Within two years of the release of his first film as a director—the aptly-named Crisis (1946)—Ingmar Bergman embarked upon his fifth production, Port of Call (Hamnstad). In the interval, he had staged nine plays (four written by himself) at the Gothenburg City Theatre, and delivered a screenplay, Woman Without a Face, for the filming by Gustav Molander in 1947. Bergman's own films had been a mixed bunch: he described A Ship Bound for India (1947) as "a major disaster," but Night Is My Future (1948) was "generally well received and a modest box office success." It was enough to persuade Svensk Filmindustri, who first employed the mercurial Bergman in 1943 in the company's script department, to invite him back to direct a new project.

"When I returned to Svensk," Bergman recalls, "I occupied the sound department and the laboratory every free moment I had and learned everything I could about sound, film developing and copying. I learned also about the camera, and the various camera lenses. No technician would ever walk all over me again. I began to learn how I wanted things to be done." What he also needed to learn, as Port of Call intriguingly illustrates, was what he wanted to say, initially by pruning Olle Länsberg's manuscript, The Gold and the Walls, down to its essentials.

Novelist and screenwriter Länsberg had previously written Railroad Workers (1947), starring Victor Sjöström, and later achieved some international notoriety for the passionate and censor-troubling Dear John (1966). But little of his text survived the Bergman treatment, although he received full on-screen credit. It was, in fact, almost the last time that a Bergman film was derived from any other source than Bergman himself.

Strangely, one inspiration for Port of Call is claimed within the film: asked what he's reading, the sailor home from sea says it's a book by Harry Martinson (from the spine, the title might be guessed as Journeys Without Aim), a name immediately recognizable to a Swedish audience. Elected to the Swedish Academy in 1949, Martinson was Nobel Prizewinner for Literature in 1974. The stories of his orphaned childhood and maritime adventures as a teenager are told with a power and poetry that reached a peak with his celebrated space opera Aniara (1959), a meditation on the risks and rewards of technology. In effect, by identifying the character of Gösta with Martinson, Bergman needs to tell us little else about him—his eight year seafaring odyssey is already familiar enough, no flashbacks required, whereas Berit has a sorry tale to reveal.

Both Berit and her despairing social worker (played by Birgitta Valberg, who was to be the mother in Bergman's The Virgin Spring) are briefly seen reading as if to consider the outburst by Gösta's host and helper that "books only make loneliness worse." Since the headline studied by Berit offers guidance to "The Road to Happiness" the claim doesn't seem to be taken too seriously. Bergman also refutes any ties with the so-called 'Writers of the Forties,' who were eager to adopt his work as representative of extreme post-war melancholy. "I had no contact whatsoever," he declares, "with Swedish Literary culture, and its authors had no contact with me."

Martinson aside (Bergman's only other association with him appears to have been a failed theatrical production of Three Knives From Wei in 1964), the shaping of Port of Call was dictated partly by the 'poetic realism' of the French cinema of the early 1940s, partly by the postwar Italian neo-realists, and partly by the need for quick and economical filming as achieved by popular Swedish directors like Molander, Faustman, and Mattsson. The result is an indecisive miscellany, with authentic dockyard scenes (clearly copying those of Quai des Brumes) alternating with the careful lights and shadows of studio decor. Fascinated by Rossellini, Bergman finds, even so, that imitation is no solution: his story insists on discovering its own style.

And the story it tells contains many of the now-familiar Bergman obsessions. Reflecting his turbulent malevolence in Port of Call, signalled by anything from a single line ("She never made me happy," sighs Gertrud's father) to the protracted duel between Berit and her poisonous mother, a battle punctuated by the endless opening and slamming of doors. Despite his allegiance to neo-realism, Bergman's people seem awkward and vulnerable in the open air; their more natural environment is the bedroom or, at best, the excessively crowded dance-hall (through which Gunnar Fischer, in his first film for Bergman, ploughs his camera with evident relish).

Berit, the ill-used outcast, has been at the centre of Bergman's scripts from the beginning, destined to appear most famously as Monika. At the centre of Port of Call, her long night of confession is touchingly performed by Nine-Christine Jönsson, her only appearance for Bergman in a relatively brief career. Her co-star, Bengt Eklund, was in four other Bergman films including a walk-on glimpse in The Shame (1968), and was still working in films and television in 1990.

Bergman subjects them to what was already a favoured device, the intense close-up, to which they respond nobly and with only occasional exaggeration. At times, his staging suggests haste rather than inspiration, such as the collection of Gertrud by stretcher, a sequence copied from Crisis (a glimpse here of the not-yet-discovered Harriet Andersson), or his curiously clumsy finale in which, for no convincing reason, his lovers keep changing their minds as the traffic roars past. Most prominently, his theme is jealousy, for which he was still seeking absolution years later in his script for Faithless (2000). An exploratory and rewarding stop-over on a lifelong journey, Port of Call unexpectedly displays much of the essential Bergman.