The young miss Julie (Anita Bjork) lives in a mansion with her father. She has recently broken her engagement but is attracted to one of the servants, Jean. They spend the midsummer night together, telling each other their memories and of their dreams. Realizing that an affair between a man of the people and an aristocrat is impossible, they plan to escape to Switzerland.

This film had an interesting influence abroad. Alfred Hitchcock said he had hired Björk as the female lead for "I Confess" in 1952, after seeing her in "Miss Julie". However, when Björk arrived in Hollywood with her lover Stig Dagerman and their baby, Jack Warner, head of Warner Brothers, insisted that Hitchcock find another actress.

What makes this is a great film, beyond the absolutely gorgeous cinematography, is the intrinsic idea of class division. It had been done before and has been done since, but it is a theme that seems to be eternal and always a joy to watch when properly executed.

A lot of people nowadays probably recognize the name August Strindberg from a line in one of Woody Allen's movies. For the historical context, Strindberg was a playwright in 1800s Sweden. His works addressed social stratification and the role of women in a male-dominated society. One of his works was 1888's "Fröken Julie" ("Miss Julie" in English),about the relationship between the title aristocrat and a servant. It got filmed a few times in the first half of the twentieth century, but Alf Sjöberg's 1951 adaptation is probably the most famous.

I've never seen a stage production, so I can only describe the plot in terms of this movie. The play is apparently set in one room, but the movie shows the various scenes where the story takes place. To understand the plot, one must understand that the Sweden of the 1800s was not the social democracy that we now know; it was as much a stratified society as the US, England or Russia was at the time. The movie makes the aristocracy's power apparent, using paintings as a metaphor for this power (when one falls on Jean, and when they get carried away as the mansion burns).

Anita Björk plays the title character with panache, with Ulf Palme as her lover. The rest of the cast includes a young Max von Sydow (RIP) as a farmhand. It all adds up to a cinematic experience like we rarely have. I now hope to see adaptations of Strindberg's other plays, as well as other Sjöberg movies. Definitely deserved its Golden Palm.

Alj Sjoberg's Miss Julie is superior film-making to the kinds of expected adaptations of iconoclastic plays one might usually see. This Miss Julie moves, when at its best, like a real MOTION PICTURE (not to overstate it, just to put the words in bold),where Sjoberg's camera moves in fast and smooth, transfers between present and past with one simple sweep (this part seems the most influential in future post-modern films),and combining music, lush outdoor locations (it IS midsummer night after all) and acting that's fit for the screen just as much as for the stage if not more-so. Reading the play years ago, I was struck by how it would be hard to translate this past the one-room setting, where Julie and Jean confront and have the wild possibility of leaving everything to chance and becoming lovers elsewhere. This was the case with the 1999 adaptation- a respectable but unremarkable turn- but in this much older case it's a sweeping saga of romance plagued by class distinctions and just plain old childhood problems still sticking their claws into present affairs. It's surprisingly fresh in its old-fashioned sense.

At first it looks like Sjoberg could be deviating from the bulk of the tone of the Strindberg play and start to make a much livelier version of the material (how that could really be *done* I can't say),with the horde of people dancing and rollicking in frivolity like it's the last days before the new century. But it's a very wise move of contrast: while all the townspeople and others among the Count's lot go into a delirious frenzy here there and everywhere, there's Julie and Jean all abound in their neuroses and dangers of new-found existential connection. While Sjoberg doesn't have much trouble in translating the tone of the basic material- of the difference between rich and poor struck away by the desire to just see these two talk like human beings, warts and all, without the confines of their set places and alignment with those they should be with (Jean with Ingrid, Julie with Lord knows whom)- the trick Sjoberg had was with his style and casting.

On both fronts, as luck would have it, he has it made. Anita Bjork is an excellent Julie, and the actor playing Jean is also fantastic at displaying an apt trait of showing off as at times being sincere and not sincere, confusing and riling up poor dear Julie, taught from her youth to hate and be wary of men by her hateful mother. Even little parts that might have been left shorter run in the original play are given further depth, Luke Julie's father, who's seen as something of a conflicted character as a man in power who ends up being much more caring (up to a specific point of incident) than her mother. As for the style, as aforementioned, it's often breathtaking; sequences like the young Jean running away from the lot of adults after him for stealing is shot, edited and composed like something not quite of the early 1950s. If it's a little dated here and there it should be expected, but Miss Julie is a delightful exercise in the unimaginable: an adaptation that lives up to the controversial and exciting spirit of the source.