"What isn't as easy to make clear to the uninitiated is how excitingly fresh this movie still feels, after many viewings and more than fifty years on the shelf, and how much more there is to it than its central image. Someone who hasn't seen it might not guess how emotionally varied it is--and how funny. Bergman's ability to see reasons for despair in anything made it possible for him, in his previous film, Smiles of a Summer Night, to make a great sex comedy tinged with bone-shattering melancholy. Here, his seriousness of purpose and his showman's gifts are in such uncanny balance that he doesn't undercut the power of his vision of life squandered even when he throws in an image that might have come from one of his parodists--the man looking down from the top of the tree he's climbed to escape danger to see Death, smiling, sawing away at its trunk.

 

"In his lesser work, Bergman could see cause for despair in situations that others might think better called for a stiff drink, but in this film, with its doomed protagonist (Max Von Sydow) and set amid devastation sewn by warfare, ignorance, and plague, he used the tools for a vision of hopelessness to forge an affirmation of the underappreciated value of life."

 

~ Phil Dyess-Nugent