Medan staden sover / While the City Sleeps

Jompa lives with his parents in cramped quarters in Stockholm’s Södermalm workers district. The only place he can have some privacy with his girlfriend Iris is in the laundry room. He’s the leader of a youth gang that cuts up in jazz cafés and ping-pong halls. During a nighttime burglary, Jompa abandons his mates, leading them to turn on him. When he is drawn into the orbit of a career criminal, the young man’s descent into serious crime seems pre-destined … Ingmar Bergman had a strong hand in structuring the screen character of the young gangster. For his intense portrayal of a hard-bitten outsider, critics at the time compared Sven-Eric Gamble (1924–1976) to Humphrey Bogart and Richard Widmark. At his side was Harriet Andersson in one of her first screen appearances. This realistic, yet contemplative film about teenagers was also a response to the 1948 youth riots in Götgatan, when several thousand young Stockholmers clashed with police.