Bergman expands the world of Von Sternberg’s Blue Angel. These are the decadent, degraded days of Germany. Where thugs in uniforms pull people off the street to beat or shoot them.
Fear is the true poison gas of this film - creeping into everything and everyone. Carradine’s performance is wildly uneven (if he had gotten Dustin Hoffman this might’ve been an all time classic), but the film itself offers the creeping dread that accompanies the end of an ordered society.
A much more powerful film in present contexts.