The Serpent's Egg is a 1977 drama film written and directed by Ingmar Bergman and starring David Carradine and Liv Ullmann.

The title is taken from a line spoken by Brutus in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar: "And therefore think him as a serpent's egg / Which hatch'd, would as his kind grow mischievous; / And kill him in the shell".

[2] In late 1923 Berlin, Abel Rosenberg, an unemployed alcoholic and former trapeze artist, struggles to cope with the hardships of post-war Germany.

As tensions rise in November with the threat of armed confrontations between extremist parties, Abel and Manuela live in fear on the outskirts of Berlin.

After a drunken incident and a sexual encounter with a prostitute, Abel returns home to find Manuela dead and cameras scattered in the apartment.

Fleeing the scene, Abel ends up in an abandoned industrial building and fights off an unknown attacker in an elevator, decapitating him.

Elliott Gould claimed that Bergman had written the lead role for him, but that producer Dino De Laurentiis overruled it, with David Carradine cast in his place.

In the Chicago Reader, Dave Kehr opined that Bergman "comes very close to camp" and argued that the suffering throughout the work "... has no shape or substance, apart from pointing out that Nazis and their progenitors were not nice people.

"[5] Roger Ebert wrote that "... there is no form, no pattern, and when Bergman tries to impose one by artsy pseudo-newsreel footage and a solemn narration, he reminds us only of the times he has used both better.