# The Serpent's Egg
**The Serpent's Egg** (German title *Das Schlangenei*, Swedish title *Ormens ägg*) is a 1977 historical drama directed and written by [Ingmar Bergman](https://www.edgepedia.org/ingmar-bergman), set in hyper-inflationary Berlin in November 1923 and depicting, in an expressionist mode, the social decay from which German Nazism rose. It was Bergman's first film produced outside his native Sweden and his only film made for Hollywood, a United States and West German co-production produced by [Dino De Laurentiis](https://www.edgepedia.org/dino-de-laurentiis) with a budget of $4 million.[1](https://catalog.afi.com/Film/56320-THE-SERPENTS-EGG?cxt=filmography) • [2](https://academic.oup.com/edinburgh-scholarship-online/book/41648/chapter-abstract/353650283) • [3](https://catalog.afi.com/Film/56320-THE-SERPENT%27S-EGG)
| Key fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| Director and writer | Ingmar Bergman, his fortieth feature film and first made outside Sweden[4](https://www.rialtofilm.de/en/schlanei.htm) |
| Production | Dino De Laurentiis Corporation and Rialto Film (with ZDF); budget $4 million; shot 6 October 1976 to 5 February 1977 at Bavaria-Atelier, Munich-Geiselgasteig[3](https://catalog.afi.com/Film/56320-THE-SERPENT%27S-EGG) • [5](https://www.filmportal.de/en/movie/das-schlangenei_ea43d4a7301e5006e03053d50b37753d) |
| Setting | Berlin, 3–11 November 1923, during Weimar hyperinflation; the story ends with Hitler's failed Beer Hall Putsch in Munich[6](https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1978/02/17/its-no-cabaret-my-friends/01050b8d-304b-40bd-965b-59def0f231e1/) • [7](https://wiki.chadnet.org/files/soiled-sinema.pdf) |
| Principal cast | David Carradine (Abel Rosenberg), Liv Ullmann (Manuela Rosenberg), Gert Fröbe (Inspector Bauer), Heinz Bennent (Hans Vergérus)[8](https://www.criterion.com/films/29445-the-serpent-s-egg) |
| Key crew | Cinematographer Sven Nykvist; production designer Rolf Zehetbauer; music Rolf A. Wilhelm[8](https://www.criterion.com/films/29445-the-serpent-s-egg) |
| Release | World premiere 26 October 1977 at the Gloria-Palast, Berlin; New York opening 27 January 1978; 119 minutes[5](https://www.filmportal.de/en/movie/das-schlangenei_ea43d4a7301e5006e03053d50b37753d) • [3](https://catalog.afi.com/Film/56320-THE-SERPENT%27S-EGG) |
| Reception | A critical and commercial disappointment; Rotten Tomatoes lists 20% from 20 reviews, and Bergman himself later called it a substantial failure[9](https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/20.500.12657/50921/1/9789198557718_fullhl.pdf) • [10](https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_serpents_egg) • [11](https://www.ingmarbergman.se/en/production/serpents-egg) |
## Spoilers
### Story
The plot follows a week in the life of Abel Rosenberg, an out-of-work Jewish American circus acrobat living in poverty-stricken Berlin after Germany's defeat in World War I.[11](https://www.ingmarbergman.se/en/production/serpents-egg) In early November 1923 Abel returns to his boardinghouse room and finds that his brother Max, his trapeze partner, has shot himself; Max's suicide note contains the cryptic phrase "There's poisoning going on."[3](https://catalog.afi.com/Film/56320-THE-SERPENT%27S-EGG) Abel takes refuge with Max's ex-wife Manuela, a cabaret singer, and the two eventually take jobs at the St. Anna Clinic run by Professor Hans Vergérus, a childhood acquaintance of Abel's.[3](https://catalog.afi.com/Film/56320-THE-SERPENT%27S-EGG) • [8](https://www.criterion.com/films/29445-the-serpent-s-egg)
In the clinic's vault Vergérus screens films of his secret medical experiments on human subjects. He explains that Max, formerly one of his assistants, killed himself after taking an experimental drug, and describes his work as the beginning of a social program based on eugenics. Vergérus predicts that a new Germany will emerge in ten years, when angry youth will converge with a strong leader and Germans will exterminate "inferior human beings." As the police break down the vault door, Vergérus kills himself with a cyanide capsule. Abel wakes two days later at police headquarters, where Inspector Bauer happily reports that Hitler's attempted putsch in Munich has failed; escorted to a train station for a new circus job, Abel escapes and is never heard from again.[3](https://catalog.afi.com/Film/56320-THE-SERPENT%27S-EGG)
## Origin in Bergman's exile
The film is inseparable from the crisis that preceded it. Bergman wrote the first draft of the screenplay in 1966 but did not finalize the script until January 1975, shortly before his arrest.[3](https://catalog.afi.com/Film/56320-THE-SERPENT%27S-EGG) On 26 January 1976 tax police took him from a rehearsal at the [Royal Dramatic Theatre](https://www.edgepedia.org/royal-dramatic-theatre) in Stockholm on charges of tax evasion; he suffered a nervous breakdown, and although the charges were later dropped, he left Sweden and settled in Munich, West Germany.[11](https://www.ingmarbergman.se/en/production/serpents-egg) • [12](https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/6022-the-touch-and-the-serpent-s-egg-foreign-tongues) In his memoir *Images: My Life in Film* he wrote that he assembled the screenplay while lawyers met and conversations with the tax authorities began, and that "everything was already wrong. The creative work had been disturbed."[11](https://www.ingmarbergman.se/en/production/serpents-egg)
