In the summer of 1949 the Swedish film and theatre director Ingmar Bergman gave up his attempts to salvage his second marriage (a process hauntingly retold in his film To Joy) and at the age of 31 began a passionate affair with film journalist Gun Hagberg. It was a time of crisis in the Swedish film industry, about to face a complete shut down, and Bergman now with three families to support, was soon desperate for income. Forced to make a film he despised (This Can't Happen Here) which, as he expected, was a crashing failure, he saw his potentially successful Summer Interlude shelved for a year until, the production strike resolved, he was locked into a punishing programme of debt repayment. Fortunately for cinema history, this proved to be the making of him.

Certain that Summer Interlude, once released, would restore his reputation, Bergman tinkered with some ideas prompted by the film in a project called She Danced One Summer. This became One Summer of Happiness when the producer decided he didn't want to risk Bergman's "Neurotic Vulgarity," and fired him. The film was made instead by Arne Mattsson and proved to be an international hit along with its star, Ulla Jacobsson, later to appear for Bergman in Smiles Of A Summer Night (1955). Meanwhile, Bergman had prepared Waiting Women (known as Secrets of Women in the USA) from a description by Gun Hagberg of an event in her previous marriage. According to Bergman, he and Gun worked on the script together, so closely that she should have received a screen credit—but hers was not the only contribution.

The film's structure and the first of its episodes are based, sometimes word for word, on Bergman's play Rakel and the Cinema Doorman, a bitter tale of marital infidelity first staged in 1946 at the Malmö City Theatre. And while there is no question that the second episode, the idyllic visit to Paris, is a direct reference to the three months Bergman spent there in 1949 with his new love, the sequence is also a deliberate experiment in wordless narrative. Bergman explains: "I saw Ecstasy (by the Czech director Gustav Machaty) when I was eighteen years old, and it deeply affected me. This was partly a natural reaction because the movie told nearly everything through images alone. I discovered that it was possible to tell stories without text."

The third episode, by contrast, is all talk, and would have been a one-shot wonder too intentionally in the tradition of Hitchcock's Rope—if the confinement of the jammed lift had not proved too inflexible for Bergman's camera. The enthusiasm for uninterrupted takes can be seen elsewhere in the film (the first encounter, for instance between Marta and the Lobelius family), but the real innovation of course is Bergman's venture into comedy, ably guided by his two leading players. Astonished at the mirth of his audiences when the film, actually based on an incident in Bergman's own life, proved a huge success, he would visit the cinemas where it was showing and listen, fascinated, to the laughter. With Björnstrand and Dahlbeck he launched a lasting comedy partnership—and at the same time, when his marriage to Gun Hagberg collapsed shortly after he met Harriet Andersson, it was always Dahlbeck who spoke for Gun on screen. "Gun was the model for many women in my films," says Bergman, "and in the incomparable Eva Dahlbeck I found her interpreter."

To rediscover Waiting Women, the link between Summer Interlude and Summer with Monika, is to be reminded of the gentle melancholy with which Bergman contemplated his behaviour during the 'Summer Years.' Each of the film's episodes has the potential for grim tragedy, and yet from each the vain is rippled away in the telling, so that against all odds the concluding mood is one of fulfilment and understanding. The young lovers (Gerd Andersson, by the way, is Bibi's big sister) are certain they can make a better job of their undying passion and elope furtively by motor-boat in images that echo the opening shot of a beached toy and later, the floating dream-days of Paris—but everyone knows they'll be back. "Let them have their summer," says the family elder, "there'll be time enough for cares and wisdom."

Of the three stories, the darkest is that of Marta, who tells of her pregnancy in a complex interweaving of flashbacks from the labour ward and the process of birth itself. All the Bergman trademarks are in evidence: the use of mirrors, of water, of family interference, of seduction after exhibitionism, of the artists as free spirit untrammelled by mundane considerations. Remarkably, part turns out to be a first run for Face to Face (1975): the girl alone in her grandparents' apartment, with its decorative blinds, heavy furniture, and unspeakable menace behind the glass of the front door. The church bells and an array of clocks perform a perpetual symphony to mark the mood for the passing hours. And where Rakel's earlier seduction has been in full sunshine Marta is in mysterious darkness from which her lover's hand all she can see of him [sic], beckons in irresistible invitation.

Later, as she studies her pregnant self delightedly in a hall mirror (and the passing Bergman smiles appreciatively), the shadows close in again; a baby chuckles at her in the street, but her response is cut short by the intrusion of a crippled passer-by. And as, under gas, she tackles the birth pains, her visions are of remorse and terror, an axe chopping into a doll, until the flowing water washes the fear away and she glides placidly off with the baby in her arms. In years to come, Bergman was perhaps to be less certain that a new life could absolve all the torments of the past, but in Waiting Women his honesty contrives to be less cruel, his empathy less abrasive and the result is cause for celebration.