Maid in Sweden (1971)

Maid in Sweden, released by Cannon Films in 1971, has one thing going for it, and one thing only - Christina Lindberg. For her fans that will be more than enough, but this is truly her worst movie.

Although it was shot in Sweden it’s actually a US-Swedish co-production and was filmed in English.

It’s a coming-of-age story with an absolute minimum of plot. Which perhaps is just as well, since what little plot there is is rather unsavoury and sadly predictable.

Young Inga yearns for the bright lights of the big city. Life on the family farm seems like a prison sentence. Finally she gets a letter from her sister Greta inviting her to spend the weekend with her in Stockholm.

On arrival Inga finds that Greta is shacked up with a guy called Casten. Greta and Casten’s life together consists mostly of getting stoned, having sex and arguing. Casten is lazy, boorish and generally loathsome. So naturally Greta is hoping that he’ll marry her.

Greta fixes Inga up with a date, one of Casten’s friends who turns out to be even more of a waste of oxygen than Casten. Bjorn’s idea of showing an innocent young girl a good time is to take her out, get her drunk, then take her home and rape her. So naturally Inga falls madly in love with him. But this will be a holiday romance only - Inga must return to the farm after three days of dirty sex with Bjorn.

Lindberg could act, as she proved in later movies such as Thriller: A Cruel Picture and the delirious Japanese costume yakuza movie Sex and Fury. She gets no chance to act in this movie. All she gets to do is to take her clothes off and have sleazy simulated sex. Nobody is likely to complain about her taking her clothes off but the sex is too nasty to be appealing.

Lindberg of course looks stunning. Her lack of acting experience shows but she was always comfortable in front of a camera and the camera always loved her.

Impulse’s DVD release of this movie is truly atrocious. It’s a dreadful fullframe transfer. The colours are washed out, the picture is soft and there’s lots of print damage. It’s about as bad as a DVD release can get.

Maid in Sweden is for Christina Lindberg completists only. She made much better movies than this, and if you have a hankering for seeing her without her clothes on you’re better off going for Anita: Swedish Nymphet which is vastly better than this offering.