Cinema: The New Pictures, Nov. 10, 1958

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To get sympathy for the heroine, the moviemakers have made her so sweetly reasonable and the rest of the family so viciously irrational that the moviegoer may find himself confused about which belfry the bats are really in. But as played, the film is often a remarkably intense and intelligent study of close relationships—the rare sort of drama that demonstrates how soap opera at its best can bear a true and moving resemblance to life at its worst.

Chief credit clearly belongs to Mervyn (Quo Vadis, No Time for Sergeants) Le-Roy, the old Hollywood pro who directed the picture. Under his skillful guidance. Actress Simmons gives one of her most sensitive and graceful performances. And even Rhonda Fleming has been persuaded to make a variety of facial expressions that generally accord with what she is saying. But Dan O'Herlihy steals the show with one of the year's finest screen performances. Limited, insensitive, frightened, petty, penny-pinching, pompous, ambitious, but with it all somehow trying to be decent, trying to be kind, the husband he portrays is the pitiful and terrifying type of the natural-born philistine, a forlornly average man.

The Seventh Seal (AB Svensk Film-industri; Janus). Ingmar Bergman, the 40-year-old Swede who wrote and directed this powerful and peculiar picture, is the son of a well-known Swedish clergyman, and he says that the film was inspired by childhood memories of "the strange vegetation of medieval paintings and carved figures on ceilings and walls" in churches where his father preached. Working with several of the common themes of medieval art (the Black Plague, the Wise Fool, the Night Journey, Death Sawing at the Tree of Life, the Game of Chess with Death), Moviemaker Bergman has attempted "to express the modern dilemma" in the form of a medieval morality play—a tall order which he is seldom able to fill. The Gothic spirit had the natural beauty and mysteriousness of a growing thing. Bergman's Gothicisms, on the contrary, are as artificial and complex as paper roses, and spiritually they have about as much of the genuine Gothic mood and inwardness as the Mobil oil gargoyle. In Bergman's camera, the most numinous and vital symbols are somehow diminished into mere ideas; but then the ideas seem marvelously clever. And strong religious feelings are dissipated into a sort of arty, romantic, death-wishful mood that is often hard to distinguish from sentimentality; but then the mood is unfailingly hypnotic. Such qualities, along with the fact that the film is beautifully photographed and composed, should make it a very special sensation for moviegoers who like an occasional exotic tidbit—in this case, something that often has the horrible fascination of a candied tarantula.