Edith Carlmar's The Wayward Girl (1960) is exclusively showing on MUBI starting December 16, 2020.
Illustration by Ruth Gwily.
Edith Carlmar’s The Wayward Girl, a 1959 tale of young lovers on the run, revealed one of cinema’s great stars to the world—Liv Ullmann. But it would also spell the end of Carlmar’s career in feature filmmaking. Norway’s prolific first woman director, Carlmar made ten features in the decade between 1949 and 1959, from comedies and social-issue dramas to what came to be considered the country’s first noir with her debut Death Is a Caress. Alongside her husband Otto, Carlmar would establish Carlmar Film A/S, producing movies that, not unlike her contemporary Ida Lupino, tackled sensational subject matter—abortion, unwed pregnancies, substance abuse, and juvenile delinquency—with warmth and empathy. Above all, Carlmar was a popular filmmaker: hardworking, mercenary, and with a good eye for the scandalous issues of the day that would sell tickets fast.
The Wayward Girl had plenty in there to get bums on seats. A spicy “youth on the run” storyline centered on a bad girl with loose morals, the film tapped into many of the popular symbols of ‘50s youth culture. The young Gerd (Liv Ullmann) drinks Coke, smokes incessantly, lives for the cinema, and jives to jazz in tawdry clubs. Jaded and restless at home, and faced with an overbearing mother, she falls in with a bad crowd: a local crime gang that threatens to bring about her downfall. Here was a classic trope of the “youth problem” film, which dealt with the hysteria surrounding the emergence of a distinct demographic—the eminently cinematic teenager—by conjuring up a shadowy world of urban-set crime gangs, broken homes, and sexual depravity. Gerd’s middle-class boyfriend Anders (Atle Merton) begs her to flee the city with him and so they run off to a cabin in the countryside. Used to the sensory excitement of the city—of boys and nightclubs and dancing—the simplicity of this pastoral idyll at first holds little attraction for Gerd. Gradually, however, the wonders of the natural world begin to soften her hard-boiled city soul and she succumbs to its delights. But happiness doesn’t last long, as temptation soon arrives at the door.
Although Carlmar plays up the more sensational elements of the story, the film shows a great deal of sympathy for the plight of the young lovers. The adult ranks of ‘50s Norwegian society are shown to be calculating, conservative, and judgmental. Anders’s middle-class parents will not accept their relationship, coming down hard on Gerd’s “bad reputation”: a judgement infused with more than a strong whiff of class snobbery. The men in the film are not much better: controlling, demanding, and even violent. Gerd’s trust in men, who only seem to want her for her body, is shaky at best and frequently compromised. Even when Carlmar strays into sexploitation territory—through Gerd’s seductive, maniacal stripteases and peekaboo outfits, and the sudden, melodramatic plot-turn towards infidelity—the director remains eager to point out the hypocrisies of bourgeois adulthood and men’s controlling natures. Gerd may be no angel, but much of her behavior can be traced back to a defensiveness brought about by how the world has treated her: burn it all down, before they burn you down with it.
Ullmann is the film’s dramatic—and erotic—center and it’s easy to see why this role launched her career. Appearing as an uncredited extra in Carlmar's 1957 comedy Fools in the Mountain, Ullmann already had strong foundations in the theater when Carlmar asked her to audition for the role. With a slit in her pencil skirt and the perfectly sullen slouch of a twenty-year-old, she radiates a youthful sensuality shot through with both innocence and danger. The lamb, a symbol of the purity of their romance in the early stages of the film, soon becomes an object of slaughter, as Gerd, eyes glinting, takes a knife to its throat. She is as convincing in the integrity of her love for Anders as she is in the urge to destroy everything. Veering rapidly between the Madonna-whore dichotomy—evoked in a daisy-pulling scene that provokes past traumatic memories and a frenzied, emotional dance—Gerd seems to be battling a self-destructive instinct instilled in her by a conservative society with no real place for liberated young women. In this and other things, Ullmann’s carefree and physical performance recalls a young Brigitte Bardot, an allusion the director seems to emphasize by framing her underneath a poster of B.B. tacked onto her bedroom wall. (Gerd’s wiggle skirt is also very much in the Bardot fashion mould.)
The Wayward Girl’s incursions into sexploitation were riding on the coat-tails of successful Scandinavian softcore films like the Swedish drama One Summer of Happiness (Arne Mattsson, 1951), whose whirlwind box-office success was due in no small part to its frank scenes of nudity. Carmar’s film similarly sets up an ideological distinction between the pressures of the city and the freedoms of the countryside. Like in One Summer of Happiness, Anders and Gerd, idyllically framed behind tall reeds, frolic naked in a lake: an image of innocent, liberated sexuality. (Apparently, religious members of Ullmann’s family tried to stop the film’s distribution when they heard of her nude scenes, with little success). 
Something of a precursor to the wilder declarations of the ‘60s sexual revolution, The Wayward Girl invariably fed into the mythology of the sexually liberated Scandinavian that would prove such a success both domestically and abroad. The film’s most obvious parallel is Ingmar Bergman’s earlier film My Summer with Monika (1953) , not least because Ullmann would go on to become a regular star of Bergman’s films. Set at the height of summer, both films follow a pair of young lovers who leave the city for the sexual cornucopia of the country. Gerd and Monika (Harriet Andersson) are similarly liberated and impetuous; both working-class children of single-parent families, they throw themselves head-first into the passions of a fledgling romance but are eventually forced to confront the realities of adulthood. Sensual and summery, with a number of peppery twists, Carlmar’s bad-girl melodrama opens a window onto the life (and possible fate) of emancipated young women in a country at the cusp of second-wave feminism and a 1960s in full swinging mode.