Ingmar Bergman was appointed Head of the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm in 1963 and for the next three years, he recalls, he barely had time to sleep ("There was no place left for demons and dreams"). As a result, there was a seemingly featureless interruption to Bergman's cinematic career between the twin summits of The Silence (made in 1962) and Persona (released in 1966). It was punctured only by the one film in his entire output for which hardly a voice has ever been heard in unqualified praise. It seemed at the time that with the austere and controversial trilogy completed by The Silence the Swedish maestro has burned himself out.

With its clumsily jocular title (variously abbreviated in translation to Not To Speak About All These Women or Now About These Women, and called All These Women for American release), the new film appeared to be a trivial postscript, a banal piece of self-indulgence, bitter, unfunny, and best forgotten. Bergman himself, always a stern critic of his own work, claimed to be "desperately ashamed of my superficial and artificial comedy—a convincing and well-deserved fiasco."

Looking back, when it's hardly possible not to look with interest at anything directed by Bergman (even his television commercials for bath-soap have rewarding complexity), it would be pleasing to rediscover All These Women as a much-misunderstood masterpiece. But while it contains much to enjoy, it is a difficult film to like at first encounter: the viewer seems shoved into the role of unwelcome guest at a game of charades played by a close-knit family almost incoherent at its own jokes.

The broad bursts of lumbering farce are a reminder that Bergman has seldom seemed comfortable as comedian. He blames this awkwardness on his childhood, when he was "an enthusiastic weeper" while his enviably self-assured brother got all the laughs. "From an early age onward it was said that 'Ingmar has no sense of humour.'" Somewhere at the heart of All These Women, then, there could be traces of sibling rivalry—and sure enough, the relationship between the uneasy genius and his fawning biographer is fraught with malice.

The film was co-written with Erland Josephson, Bergman's lifelong friend and frequent leading actor. Together, under the pseudonym Buntel Eriksson, they had written a light romantic comedy, The Pleasure Garden (directed by Alf Kjellin in 1961), which was well enough received. Bergman felt that a follow-up could be his revenge on the critics who dismissed his Winter Light (released in 1963). The starting point was provided by Bergman's concert-pianist wife, Kabi Laretei, who recalled an ardent music teacher who made an international nuisance of himself. Bergman thought up events arising from the antics of this character, while Josephson wrote the dialogues.

Their script was initially a series of episodes centred on the women (one for each day of the week) who thwart the intruder and dedicate themselves to gratifying the needs of the reclusive cellist. Then, with the casting of Jarl Kulle as the pretentious music critic, the emphasis changed: Kulle's improvised buffoonery appealed to Bergman so much that it became dominant, to some extent a parody of Kulle's performance as Don Juan in The Devil's Eye (1960).

On close inspection, All These Women has almost as many avenues of approach as the magical villa that provides its setting. There is much to be made, for example, from the operatic resonances of the girls' names, while the curiously close resemblance between the cellist and his valet suggests another tale entirely. Above all, the film introduces colour into Bergman's work to dazzling effect, opening with the sombre decor of the funereal introduction (the whole event neatly if theatrically filmed in a single take) and growing increasingly brighter until the explosively mobile firework display.

Bergman previously considered colour for Through a Glass Darkly (1960), and took close interest in its use for The Pleasure Garden. For All These Women he filmed innumerable test sequences with his cinematographer Sven Nykvist and even checked cast and crew, so the story goes, for colour blindness. The end result, in which layers of lighting in different hues often convey a strikingly three-dimensional depth of action, was technically perfect, if not entirely to Nykvist's approval: he felt it "lacked atmosphere."

One might guess, even so, that a brittle and superficial prettiness was precisely what Bergman wanted, the mood of 1920s farce being conveyed by wonderfully elaborate costumes, grandiose posturing, and sugar-icing decor—something of a colour version, in fact, of the Hell he had already fashioned for The Devil's Eye. Atmosphere enough, perhaps: it was five years and four features later before his next colour film (excepting the brief contribution to Stimulantia in 1967). And he never relinquished entirely the attractions of monochrome, witness From The Life of the Marionettes (1980), where colour is confined to its own special psychological territory.

'Any resemblance between this film and so-called reality must be a mistake' warns an opening title, later reinforced by the suggestion not to interpret the fireworks as symbolic. This does nothing, of course, to pull the attention: instead, it offers a reassuring clue to the Bergman purpose. For all its absurdist ragtime rendition of 'Yes, we have no bananas,' its pie-in-the-face slapstick, its chases and pratfalls, All These Women is clownishly consistent with Bergman's many stories of clowns, of tormented entertainers and social exiles. Not too subtly, it's a masquerade, sheltering a bitter vulnerability. Disregard the daftness, play the story straight, and Felix is the stand-in for Bergman, slowly corrupted by the image his admirers have of him until his 'reality' as an artist is threatened. His isolation only opens him to another danger—that of becoming unchanged and unchangeable, a sterile, colourless performer. It is a paradox that could destroy him.

As a cri de Coeur, it is almost too recognizably a Bergman nightmare. The struggling artist, torn to pieces by his contemporaries, reappears immediately in Persona, where another haunted musician has retreated into inarticulate silence. Other examples can be found as early as Sawdust and Tinsel (1953) or as late as Autumn Sonata (1978), where a cellist again plays for an enraptured audience. Bergman may have been determined to enjoy some harmless nonsense when he set out to create All These Women, taking advantage of the project to surround himself with appreciative mistresses, but his comical excuses finally do nothing to alleviate a perplexed and furious frustration.