There were several reasons for an American teenager in Brooklyn to see the first Ingmar Bergman films that arrived in the United States in the 1950s. None of the reasons had to do with cinematic craft, artistic vision, or a taste for spiritual angst. The far more compelling attractions were named Harriet Andersson, Maj-Britt Nilsson, and Anita Björk. Titles like Illicit Interlude, Secrets of Women, and The Naked Night didn't hurt either. In short, Bergman was skin. With these early efforts he might very well have been dipping a toe into the waters of the existential exasperations that would wash over him more maturely later on, but that was immaterial. More to the point was Andersson's Monika dipping her whole foot (along with all the rest of her) into a moonlit lake.

As far as I was concerned, those first Bergman films weren't even Swedish. They were simply foreign, qualifying them for one of the four Brooklyn art houses (four more than exist now) then showing European productions. There were three ways you knew they were art houses. First of all, they were about half the size of the RKO or Loew's chain outlet a block away. Secondly, their marquees carried only titles, the presumption being that few patrons would be drawn by actors with too many vowels or weird arrangements of consonants in their names. The third tip-off was the posters in front of the theatre that invariably depicted a glowering hero and a bare-shouldered, rueful heroine. To judge by the posters, European men never had anything to smile about and European women were resigned to never being clothed enough for the next cold snap.

It didn't take a passport to enter one of these houses, but it might as well have. In contrast to the brightly lighted lobbies and Willy Wonka variety of treats to be found at the refreshment stands of the chain theatres, establishments like the Plaza and the Bell specialized in dusty boxes of Good 'N Plenty inside which the white and pink licorice capsules seemed to have made some chemical dye trade with one another. They weren't good and one was plenty. Only the Plaza offered popcorn; sort of.

The Plaza's popcorn machine had an impact on Bergman, too. When it wasn't spewing its contents over the floor, prompting loud melancholy ad libs from the fool with the nickels, it was churning, grinding, or whining about its contents on its own, this in direct competition to the pains unfolding on the screen. This usually brought shouts from the 10 or 15 patrons scattered around the orchestra to the effect that they couldn't listen in peace to the language they didn't understand, and were seriously considering demanding their kronor, francs, and marks back. I never saw anybody go so far as to carry out the threat (if only because the promised nude scenes from the posters had yet to come), but on one occasion the manager felt enough pressure to unplug the popper behind some snarling about how "you don't have to hear what the hell they're saying, just read the subtitles!" I never discovered whether the man had worked previously in a library, was unable to grasp the essentials of the cinema experience, or simply had a piece of the popcorn action.

Then I saw The Naked Night

In case you didn't already know you weren't about to see a Gregory Peck western, the Brooklyn art houses betrayed their exhibition policy with their coming attractions. Instead of the usual frantic explosions, kisses, and pratfalls in rainbow colors, there was a sombre black-and-white legend informing the audience that next week's film had won awards at the Cannes, Berlin, and Lusaka festivals and had been praised by whoever-these-people-were-supposed-to-be writing in whatever-these-periodicals-were-supposed-to-be. Actual scenes from the coming films were rarely shown, apparently on the theory that anything said in French or German would have been Greek to the audience being counted on to return. I always found these imageless trailers vaguely unsettling, and not only because they didn't follow the Hollywood pattern of throwing together a movie's most dramatic scenes, cutting away from them before their climax, and then splashing the big red word INCREDIBLE over the screen. What could be truly eerie was the silence—the festival designations and critical excerpts being flashed out with nothing more than the low hum of the projector as accompaniment. It was an arrogant kind of quiet, as if we were to understand that prestige was the topic here so shut up and prepare to be as impressed as that reviewer for the Glasgow Herald had been.