**The De Laurentiis deal.** [The Italian](https://www.edgepedia.org/the-italian)-born producer Dino De Laurentiis, who had earlier obtained worldwide distribution rights to Bergman's 1975 film *Face to Face*, offered him the project, which Bergman called "a seductive project"; as a "bankable" name after *Cries and Whispers*, *Scenes from a Marriage*, and *The Magic Flute*, Bergman negotiated a sizable director's fee.[3](https://catalog.afi.com/Film/56320-THE-SERPENT%27S-EGG) • [11](https://www.ingmarbergman.se/en/production/serpents-egg) The film was intended as an English-language European art film for American audiences, situating Bergman for Hollywood exposure.[2](https://academic.oup.com/edinburgh-scholarship-online/book/41648/chapter-abstract/353650283)
Casting the male lead proved difficult. Bergman first asked [Dustin Hoffman](https://www.edgepedia.org/dustin-hoffman), who withdrew after deciding he was not right for the part; [Robert Redford](https://www.edgepedia.org/robert-redford) also declined, saying he could not see himself playing a Jewish circus performer. [Richard Harris](https://www.edgepedia.org/richard-harris) was originally cast but could not work on the project because of physical exhaustion from filming *Orca* (1977). Bergman finally settled on David Carradine.[11](https://www.ingmarbergman.se/en/production/serpents-egg) • [3](https://catalog.afi.com/Film/56320-THE-SERPENT%27S-EGG)
## Title and sources
The title comes from a line in Shakespeare's *Julius Caesar* in which Brutus describes the danger Caesar poses to Rome: "And therefore think him as a serpent's egg / Which, hatch'd, would as his kind grow mischievous."[3](https://catalog.afi.com/Film/56320-THE-SERPENT%27S-EGG) According to the Bergman biographer Peter Cowie, the screenplay opens with a quotation from the nineteenth-century German dramatist [Georg Büchner](https://www.edgepedia.org/georg-buchner): "Man is an abyss and I am giddy when I look down into it."[3](https://catalog.afi.com/Film/56320-THE-SERPENT%27S-EGG) Bergman said the story was partly inspired by his stay as an exchange student in Thuringen, Germany, in 1935, with a family whose children participated in Nazi youth groups.[3](https://catalog.afi.com/Film/56320-THE-SERPENT%27S-EGG)
## Production design and filming
Bergman found the film's visual anchor in a 1923 issue of the magazine *Simplicissimus*: a charcoal drawing of a heavily trafficked Berlin street in wintry twilight, named Bergmannstrasse. After scouting failed to find a matching location, he persuaded the producer to build the entire street, complete with streetcar tracks, backyards, crossing alleys, and domed portals, on the lot of Bavaria Studios in Munich; he called the cost "astronomical."[11](https://www.ingmarbergman.se/en/production/serpents-egg) Working with his regular cinematographer Sven Nykvist, he employed several technicians from [Bob Fosse](https://www.edgepedia.org/bob-fosse)'s *Cabaret*, including the production designer Rolf Zehetbauer and costume designer Charlotte Flemming; the Berlin the film evokes is a brooding, nightmarish city of beggars, cripples, and numbed citizens, quite different from Fosse's.[13](https://cultureinjection.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/MACNAB-Geoffrey-Ingmar-Bergman.pdf)
Shooting ran from 6 October 1976 to 5 February 1977, 69 shooting days, at Bavaria-Atelier in Munich-Geiselgasteig with some work in Berlin.[5](https://www.filmportal.de/en/movie/das-schlangenei_ea43d4a7301e5006e03053d50b37753d) Bergman later wrote that Carradine, though hard-working, punctual, and well prepared, repeatedly fell asleep on the set, and that the film was finished on schedule.[11](https://www.ingmarbergman.se/en/production/serpents-egg)
## Afterlife of the sets
The massive exterior sets built for the film were re-used for [Rainer Werner Fassbinder](https://www.edgepedia.org/rainer-werner-fassbinder)'s *[Berlin Alexanderplatz](https://www.edgepedia.org/berlin-alexanderplatz-1980-film)* (1980) and served a central role in that episodic television miniseries. This connection makes *The Serpent's Egg* an "elsewhere" not only of Bergman's production and of New German Cinema, which had not yet addressed this repressed part of German history by the mid-1970s, but also of [New Hollywood](https://www.edgepedia.org/new-hollywood).[2](https://academic.oup.com/edinburgh-scholarship-online/book/41648/chapter-abstract/353650283)
