Swedish-born Mai Zetterling found acting as an escape from an impoverished childhood, and after training at Stockholm’s Royal Dramatic Theater School, she made her debut on stage and screen at the age of 16. Her movie career took over when she was cast as the teenage girl victimized by a sadistic teacher in Torment (1944), a picture directed by Alf Sjoberg that was scripted by Ingmar Bergman, which became a major success among critics all over the world. She went to England in 1946 to star in the drama Frieda, about the plight of a European immigrant living in England during the postwar period. She was then signed by the Rank Organisation which tried to turn her into a major star. Unfortunately, she came to England at a time when the film industry was in a period of upheaval and retrenchment, and her films — which included Quartet (1948) and The Bad Lord Byron (1949) — never really succeeded. After the failure of The Romantic Age, she began… read more
Tracked this down for its Bergman associations (Thulin, the kid from The Silence and Persona, as well as the great Naima Wifstrand). Some great cinematography but the boy's past, dominated by a hedonistic mother, played by Thulin, was a little too wacky. The present-day sequences were much more effective for their subtlety, quietness and the restrained acting of Brundin and Hjelm. Not a lost classic so much as curio
