Smiles of a Summer Night Smiles of a Summer Night Smiles of a Summer Night () is a 1955 Swedish comedy film written and directed by Ingmar Bergman. It was shown at the 1956 Cannes Film Festival. In 2005 "TIME" magazine ranked it one of the 100 greatest films since 1923. The film's plot—which involves some couples who switch partners on a summer night—has been adapted many times, particularly as the theatrical musical "A Little Night Music" by Stephen Sondheim, Hugh Wheeler and Harold Prince, which opened on Broadway in 1973, and as Woody Allen's film "A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy" (1982). The film takes
A Little Night Music her character thinks back on the art of love as a profession in a gilded age, when sex 'was but a pleasurable means to a measurable end.' Her face, with its glamour-gorgon makeup, softens, as Madame Armfeldt seems to melt into memory itself, and the wan stage light briefly appears to borrow radiance from her. It's a lovely example of the past reaching out to the present..." Steven Suskin, reviewing the new Broadway cast for "Variety", wrote "What a difference a diva makes. Bernadette Peters steps into the six-month-old revival of "A Little Night Music" with a transfixing performance, playing