Cinema: The New Pictures, Dec. 5, 1960

The Virgin Spring (Svensk Filmindustri: Janus), the latest work of Ingmar Bergman (TIME, March 14), is a violently beautiful miracle play, an apocalyptic parable in which good and evil, Christian and pagan powers collaborate in a divine rebirth, the continuous nativity of love.

Derived from a ghastly-lovely medieval ballad (Töres dotter i Vänge), the film tells the story of two sisters, one dark (Gunnel Lindblom) and one fair (Birgitta Pettersson), one serving Wotan and the other Christ, one sunk in nature and the other lost in light. The dark sister hates the fair sister, and one morning, when the two girls ride together through the forest to bring candles to the village church, the dark sister secretly opens the fair sister's bread and slips a toad inside. Then, in the depths of the forest, she turns back and lets her sister go on alone.

Soon the fair sister meets three hungry goatherds. When she offers to share her bread with them, the toad jumps out. "The herdsmen three," the ballad continues, "took her to wife/ And then from her they took her life./ Her body in the mire they lay/ And with her garments went away." That night the murderers take shelter at a farmhouse, unaware that the farm belongs to the father (Max von Sydow) of their victim. When they offer to sell him the girl's garments, he slaughters them like the animals they are. Then he rushes through the forest to his daughter's corpse.

"God!" the father cries aloud, wrenching his face to heaven, "you saw it! The death of the innocent child and my revenge. You allowed it! I don't understand you." In despair and atonement he vows to build a church of stone with his own hands on the spot where his daughter died. "I know no other way to be reconciled with my own hands. I know no other way to live." At that instant, a spring gushes out of the ground beneath the daughter's head. The father—and the Wotan-worshiping sister—fall on their knees to receive the miraculous water of life.

This holy and horrible Gothic tale cannot of course be understood as a story of real men and women in real situations.

Like the ballad that inspired it. The Virgin Spring is a myth, and as a myth it is treated in this film. Bergman's style, usually subtle and allusive, is startlingly simple. The script, written under Bergman's supervision by Novelist Ulla Isaksson, who also did the screenplay for Brink of Life, is as clear and grave as a Mass. The actors, as always finely disciplined by Bergman, behave as formally as acolytes. The photography is as beautiful as it generally is in Bergman's pictures, but if anything more plain—there are very few cute shots to catch the eye. In the European version of the film the scenes of rape and murder are direct, unmitigated, appalling. In the U.S. version the scenes are, in effect, castrated by false modesty, and as a result they tease the imagination instead of smiting the heart. The damage to the film is serious, considerably diminishing the moral impact of Bergman's principal point: the way to God lies through the valley of the shadow of death, and in that valley all men tremble.