Miss Julie - Criterion Collection (1950)

A classic play brought to the screen

This review is for the Criterion Collection DVD edition of the film

Miss Julie is based on a well known 1888 play August Strindberg with the original Swedish title of Fröken Julie. The play has been adapted in to a movie over a dozen times.

The film won the grand prize at the Cannes Film Festival. It is about a aristocratic young woman living with her father who has broken up with her fiance and begins to be attracted to a servant in their mansion. They fall in love but societal norms prevent a marriage between common people and the upper class.

The special features are excellent as well. There is a television documentary about the play that inspired the film. It includes material about the 1999 US/British film adaptation. There is also a theatrical trailer, an archival interview with Alf Sjöberg, and a video essay by Peter Cowie.

This is a great film and makes me want to see the other versions. This one no doubt is the most well known. March 9, 2008

the alter movie

After several years i've got the movie( DVD ) that I was looking for to 'see' again. March 4, 2008

Things we can do for mending a broken heart!

Strindberg seemed to anticipate the ontological loneliness, the boredom, the immature frivolity and the no sense of living around a impetuous young who having been rejected by her fiancée decides to flirt and eventually seduce her servant.

If you watch this film with the glasses of the actual society, you will find it something dated, but if you observe from another perspective, you will find interesting clues that may lead you to link the essence of the Existentialism (Think in Albert Camus The foreigner) and three outstanding films released after: Joseph Losey ` s The Servant, Bergman 's The silence and Bertolucci `s Last Tango based on Alberto Moravia.

It's a crime to arouse a passion only to satisfy a caprice.
November 6, 2005

An immaculate and definitive screen adaptation

Some films are so utterly faultless and brilliantly made that one is almost at a loss to find enough superlatives with which to praise them, and yet, at the same time keep it credible. MISS JULIE is one such film, and it seems entirely fitting that one of the greatest Swedish films ever made should be based on the work of one of Sweden's greatest writers. Every single aspect of this film is perfect; the black and white photography, the wonderful musical score by Dag Wiren, the acting from all the cast, but in particular from Anita Bjork who sets a standard in playing Miss Julie that could hardly be bettered. The play which provides the screenplay is of course devastating with the inexorable interplay between class and rank, and human desire and lust overlapping and intertwining, and too, the now almost forgotten concept of "duty" and "honour". If you like movies that make you think, eat away at your heart and memory long after you have seen them, then I cannot recommend MISS JULIE more highly. In the fifty years since it was made, its brilliance has not diminished one jot. A masterpiece and a film to truly treasure. My one regret with the VHS print is that although the sequence is intact, the lettering from the original credit titles has disappeared. February 22, 2002

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