SHORT TAKES : Ingmar Bergman Comes to Grips With Failure of ‘Serpent’s Egg’

Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman admits in a forthcoming book that his first foreign feature film, “The Serpent’s Egg,” was a big failure created while he was still recovering from a nervous collapse.

Bergman’s new book “Pictures,” in which he writes about his films, is the follow-up to “The Magic Lantern,” a candid 1987 book about his life. The first in a series of preview excerpts from “Pictures,” due out next month, was published in the Stockholm daily Dagens Nyheter over the weekend.

“It was only when my existence began leveling out into a calmer rhythm that I understood the gravity of my failure,” Bergman wrote of “The Serpent’s Egg,” his 39th feature film.

It was produced in West Germany and released in 1977--a year after he left Sweden for Munich, West Germany, after allegations of tax evasion humiliated him so much that he had a mental breakdown.

Bergman writes in the book that he lived an illusion that he had created a masterpiece with “The Serpent’s Egg” and did not see as warning signs the fact that Hollywood stars Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford both declined parts in the film.

David Carradine eventually starred in the dark drama set in pre-Hitler Germany. The film received lukewarm reviews.

Bergman was arrested in January, 1976, during a rehearsal at Stockholm’s Royal Dramatic Theater and questioned about alleged tax evasion. No charges were ever brought against him.

After condemning Swedish bureaucracy in an open letter, he left his homeland for a long artistic exile at the Residenztheater in Munich, returning to Sweden in 1985.