Maerta Dorff Movies

In this drama set in a Scandinavian hospital in 1915, the individual stories of three pregnant women about to give birth are presented. The women come from a different social classes and have disparate views about the impending births. The middle-class woman married a servant of a wealthy family. She doesn't love her husband, nor does she care much about her child, whom she conceived out of spite. The baby is stillborn, and the woman sheds nary a tear. The second woman became wild and sexually irresponsible after she was seduced as a young woman by a much older man. Dividing her time between modeling and robbery, the woman ends up sleeping with the son of the family the middle-class woman's husband works for. The son is willing to support his bastard provided the wild woman marry his homosexual friend and pretend the child is his. She agrees. The third woman is introverted. As a youth, she had a short-lived lesbian affair in school. She then fell in love with an archaeologist who impregnated her. He refuses to acknowledge the child as his. This enrages the woman who joins a feminist movement and dedicates her life to removing the stigma of having babies out of wedlock. Of the three, she is the only one who really wants her child. ~ Sandra Brennan, Rovi

Froken Julie (Miss Julie) is adapted from August Strindberg's trenchant one-act play of the same name. The title character, a young woman of prestige and property, is played by Anita Bjork. Taught by her mother to hold all men in contempt, Miss Julie nonetheless enters into an affair with misanthropic valet Jean (Ulf Palme). Their passion for one another is tempered by their mutual animosity, and the results are catastrophic. Playwright Strindberg's intense dislike for womanhood will probably alienate half the audience of Miss Julie, but director Alf Sjoberg's handling of the material is masterful--so much so that this film, together with Frenzy (1947), cemented Sjoberg's international reputation as a filmmaker of distinction (despite the efforts by American censors to "water down" the film). ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi