Strindberg based the play, Miss Julie, on his own disastrous affair with a decadent countess while he was housed within her manor. Stressing the sado-masochistic tendencies of this work, Sjöberg broadens the play's scope, while embarking on a series of daring experiments that propel his stunning production right out of the proscenium arch. The fitful, erotic struggle between Miss Julie and her father's valet, Jean, overflows the single kitchen that domesticated the sexual themes of the stage version. Here, as Peter Cowie notes, "Sjöberg gives us the full glory of the Swedish summer night; Goran Strindberg's camera glides through the sun-dappled parkland around the manor-house, as well as glaring in merciless close-up at Jean and Miss Julie as dawn advances and their passion turns bitter...There is a furtive eroticism about the affair to which Sjöberg gives plastic form in such incidents as the quarrel between Julie and her fiancé, or the barn dance, where the contagious rhythm of the music matches the whirl of movement in the picture." Sjöberg expands the psychological currents of the play by elaborating Julie's account of her tortured childhood and expanding the roles of both her father and mother whose dementia often serves as an ironic visual comment on the present. Anita Björk, playing Miss Julie with waxen intensity, was but a vote away from grabbing the Best Actress Award at Cannes in 1951, when the film itself secured the much-coveted Palme d'Or.