"Who would have thought that august Sweden would be sending us a film comedy as witty and cheerfully candid about the complexities of love as any recent French essay on l'amour? Yet that is what Ingmar Bergman's Smiles of a Summer Night is—a delightfully droll contemplation of amorous ardors....In a style of writing and direction more characteristic of the French or perhaps the pre-war Hungarians than the usually solemn Swedes, Mr. Bergman skips us gaily through a mix-up of youthful and adult love affairs, which, while timed around the turn of the century, are as spicy as any such today....Mr. Bergman, whose previous pictures seen here have been on the deeply serious side, keeps this one light and intriguing with a fine blend of stylized high comedy and farce. His gentlemen are sternly pompous figures while his ladies are sweetly pliable. The matter most pointedly satirized is masculine dignity."


"Ingmar Bergman achieves one of the few classics of carnal comedy: a tragicomic chase and roundelay that raises boudoir farce to elegance and lyric poetry. This film is the culmination of Bergman's 'rose' style; as writer and director, he ties up his persistent, early battle-of-the-sexes themes in an intricate plot structure. And in this fin-de-siècle houseparty setting, with its soft light, its delicate, perfumed atmosphere, and its golden pavilion, the women are all beautiful and epigrams shine. The film becomes an elegy to transient love; a gust of wind, and the whole vision may drift away. As the hostess, the stage actress trying to win back the lawyer she loves, there is the great Eva Dahlbeck (in one inspired, suspended moment she sings 'Freut Euch des Lebens'). Ulla Jacobsson is the lawyer's virgin wife; Harriet Andersson, a blonde here but as opulent and sensuous as in her earlier roles, is the impudent, love-loving maid; Margit Carlqvist is the proud, unhappy countess. Gunnar Björnstrand is the lawyer, Björn Bjelfvenstam is his son, Jarl Kulle is the strutting count, and Naima Wifstrand is the actress's aged mother, who is carried about for her game of croquet."


"Ingmar Bergman goes poaching on the terrain of Renoir, Lubitsch, and Mozart. This 1955 film is his lightest and most appealing, but the light touch doesn't come naturally to the Brooding Swede; a few of those smiles feel uncomfortably forced. Eva Dahlbeck is wonderful as the aging actress who hosts a summer party on her country estate—she seems much more responsible for the film's gently wise tone than Bergman's heavily telegraphed ironies."