Swedish actress Harriet Andersson is best known for her many film collaborations with director Ingmar Bergman but, even after she became a celebrated star in the mid-fifties with her breakout role in Bergman’s Summer with Monica (1953) and the award-winning Smiles of a Summer Night (1955), she continued to appear in a wide variety of films and not just art-house fare. She could play anything from sexy sirens to fiercely independent, working class women to romantic heroines and one of her more entertaining efforts is her performance as Eva Malmborg, a fledgling reporter who helps solve a famous robbery/murder in the 1959 genre thriller Brott I Paradiset (English title: Crime in Paradise), directed by Lars-Eric Kjellgren.
The film opens with a quartet of thieves breaking into the business office of Awe and Company and stealing a large amount of cash from the safe. A night watchman is killed accidentally but the robbers escape with the loot. Ten years later, Einar Hansson (Karl-Arne Holmsten), the stepson of the murdered security guard, receives a mysterious phone call from Vivi (Gerd Hagman), a woman who claims to know details about the robbery. She sends him to a shop where he can pick up a letter with instructions on where to meet her. Eva (Andersson), who is on her way to a job interview at the Stockholm News, also shows up at the shop to pick up a letter. The clerk behind the counter gets confused and Einar and Eva end up with each other’s private correspondence. Meanwhile, Tage (Bengt Eklund), one of the thieves and Vivi’s fiance, overheard her phone call and follows Einar to the shop. He manages to steal the envelope intended for Eva and Tage and his associates are soon tracking Eva’s every movement.
The criminals become more proactive when they learn that Eva has been hired as a crime reporter and is working in tandem with Adam Palmquist (Gunnar Bjornstrand), the top crime reporter at the paper. Eva soon joins forces with Einar in a search for the missing Vivi and she becomes convinced she can crack the ten-year-old case while Adam tries to keep her from revealing details of her investigation or putting herself at risk. The latter is a constant concern because Eva is impulsive, fearless and a bit naïve when it comes to protecting herself.
Crime in Paradise is a fun, briskly paced B-movie mystery thriller with moments of light comedy, romance (Eva is flirtatious with both Einar and Adam) and police procedural drama. In some ways, the film is like a Swedish variation on a Nancy Drew sleuthing adventure or an entry in the Warner Bros. Torchy Blane series (in which Glenda Farrell played the unflappable, fast talking tabloid reporter). Andersson is a perfect fit for the intrepid heroine, bringing a spunky charm and sexual swagger to the role. Watch the way she swings her hips when she knows she is being watched by men.
It is also amusing to see her paired romantically with Bjornstrand, who was her frequent co-star in numerous Bergman films. In fact, the movie Andersson made right after Crime in Paradise was Bergman’s Through a Glass Darkly (1961), in which she played the mentally ill daughter of a famous psychiatrist (played by Bjornstrand), who treats her like a guinea pig for his research.
Even though Andersson is the top-billed star of Crime in Paradise and we can tell by the lighthearted tone of the movie that no harm will come to her, there are still some creepy sequences that generate real frisson. One of the most memorable scenes finds Eva tracking one of the suspected murderer/thieves to a laundry that has closed for the evening. As she investigates the vast expanse of the warehouse floor where row upon row of clothes hanging out to dry look ominous in the flashlight beam, an overhead shot reveals that she is not alone. Someone wearing black gloves like a killer in an Italian giallo is stalking her.
The climax of the movie is equally suspenseful as Eva and Einar are separated while trying to apprehend Gunnar (Helge Hagerman), a suspected murderer who is hiding in the bowels of a deserted observatory. Once again Eva finds herself being hunted in the dark and soon comes face to face with the real killer (by this point in the movie, two other suspects have already been brutally dispatched).
In terms of a murder mystery/crime drama with elements of comedy and romance, Crime in Paradise is closer in tone to The Thin Man (1934) than a more straightforward thriller like Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1943) but the atmospheric black and white cinematography of Lasse Bjorne gives the movie the look of a classic film noir. I haven’t been able to determine if Crime in Paradise was a commercial hit at the time it was released but it is a shame it didn’t launch a series of “Eva, Crime Reporter” mysteries because Andersson and Bjornstrand have a playful on-camera chemistry and make an amusing but highly effective detective team.
Andersson would continue to work with Bergman for years to come. They were lifelong friends and even had a brief affair after the complete of their first film together, Summer with Monika. Among their nine collaborations are Bergman’s later masterworks Cries and Whispers (1972) and Fanny and Alexander (1982).
The actress also was romantically involved with Swedish writer/director Jorn Donner and made several movies with him as well including Att Alska (English title: To Love, 1964), which won her the Best Actress prize at the Venice Film Festival. Andersson also worked with Swedish actress-turned-director Mai Zetterling on Loving Couples (1964) and The Girls (1968) and other significant filmmakers from her native land like Henning Carlsen (People Meet and Sweet Music Fills the Heart, 1967). She continued to work in film and television until 2013 and, as of this writing, is still alive today at 91 (she was born on February 14, 1932).
Crime in Paradise was the final film for director Lars-Eric Kjellgren, who never achieved the international statue of someone like Ingmar Bergman or Alf Sjoberg. However, he was highly respected in his own country for a number of feature films he made in the 1950s which dealt with social issues, juvenile delinquency, and coming-of-age dilemmas such as Nattens Ijus (1957), which was co-written with Ingmar Bergman. Crime in Paradise never received a theatrical release in the U.S. and, in case you are wondering about the English title, Paradise is the name of the café Vivi managed before she went missing.
The film has never been released on any format in the U.S. but it has popped up on the gray market. I saw a decent DVD-R of it with English subtitles from European Trash Cinema when it was still in business.
Other links of interest:
https://www.ingmarbergman.se/en/person/harriet-andersson-0
https://en.pressroom.filminstitutet.se/posts/pressreleases/actress-harriet-andersson-turns-90
https://www.ingmarbergman.se/en/person/gunnar-bjornstrand
http://thebloodypitofhorror.blogspot.com/2020/08/films-by-country-sweden.html
Cinema Sojourns 