A maiden aunt of mine keeps insisting that people mellow when they enter middle-age. I have always thought this nostrum a trifle pat, and Ingmar Bergman (doubtless intending no malice to my aunt) turns her theory inside out with Secrets of Women, an unpretentious early work that precedes by some years the tempestuous and difficult films by which he is better known. For Bergman, the mellowness of maturity seems to have come before youth's probing restlessness.

By this, I don't mean to imply that Bergman hadn't learned enough to generate tension with his camera, nor do I intend the impression that Secrets of Women suffers from too much tranquillity and too little drama. Quite the contrary. Just as in Wild Strawberries, Bergman builds up a rich world of visual symbols and touches the agonized center of his characters' struggles; but he has not yet become obsessed with dark and cryptic half-meanings that lead on to a twilight zone of nightmare.

Four women sit alone in a cottage trading stories about their marriages, while they wait for their husbands to return. Each of these flashbacks deals with blighted love that springs to life once more, surviving infidelity, unwed pregnancy and simple loss of interest. To complete this motif of regeneration, the picture ends as the teen-age sister of one of the wives elopes with her lover, starting the cycle once again.

Operating on an almost mythic basis, Bergman uses boatrides and water to represent fertility in its many aspects. In the first vignette, Rakel (Anita Bjork) makes love to Kaj (Jarl Kulle) in a boathouse after a swim; Marta (Maj-Britt Nilsson) and her Bohemian seducer Martin (Birger Malmsten) spend a good part of their Parisian romance rowing in the country; and, finally, the younger sister elopes with her boyfriend in a motorboat.

The third vignette fits awkwardly into the picture's symbolism and shows, too, that Bergman's best comic effort (which this probably is) tends to the lumbering side. Couple trapped in elevators hardly ever are very funny, and this particular twosome (Gunnar Bjornstrand and Eva Dahlbeck) aren't worth even as many laughs as a Berle kinescope.