## Reception
The film was a critical and commercial disappointment.[9](https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/20.500.12657/50921/1/9789198557718_fullhl.pdf) Rotten Tomatoes records a 20% score from 20 reviews; Variety wrote that the film "lacks both the strength and depth of Bergman's major work," and Vincent Canby of The New York Times called it "a melodrama that never quite makes any connection to the characters within it."[10](https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_serpents_egg) Roger Ebert, the [Chicago Sun-Times](https://www.edgepedia.org/chicago-sun-times) critic, judged that Bergman "did not make a good film," finding it "a cry of pain and protest" without form.[14](https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-serpents-egg-1978) A Washington Post critic argued the film dangerously distorts the nature of Nazism by portraying it as "just another sinister cult, a mere madness," while conceding Bergman's point that the serpent's egg was nested early in the [Weimar Republic](https://www.edgepedia.org/weimar-republic).[15](https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1978/02/26/thats-not-the-berlin-that-i-remember/70b1fceb-9d08-4114-ae0e-50d78e52ebce/)
Bergman himself came to accept the verdict. In *Images* he wrote that it was not until much later that he realized *The Serpent's Egg* "was a substantial failure," though he added that he did not regret making it and called it "a healthy learning experience."[11](https://www.ingmarbergman.se/en/production/serpents-egg) A 1990 Los Angeles Times report likewise records him admitting in a book that the film was a big failure made while he was still recovering from his nervous collapse.[16](https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-09-24-ca-1090-story.html) The film has since been reassessed in some quarters as a genre-blending curiosity, mixing historical drama, paranoia thriller, and horror in its account of the Weimar period, and it was released on Blu-ray by Arrow Academy in its original 1.66:1 aspect ratio.[17](https://www.criterionforum.org/review/the-serpents-egg-arrow-academy-blu-ray)
## References
1. [The Serpent's Egg (1977), AFI Catalog of Feature Films](https://catalog.afi.com/Film/56320-THE-SERPENTS-EGG?cxt=filmography)
2. [Anna Westerstahl Stenport and Arne Lunde, "The Serpent's Egg: Ingmar Bergman's Exilic Elsewheres in 1970s New German and New Hollywood Cinema," in *Nordic Film Cultures and Cinemas of Elsewhere* (Edinburgh Scholarship Online, 2019)](https://academic.oup.com/edinburgh-scholarship-online/book/41648/chapter-abstract/353650283)
3. [The Serpent's Egg, AFI Catalog (history and details)](https://catalog.afi.com/Film/56320-THE-SERPENT%27S-EGG)
4. [The Serpent's Egg, Rialto Film](https://www.rialtofilm.de/en/schlanei.htm)
5. [Das Schlangenei, filmportal.de](https://www.filmportal.de/en/movie/das-schlangenei_ea43d4a7301e5006e03053d50b37753d)
6. ["It's No Cabaret, My Friends," The Washington Post, 17 February 1978](https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1978/02/17/its-no-cabaret-my-friends/01050b8d-304b-40bd-965b-59def0f231e1/)
7. ["The Serpent's Egg," Soiled Sinema notes](https://wiki.chadnet.org/files/soiled-sinema.pdf)
8. [The Serpent's Egg, The Criterion Collection](https://www.criterion.com/films/29445-the-serpent-s-egg)
9. [Ingmar Bergman: An Enduring Legacy (OAPEN library)](https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/20.500.12657/50921/1/9789198557718_fullhl.pdf)
10. [The Serpent's Egg, Rotten Tomatoes](https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_serpents_egg)
11. [The Serpent's Egg, Ingmarbergman.se (Bergman Foundation)](https://www.ingmarbergman.se/en/production/serpents-egg)
12. [Karan Mahajan, "The Touch and The Serpent's Egg: Foreign Tongues," The Criterion Collection, 9 November 2018](https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/6022-the-touch-and-the-serpent-s-egg-foreign-tongues)
13. [Geoffrey Macnab, Ingmar Bergman: The Life and Films of the Last Great European Director](https://cultureinjection.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/MACNAB-Geoffrey-Ingmar-Bergman.pdf)
14. [Roger Ebert, "The Serpent's Egg," Chicago Sun-Times, 1 January 1978](https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-serpents-egg-1978)
15. [Wolf Von Eckardt, "That's Not The Berlin That I Remember," The Washington Post, 26 February 1978](https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1978/02/26/thats-not-the-berlin-that-i-remember/70b1fceb-9d08-4114-ae0e-50d78e52ebce/)
16. ["Short Takes: Ingmar Bergman Comes to Grips With Failure of 'Serpent's Egg'," Los Angeles Times, 24 September 1990](https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-09-24-ca-1090-story.html)
17. [The Serpent's Egg Blu-ray Review, Criterion Forum](https://www.criterionforum.org/review/the-serpents-egg-arrow-academy-blu-ray)
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*Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Crime, thriller, and mystery films (individual works) › 1970s films*
*Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026*
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