In 1938, at the age of 20, Ingmar Bergman began a degree course in literature and art history at Stockholm University (known then as Stockholm High School). Already a film fan since his grandmother took him to Black Beauty when he was sick, he discovered a comparable passion for the theatre and quickly became involved in all aspects of student production. Estranged from his parents ("as though they were from another planet," he once said), he would retreat when infrequent leisure permitted, to his grandmother's country house overlooking the railway line at Dufnas. And it was there in 1941 that "for the first time in my life I wrote uninterruptedly: the result was twelve stage plays and one opera libretto." Given the location, Eva could have been once of these, but none of them survived intact; they were absorbed into other projects and it was not until September 1942 that Bergman finally staged a play of his own, The Death of Punch. Attracting considerable praise, it led to an invitation to join the script department of Svensk Filmindustri. As Bergman confided years later to Greta Garbo, he was to inherit the "Film Town" office formerly occupied by Gustaf Molander.

Garbo, in fact, was "discovered" by Molander when Mauritz Stiller asked him to recommend one of his Stockholm drama school students for a role in The Atonement of Gosta Berling (1924). After training as an actor himself, Molander had begun his film career in 1916 as screenwriter for Stiller and Sjöström on some of the great classics of silent cinema, including A Man There Was (1917), Thomas Graal's Best Film (1917), and Sir Arne's Treasure (1919). Becoming a director in 1920, he made more than sixty films before his retirement in 1967, most notably Intermezzo (1936) which launched Ingrid Bergman to international fame.

A frequent and genial visitor to the "script slaves" at Svensk, Molander read an early draft of a Bergman screenplay called Torment and promptly brought it to the attention of the head of Svensk, Carl Anders Dymling. The story contained much that was objectionable and unpleasant, he said, but also a generous amount of joy and truth—it ought to be filmed. Supervised by Sjöström and directed by Alf Sjöberg, Torment was made in 1944, and as a reward for Molander's support three more Bergman projects shortly came his way: Woman Without A Face (1947), Eva (1948) and Divorced (1950).

They too, it might be noted, contained "much that was objectionable and unpleasant," reflecting the masochistic tone of Bergman's astonishing output, both film and on stage, during the late 1940s. At the same time, Bergman's scripts of the period can be seen as exploratory, searching for a suitable dramatic vocabulary to express Bergman's private litany of agnosticism and betrayal. In Molander's treatment, the savage, suicidal characters of Woman Without A Face proved to be a commercial attraction, and it was clear that Eva could be a repeat success—although instead of looking back to the grim shadows of Torment it has a more positive identity. Eva proceeds from dusk to dawn in anticipation of the precarious optimism of To Joy (1950) and the "summer" films.

Expanded from what had become a short story by Bergman—The Trumpet Player and Our Lord—his script for Eva was "a protest against myself." It is told in three main interlocking sections: Bo as a child battling with his father, Bo seduced into committing near-murder by his lascivious friends, and Bo as lover, husband, and father in his turn. Each section has mysterious and unpredictable elements, from the jocularity of the Tyrolean Trip to the unexplored neon night-life of Bo's career as a trumpeter, and the enigmatic, almost dismissively underwritten activities of Eva herself, firmly ushering Bo into parenthood but granted remarkably few close-ups on the way.

Molander films it all with a casual precision and an affection for family meal-times. Whether or not the expressive shadows on Bo's face, the flashes of thunder, the misplaced sandwich, the lighthouse, or the spotlit hand (soon to reappear in Waiting Women) are more Molander's images than Bergman's, there is no mistaking the origin of the film's obsession with the proximity of death or with the possibility that God has abandoned mankind. "I wish that someone could sit down and explain my life to me," says Bo, ahead of pilgrims to come (see The Seventh Seal and The Magician), and a battle with raging seas in the presence of a saintly sea-dog called Mikael contrive to win him the joyful explanation he needs. A cheery conclusion against all odds was a Svensk trademark for the period.

A major attraction, of course is the film's cast, headed by the formidable trio of Birger Malmsten, Stig Olin (father of Lena), and Eva Dahlbeck, whose film debut in 1942 was also for Molander in his highly-praised Ride Tonight! The scenes of these three together are like a rehearsal for innumerable confrontations to follow, and in their company the intriguing hybrid that is Eva seems reassuringly both fresh and familiar, a recycling of welcome faces. Again we meet Inga Landgre, formerly heroine Crisis (1945), Bergman's first film as a director (and now rather wistfully sidelined), and we can glimpse Erland Josephson (credited as "Karl") in another of his early walk-on roles of absolutely no consequence. The exception is the "unknown" Eva Stiberg, who followed her appealingly meditative performance with a dozen average feature films until finding popularity in a television series that ran for years. With its Bergmanesque settings of cramped bedrooms, turbulent seashores and anguished souls, Molander's Eva evidently brought out the best in her.

Actually, the film's opening shot says it all. Bergman's childhood visits to his grandfather, who had been a railway engineer in Dalarna, gave him a lifelong craze for locomotives. Whenever there was turbulence in the Bergman household, a model railway set provided consolation and trains had a frequent and even essential role in his films (as with To Joy, Three Strange Loves, The Silence, and Autumn Sonata). "Anything to do with trains has always fascinated me," Bergman says, "and an awful lot of trains run through my films. They are among the jolliest things I know, trains."