One of the many attractions of Ingmar Bergman's Summer with Monika is its pre-credit sequence in which the quays of Stockholm gradually materialize in the early morning mist. These tranquil images, very similar to the preface he used for Port of Call in 1948, are partly a tribute to the genius of Bergman's regular cinematographer Gunnar Fischer and partly a response to post-war documentary film-making in Europe, particularly the 'film symphonies' of Britain's GPO Film Unit as emulated by the popular Swedish success Rhythm of a City (1947). With its urban panoramas and its endearing touches of travelogue ("It's a thrill to see the city again!" proclaims a passenger on the Stockholm Central train), Summer with Monika seems at pains to imply that the adventures of Harry and his girls are no good reason for tourists to be alarmed.

The film's opening mood is quickly eroded by raucous traffic. On his delivery-bike, Harry is hemmed in by vehicles on the crowded streets until, his vulnerability established, he is diverted into a quite different setting, a Bergman courtyard. This artificial enclosure, signifying entrapment as well as a microcosm of society in general, owes much to Bergman's admiration for French cinema of the 1930s when 'poetic-realist' directors like René Clair and Marcel Carné insisted on creating their comedy drama only in the controlled environment of the film studio. Within the walls of this arena, Summer with Monika acquires both a spirit of pantomime (the ritualistic raising of hats) and later—as Monika pauses to listen to the street musicians—a measure of pathos. It is also, of course, the complete antithesis to the getaway islands of Stockholm's coastline.

Referring back to his own childhood and his stormy relationship with his authoritarian father, Bergman's films are constantly constructed around a battle between generations, youngsters being tormented and reviled by their elders. In Summer with Monika this theme is presented almost as parody, a cursory re-run of the struggles endured by the young couple in It Rains on Our Love (1946), Bergman's second film as a director. Monika is blatantly harassed by her lustful colleagues, while Harry's employers unite against him in a vicious tribunal. Something might be made of the contrasts in employment (Monika linked with the earthiness of the green-grocery, Harry with the fragile artifice of glassware), but the story's real objective is the summer and its aftermath.

It was based on a synopsis offered to Bergman's usual producers, Svensk Filmindustri, by Per Anders Fogelström, a writer specializing in anecdotes about Stockholm. "He told me the plot in ten words," Bergman recalls, "and I said we have to make a picture out of this." Expanded to a complete shooting script, the 'ten words' acquired a nude bathing scene, causing near-panic at Svensk and a major intervention by Carl Anders Dymling, head of the company, who was Bergman's periodic champion (he turned down Sawdust and Tinsel but defended The Seventh Seal). Bergman returned the compliment to Fogelström by giving him the synopsis of While the City Sleeps, filmed by Lars-Eric Kjollgren in 1950 from Fogelström's screenplay. Their film included an uncredited walk-on appearance by an unknown Harriet Andersson.

Filmed in August 1952 on the island of Orn, south of the Stockholm archipelago, much of the location shooting for Summer with Monika was done twice. Three weeks had gone by before laboratory damage to the negative was discovered, but Bergman and his crew were enjoying themselves too much for serious complaint and welcomed the excuse to stay put. Monika's summer, on close inspection, seems as a result to be relatively brief, all too quickly giving way to choppy winds and waves of autumn. Where the outward journey heads to the skerries through placid waterways, the return to courtyard territory is dark and oppressive, accompanied by Bergman himself hammering on the bass strings of a piano.

There are other summers, or fragments of them, in all Bergman's work, notably To Joy (1950), the enchanting Summer Interlude (1951), and Waiting Women (1952), filmed only a month before Monika. Together with Smiles of a Summer Night (1955), they seem to concede to Bergman a monopoly of idyllic holiday stories. In fact, the Swedish 'summer films' of the 1950s were reinforced by another director, Arne Mattsson, whose One Summer of Happiness (1951) was internationally appreciated for its lack of inhibition. Bergman's interludes often heralded by the dreamlike voyages of small boats on sun-toasted areas, habitually lead to recrimination amid the bedstead-crowded apartments of 'real' life, a close parallel to Bergman's own.

In Harriet Andersson, Bergman found a vitality that was lacking in his 1940s melodramas. She had gone by unnoticed as an extra in his Port of Call, and spent four years as schoolgirls, waitresses (sometimes for real), girlfriends and onlookers in crowd scenes until achieving the role of 'Harriet' in Hampe Faustman's Submarine 39 (1952) alongside Lars Ekborg (her co-star in Monika). Bergman spotted her in the Scala Theatre Revue, his attention caught by her "fishnet stockings and elegant décolletage," and noted her performance in Gustaf Molander's Defiance (1952) with her fiancé Per Oscarsson (of Hunger fame).

He scooped her off to the archipelago and although their affair only lasted until the significantly-titled Journey into Autumn (1954) her subsequent career spans over eighty screen and television appearances, still going strong with Lars von Trier's Dogville (2002). "She is a lovely person," says Bergman, "and one of my dearest friends." As for Monika, with the daring close-up in which she stares straight at the camera, Bergman leaves us to reach our own conclusion.