Torment

Torment (1944)

Hets

Jan-Erik Widgren meets the lonely Bertha Olsson, a woman struggling with alcoholism. Though Bertha is already linked to Caligula, Jan-Erik's heartless teacher, she begins a relationship with the boy anyway. When Caligula learns that Jan-Erik is having an affair with Bertha, he begins to torture his student psychologically. He reserves his cruelest behavior for Bertha, however, which results in a tragic turn of events.

Date of release
1944-10-02
TMDB
7.1 / 10 (88)
Runtime
1h 41m
Genres
Drama
Director
Alf Sjöberg

Casting

Interesting facts

Torment is a 1944 Swedish film, directed by Alf Sjöberg from a screenplay by Ingmar Bergman. The film, a tale of sex, passion and murder, was originally released as Frenzy in the United Kingdom, although later releases have used the US title. The film won the Grand Prix at the 1946 Cannes Film Festival.

Production

On 16 January 1943, Ingmar Bergman had been appointed by the Svensk Filmindustri (SF) as an "assistant director and screenwriter" on a one-year initial contract. Bergman, who suffered illness and was hospitalized during the winter of 1942–43, wrote the screenplay for Torment, for which SF acquired the rights in July 1943.

Filming, on which Ingmar Bergman served as an assistant director, took place in two stages. The first stage, for interior scenes, took place from 21 February to 31 March 1944 at the Filmstaden studios north of Stockholm and the Södra Latin High School in downtown Stockholm. The second stage, covering the exterior scenes, comprised only ten days in late May of the same year.

When the film was virtually done, I made my debut as a movie director. Originally, Torment ends after all the students have passed their final exam, except for one, played by Alf Kjellin, who walks out through a backdoor into the rain. Caligula stands in the window, waving good-bye. Everybody felt that this ending was too dark.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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