REVIEWS
"After three successive flops, Bergman needed a hit, so he knuckled down to Edqvist's adaptation of her tearjerking novel about a blind piano teacher finding love with a female student. An early sequence, where protagonist
Malmsten is disfigured on a military rifle range while trying to save a puppy, gives some indication that this is one film Bergman didn't wrench from the depths of his soul. It plays like a commercial chore, but may have saved his movie career by doing well at the Swedish box office. And now and again, sequences flare into life, among them the surreal dream where the hero sees himself dragged into a swamp by disembodied hands, the touchingly understated material shot at the blind school, and
Malmsten's proud moment when he's slapped by a romantic rival—at last treated as an equal, not an invalid."
— Trevor Johnston, Time Out
"Looked at with all the love and tolerance that one can muster in these movie-meagre days, it still seems a soapy little picture whose showing now is only justified as demonstration for movie-lovers on how much Bergman has improved. Its story of a blinded musician who fretfully gropes his way towards a submissive mental adjustment and happy emotional union with a fine girl is luxuriously sentimental in a romantic fashion and style more akin to early Hollywood movies than to more recent Bergman films. Dramatically, the story is loaded with heart-throbbed cliches and its few hints of social injustice toward the blind are dated by 40 or 50 years....To be sure, there are hints and imitations of Bergman's later pictorial power in some of the scenes in this picture. One sequence, for instance, which describes the pitifully meagre funeral of the father of the girl, is beautifully lean and laconic, forecasting the later Bergman skill at etching emotional situations in strong, realistic strokes. But, for the most part,
Night Is My Future is cinematic juvenilia of a painful sort."
— Bosley Crowther, The New York Times (1963)
COMMENTARY
"When I made that picture, I would have accepted an offer to film the telephone book. I was a flop from the beginning. Then a very clever producer came to me and said, 'Ingmar, you are a flop. Here's a very sentimental story that will appeal to the public. You need a box-office success now.' I replied, 'I will lick your ass if you like; only let me make a picture.' So I made the picture, and I'm extremely grateful to him—he later let me make
Prison. Every day he came to the studio and told me, 'No. Reshoot. This is too difficult, incomprehensible. You are crazy! She must be beautiful! You must have more light on her hair! You must have some cats in the film! Perhaps you can find some little dog.' The picture was a great success. He taught me—in a very tough way—much that saved me. I will be grateful to him till my dying day."
— Ingmar Bergman (1971)
"My only memory of the filming is that I kept thinking: Make sure there are no tedious parts. Keep it entertaining. That was my only ambition."
— Ingmar Bergman, Images: My Life in Film
