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It is perhaps too much to say that Birger Malmsten was born as a movie star on December 23, 1920, in the Roslagen Archipelago. But he came into the world with a pair of eyes that gave him the conditions to succeed as a young man in the Swedish film of the 40s, a look that could reflect crucial emotional states: tormented, hurt, rebellious. By the way, movie star is the wrong word, at least if it evokes associations with some kind of distant glow. Birger Malmsten had a more realistic appeal.
He made his first major film roles in 1946. Partly as the son of a statesman and rebel in “When the Meadows Blossom” by Hampe Faustman, who tacitly has no intention of accepting his lot in life. Partly like David, who just got out of jail in Ingmar Bergman’s “It’s Raining on Our Love,” a young man looking in vain for a second chance. Together with Maggi (Barbro Kollberg), he tries to create a sanctuary in the area of a colony, where there is still a community between ladies and newspaper noses.
It was in collaboration with Bergman as Malmsten he made the biggest impression. After “It’s Raining On Our Love”, he played the lead role in “Ship to Indialand”, again as a young man trying to break free. In “Prison,” he played an eager writer, in a kind of representation of hell on earth. There, his forty-year-old charisma was matched by perhaps the most short-sighted cinematic replica of the decade: “Sooner or later you take your life, as long as you give yourself the time to think about it the least.”
But the intense gaze could also bring life to other moods. The desperate melodrama “Music in the Dark”, where he plays a blind pianist who falls in love with a haloed maid (Mai Zetterling), is guaranteed to help make Malmsten one of the most sought after of all time.
Photo: AF Archive / Alamy Stock Photo
The masterpiece in the romantic field is still “Summer playFrom 1951, where Birger Malmsten combines all his forces. It is also a movie that promises the Bergman 50s: here is a photo of Gunnar Fischer, a state of love in love in the archipelago, even strawberry places, but of course also existential melancholy and painful flashbacks.
A little later, in 1958, Jean-Luc Godard would call “Summer Play” one of the most beautiful films in the history of cinema. When he made the Franco-Swedish co-production “Maskulinum femininum” in 1966, and had to cast some Swedish actors, the choice fell on Malmsten.
In “Summer Game” he is however, only indirectly the protagonist of the film, as an object of romantic longing. When the movie starts, it’s too late. Maj-Britt Nilsson plays a sad-eyed ballet dancer who, after many years of solitude, finds the diary of an old boyfriend. And that is why Birger Malmsten appears for the first time in the film with double exposure on the pages of the diary, as a memory image without youthful disturbances.
Suddenly, Marie stands next to Strömkajen and lets her thoughts wander so much that she ends up on an archipelago boat and revisits her love nest in the autumn mist. “Summer play” is about the power of memory, but without sacrificing nostalgia. It is a film that nurtures first love and at the same time lets Marie free herself from her shadows. Of course, Birger Malmsten is worth remembering, with her dark hair and bleak eyes.
Read more texts by Jacob Lundström
