Introduced at both the Cannes and New York film festivals of 1970, and first shown at PFA in 1971, Kjell Grede's second feature is filled with a kind of painful humor that contrasts greatly with the uncomplicated idyll of his first film, Hugo and Josefin. Harry Munter is a precocious teenager with a Christ complex. His electronic wizardry has been discovered by an American firm whose tempting offer to study in the U.S. he rejects in favor of staying home to care for two helpless people: a young woman haunted by what Harry thinks is an imaginary tormentor, and an old workman facing death. Harry exhibits his eccentricity in imitations of Keaton (porkpie hat) and Belmondo (Pierrot's blue-face), but his fascination with death makes him a kind of pathetic saint in quest of a fall. It is finally a modern-day loss of innocence that Grede chronicles in Harry Munter, expressed in a complex contrast between urban life and country idyll embodied in the character of Harry himself and all-too-manifest in the film's disturbing climax.