Saturdays with the Stars: Ingrid Bergman

Each month of 2021 we will be taking a look at the leading ladies of some of Alfred Hitchcock's many celebrated classics; we'll be doing this series chronologically to when they first entered Hitchcock's filmography.  Last month we took a look at the career of Anne Baxter, a woman who towed the line between supporting & lead performer, and had to wait 13 years to finally break into one of Hitchcock's parts.  This month, we're going to cheat a little bit and go back in time.  While Baxter technically follows this actresses' movies with Hitchcock, July has five Saturdays, and if I'm going to pick one of the most important stars of all-time who could easily fill a year's worth of discussion on this blog, I'm going to at least give myself five films to traverse her career with.  This month, our star is Ingrid Bergman.

Bergman was born in Stockholm, and was named after Princess Ingrid of Sweden.  Her childhood was tragic, with both of her parents dying before she reached adulthood, as did the aunt she lived with after she was orphaned.  Despite this tragedy (or perhaps because of it), she went into show business, first in theater (joining the same theater company that Greta Garbo, the other classic Swedish beauty of the era, had attended some years earlier), and started making films in Sweden, one of which, Intermezzo, was commissioned by David O. Selznick to be remade in the United States, and he brought Bergman back to Hollywood to play the same part.  This movie was a huge hit in 1939, and launched Bergman's career in the United States.

Ingrid Bergman is perhaps too big of a star for a series like this.  Her career would span genuinely decades, not just with her making movies, but also making truly important films.  Bergman would be nominated for seven Oscars in her career, win Globe nominations for three additional films (plus an important TV movie), and yet those aren't even the films that you automatically name-check with her.  She wasn't, for example, nominated for Casablanca, undoubtedly her most beloved film (and quite probably the greatest film ever made), nor for her experimental work with Roberto Rossellini.  We will scratch the surface with multiple important films that I haven't seen of Bergman's (I have, for the record, watched all three of the films that she won Oscars for, and have seen Casablanca more times than I can count so these will not be amongst this month's pictures), but know that Bergman might be the first star that not only could I feature her a different month, I could do so without you feeling like I was phoning in the films.

It makes sense to feature a Hitchcock film when discussing Bergman's career.  Notorious, in particular, is considered one of the best films of the 1940's and of both of their careers, and Spellbound is a classic (Gregory Peck has never looked more beautiful).  However, I've seen both of those movies so we're going to feature Bergman in our theme with the least well-known of her three films with Hitchcock, Under Capricorn.  Bergman is one of the last actresses we're going to profile who had an historically strong relationship with Hitchcock, rather than a complicated one, and Under Capricorn is the sort of film that might have been hurt by the personal life of its star in eventually being a classic, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed for a hidden gem.  Either way, this month we're going to take a look at some gargantuan movies that have long been on my cinematic to do list for Ingrid Bergman.