recently, I watched another movie off the set, The Count of the Old Town.

The "Old Town" here refers to one particular district of Stockholm, which is portrayed as being a rather working-class part of Stockholm based on who inhabits the movie. The "Count" (Valdemar Dalquist) is a former count who lost his fortune and now aimlessly hopes to increase his hard liquor ration, Sweden maintaining a system of alcohol rationing until 1955. (I went down the Wikipedia hole and learned that Sweden actually had a national referendum on alcohol prohibition in 1922 that failed by a 51-49 margin.) The Count would like to marry the owner of the local boarding house called the "City Hotell", Klara (Julia Cæsar), but she wants him to get steady work.

Meanwhile, there's an unknown jewel thief, called "Diamond-Lasse", who pulled off a heist of a local jeweler. There's an obvious candidate for the thief, an obliging young man named Åka (Edvin Adolphson, who co-directed) who shows up at the City Hotell looking for a place to stay and not having much luggage on him. Åke, for his part, meets and falls in love with Klara's niece and chambermaid, Elsa (Ingrid Bergman in her movie debut).

Various other Runyonesque characters populate this area of the Old Town, including a blind man and a fellow drunkard companion of the Count, known as the Cucumber. Eventually the bad guy is caught, and all the good guys live happily ever after, although I won't mention who the bad guy is.

The Count of the Old Town plays much like it could have been a Hollywood programmer of the era, at least in terms of plot. The cinematography, however, includes a lot of location work in Stockholm which is really nice to see. The movie probably wouldn't be remembered at all today, and certainly wouldn't be available on DVD here in the US, if it weren't for the presence of Ingrid Bergman, who unsurprisingly does quite well. Having said that, it doesn't mean that The Count of the Old Town is a bad movie by any stretch of the imagination, more that it's the sort of thing we've all seen before.