"I refuse to examine the vomit that Ingmar Bergman has left behind this time, even though I can imagine that the menu was quite good to begin with. But I am of the opinion that one should not defecate in public even if one has a lot to get rid of—unless one can sublimate one's miseries like an August Strindberg."


"Written and directed by Ingmar Bergman, the film is set in the circus world at the turn of the century. It opens with a flashback shot on different film stock: a clown's wife—a dumpy, middle-aged woman—bathes exhibitionistically in view of a whole regiment of soldiers; the clown comes and takes her away. From there the story moves to the circus owner, Åke Grönberg, and his voluptuous mistress, Harriet Andersson; this swinish Circe betrays him, and is in turn betrayed, and they go on together. The atmosphere suggests E.A. Dupont's 1925 film, Variety, with Emil Jannings, but has upsetting qualities all its own. There is an erotic scene between Miss Andersson and Hasse Ekman, as a seducer-actor, that leaves audiences slightly out of breath. The Naked Night is one of the bleakest of Bergman's films: no one is saved from total damnation; life is a circus, and the people are gross clowns; it is a round of frustration, humiliation, and defeat. Yet this heavy, mawkish Expressionism, of a kind widespread in Germany in the 20s, was extraordinarily popular with young Americans in the late 60s."


"A major early feature by Ingmar Bergman, also known as The Naked Night (though the Swedish title apparently means 'The Clown's Night'). This 1953 film is perhaps the most German expressionist of Bergman's 50s works, as redolent of sexual cruelty and angst as Variety and The Blue Angel, but no less impressive for all that. The aging owner of a small traveling circus who left his wife for a young performer in his troupe tries to regain his lost family. Visually splendid, but you may find the masochistic plot pretty unpleasant."