Eva Dahlbeck was a major figure in Ingmar Bergman's films of the 1950s, from Secrets of Women to Brink of Life. It is significant that her only subsequent appearance for him was in his only late comedy, All These Women. It is essentially as a comic presence—aware, ironic, sophisticated—that Dahlbeck functions in Bergman's work, and the path he chose at the end of the 1950s led to the virtual abandonment of comedy.

In Secrets of Women, A Lesson in Love, and Smiles of a Summer Night Dahlbeck played opposite Gunnar Björnstrand, and they formed a team one might compare without absurdity to the great couples of Hollywood comedy, such as Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn, playing to each other with extraordinarily refined precision and nuance. Their episode of the three-story Secrets of Women takes place almost entirely in an elevator stuck between floors in which, as a couple whose marriage has become stale and routine, they work their way through a series of mutual recriminations to discover a new basis for their relationship; the entire episode is built essentially on the actors' comic gifts for facial expression, timing, and body language. All three Björnstrand-Dahlbeck films are concerned with the humiliation of the male, exposing the vulnerability and childishness behind a complacent exterior; in all three Dahlbeck represents poise and maturity, with strong overtones of motherliness.

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