I guess I was hard to impress. More often than not, the trade-off for a glimpse of a bare breast were French films about Citroens driving around Paris and cops blowing smoke into one another's faces while they endlessly interrogated a suspect; German films about motorcycles tooling around Frankfurt and hookers and cops blowing smoke into one another's faces while they all modeled long black raincoats; and Swedish films about carts rumbling through the countryside and teenagers blowing smoke into one another's faces while they fenced around getting it on. The United States might have had MGM and Paramount, but Europe clearly had Gitanes and HB. Beyond that awareness? Well, I had come to recognize a slew of European performers and could feel superior in my cinematic knowledge when they occasionally popped up in Hollywood productions. And granted there was a mood about even the dreariest Italian or Swedish picture that seemed to have escaped California filmmakers—something personal, something quirky, something, yes, sensual. Marlon Brando wouldn't have seemed so exceptional in these settings. Barbara Stanwyck wouldn't have had to rely on incessant repartee to convey her message. James Stewart wouldn't have had to climb to the ledge of a bell tower to suggest the vertigos of daily life. Maybe that distinction should have been enough of an education for me. But it wasn't. Appreciating sensuality and appreciating the wonders of Clearasil can be fairly incompatible preoccupations.

Then I saw The Naked Night.

And immediately saw it again.

My first reaction to the Bergman fable about a traveling carnival troupe was annoyance. Unlike other pictures he had shot in black and white, this one seemed to have been photographed in black and white and still more white. With a perverse sense of purpose, the director and the subtitle writer had teamed up to insure that just about every line of translation had been placed over a white shirt, a white dress, or a white horizon. Only the weary trudging of the nags pulling the carnival wagons seemed to preclude the action moving eventually to Lapland. Particularly impossible was an early sequence (presented as a story within the story) about a carnival clown going to get his exhibitionist wife away from a detachment of sex-starved soldiers. To accomplish this, the white-togged clown hurried toward a white sky, saw his white-skinned wife splashing in the sea with white-skinned soldiers, clambered down some white rocks to retrieve her, and, after realizing that her clothes had been stolen as a prank, carried her cavalry-like over his shoulder down lime-white paths back to their wagon. The most legible lines during all this were those imposed over the wife's blonde hair.

One visual fire after another

And already, to me at least, it didn't matter. The story of the clown and his wife had enkindled one visual fire after another. The entire sequence evoked those silent Russian epics in which every closeup signified HISTORY or REVOLUTION—except this was only about a cuckold trying to get his wife to stop embarrassing both of them. Substitute smeared, sepulchral makeup for bruises and the clown carrying the wife back to the carnival camp was Brando staggering back to work in the last scene of On the Waterfront—except that this was humiliation demonstrating love rather than the need for a new pier boss. And when the tale was concluded, the wagon driver telling it kept rolling along a hilltop last seen in the stark imagination of Carl Dreyer—except that the only stakes interesting him and his listener, as they both emphasized, weren't those that had held Joan of Arc or that might have been used against Vampyr, but the ones needed to keep the big tent down on their next stop-off. How else to say it, but that The Naked Night suddenly excited me because, its picaresque carnival premise notwithstanding, it appeared to want to be about something small.

I had seen small movies before, of course; some of them had even been from Hollywood. But the marriage of large references to intimate drama flabbergasted me. It was neither the roar of Genghis Khan leading the Golden Horde in Cinemascope nor the drip of the kitchen sink genre then in vogue on both the big screen and on television. Naive as it sounded even to myself under the spitting popper behind me, I had the enthralling thought that maybe this Swede believes we all carry our own epics within us and that they don't have to end in shouting at one another about who was at fault for our shotgun marriage, tiny apartment next to the railroad tracks, and gambling debts with the bookie living over the pub.

And then The Naked Night scored its second hit. Normally, one enthralling thought was good enough for me to tune out of everything that immediately followed. Why risk having one's intellectual bliss contradicted too fast? Instead, though, I sank even deeper into the picture, and with a bizarre confidence that I wouldn't contradict myself because Bergman was not about to contradict himself. Helping this self-assurance along (for both of us, I assumed) was the fact that the central drama-the growing stresses between the carnival owner Albert (Åke Grönberg) and his mistress, the troupe's much younger bareback rider (Harriet Andersson)—amounted to a macroscopic version of the clown story. There were no soldiers, but there were plenty of humiliations—the owner at the end of his rope financially, the owner promising to give up his itinerant ways and (unsuccessfully) begging an ex-wife to take him back, and the owner discovering that his mistress has slept with an actor for a worthless bauble. Then for good measure there was the very dandified actor beating up the burly Albert in the centre ring of the tent before a mocking crowd. Forget the enthralling thoughts about small, big, and epic. The picture also happened to be the ultimate teenager's manual on the romanticism of self-pity.

I've wondered more than once over the years what another screenwriter-director would have done once he had established the abjectness of the carnival owner. We know what Josef von Sternberg did with a similar type in The Blue Angel—no escape. We know what Mauritz Stiller did in The Atonement of Gösta Berling—fantasy. We can also guess at what Hollywood censors would have insisted any American filmmaker do—have Albert shoot, strangle, or drown the mistress, burn to death in the middle of a fire that destroys the entire carnival, and have his ex-wife deliver a eulogy around the theme that he had always been a traveling man and was now just traveling on to another world. As ludicrous as this last option might have been, it didn't seem altogether out of the question when the hopeless Albert dug out a gun and, in between guzzlings from a brandy bottle in his wagon, pointed it first in the direction of the entrapped bareback rider and then at the clown whose earlier related humiliation he found it easy to blame for triggering his own.

But Bergman and I hadn't come so far for that kind of pat melodrama. The first clue came in the woman's hilarious lie that she had agreed to have sex with the actor in exchange for a glass trinket only because he had locked her in his room and she didn't want to be late for that evening's performance under the big tent. There was no way that kind of baldness could be eliminated from the planet. As transparently mendacious and artificially blasé as she was, she deserved all the years ahead of her to perfect, grow out of, or laugh at her act. So poutingly innocent, she couldn't even qualify under Albert's slobbering lament to the clown (the second clue) that "you should shoot everyone you're sorry for." She had a lot more reason to feel sorry for him than vice versa.

A startling pronouncement

So better the clown should go down? The gun-wielding owner thought about it, and the equally tipsy clown didn't seem all that opposed to the principle, but then Albert spoiled that alternative with the blurt that "I like people." That I recall, no other Bergman character has ever made such a flat declaration; for sure, I've never heard any Hollywood character say it, exception made for political windbags or con artists softening up their victims. In the Plaza that day it seemed like such a startling pronouncement in the circumstances that I immediately claimed authorship of it. At the very least, I told myself, I was the only one in the orchestra who had been able to read the dialogue over the owner's shirt. One way or another, for what must have been two-and-a-half seconds, it seemed important to have title to that sentiment as a discovery from more than oratory, celebration, or self-congratulation.

Since Albert didn't count himself among the people he liked in general or in particular, however, that still left one dramatic option for his state of mind and for the theatrical rule about never introducing a gun into the proceedings without using it. And sure enough, he then pointed the pistol at his own temple. I sympathized with his despair: Had Bergman brought us all this distance merely to illustrate those perennial reports listing Sweden as one of the world's busiest suicide gardens? Maybe the mistress had been ahead of the game after all with her bauble. At least she hadn't made his mistake of overpricing the moment.

But no, not to worry. Having the owner kill himself or aborting his own dramatic situation hadn't been Bergman's only remaining options, at all. There had been a third one-growing from both Albert's desperate rage and the breeding of "I like people." So Albert staggered out of his wagon and, with the entire troupe stumbling after him, went over to a cage with an ailing bear that had been kept alive only because even the most rundown carnivals needed some kind of bear to sell tickets. And there Albert fired all his misery into a creature even more wretched and humiliated than he was.

I didn't dare move. If somebody had made the mistake of choosing that moment to shuffle into a seat in my row, he would have had to climb over my head. The flushes came more rapidly than the grindings from the popper behind me. Something about Humanity with a capital H. Something about this Bergman guy skipping over continents and oceans to land in the Plaza theatre on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn. Something about teaching all the John Waynes of my emotions how a gun could truly be useful. Something about Albert, the bareback rider, and the clown knowing more about the Greatest Show on Earth than the Ringling brothers could ever imagine.

The picture needed an ending, so there was one. In the last scene, in the most naked night of their lives, Albert and the bareback rider exchange silent glances, then trudge off together behind one of the wagons toward another town. I liked thinking they knew I was waiting for them—sitting in the Plaza as the film started again.

A playwright, novelist, and biographer, Donald Dewey has written 16 books including biographies of Marcello Mastroianni and Jimmy Stewart.