To Joy (Ingmar Bergman, 1950)

Victor Sjöström, Maj-Britt Nilsson, and Stig Olin in To Joy

Stig Eriksson: Stig Olin
Marta Olsson: Maj-Britt Nilsson
Sönderby: Victor Sjöström
Marcel: Birger Malmsten
Mikael Bro: John Ekman
Nelly Bro: Margit Carlqvist

Director: Ingmar Bergman
Screenplay: Ingmar Bergman
Cinematography: Gunnar Fischer
Production design: Nils Svenwall
Film editing: Oscar Rosander

Not long ago, while watching some YouTube videos of symphony orchestra performances, I was struck by how few women players were in the ranks of the great orchestras of Berlin and Vienna, especially in comparison to the numbers of women in the equivalent orchestras of New York, Boston, and Chicago. Even when the soloist was an Anne-Sophie Mutter or a Julia Fischer, the ranks of players behind her were almost exclusively male. It didn't take much Googling to learn that the fact hasn't escaped the notice of women musicians, especially in Europe. So I wasn't surprised when the crusty old conductor played by Victor Sjöström in Ingmar Bergman's To Joy introduced Marta Olsson, a new member of his orchestra, by commenting that her talent was "against nature." Eventually, Marta gives up her profession to raise the children she and fellow musician Stig Eriksson produce, while (mostly) patiently suffering his ego and infidelity. He's the one who, though tormented by the fear that he's mediocre, tries to move from the orchestra into a concert soloist, suffering a crushing setback when his attempt at performing the Mendelssohn violin concerto ends in disaster. The film is a flashback to their marriage after she dies, and though he's softened a bit by her kindness and good nature, he retains his egotism and self-doubt in equal measures. It's easy enough to see Stig Eriksson as the director's self-portrait, coming as it does after the failure of his second marriage. "Joy" is not an emotion that we readily associate with Bergman, though in this film it's an allusion to the final choral movement of Beethoven's ninth symphony, an excerpt from which is performed at the end of the film. The Freude of Beethoven (and of the Schiller poem that he set to music) is an emanation of the divine, emerging after struggle and pain, and Bergman tries to embody it in Stig and Marta's young son, sitting alone in the concert hall as the orchestra rehearses the symphony. It's a conclusion that teeters on the edge of sentimentality, as Bergman's invocations of the innocence of childhood often do. Still, though a lot of things in the film don't work, such as a resort to a voiceover commentary on the marriage of Stig and Marta by the conductor Sönderby that feels jarringly out of place when it occurs, To Joy is a long early step toward the mastery of Bergman's later films.

The Wind (Victor Sjöström, 1928)

Lillian Gish in The Wind

Letty: Lillian Gish
Lige: Lars Hanson
Roddy: Montagu Love
Cora: Dorothy Cumming
Beverly: Edward Earle
Sourdough: William Orlamond

Director: Victor Sjöström
Screenplay: Frances Marion
Based on a novel by Dorothy Scarborough
Cinematography: John Arnold
Art direction: Cedric Gibbons, Edward Withers
Film editing: Conrad A. Nervig

In the introduction to the 1983 video release of The Wind, produced by David Gill and Kevin Brownlow, Lillian Gish says that she and director Victor Sjöström (credited as "Seastrom" in his Hollywood years) argued for a downer ending to the film in which Letty, driven mad by the wind after she shoots Roddy, who has raped her, walks out into the whirling sandstorm to die. But Irving Thalberg, MGM's production head, insisted on the extant "happy ending," worried that their ending would hurt the film at the box office, with audiences already rejecting silent movies after the arrival of sound. It makes a good story, a fable about art vs. commerce. But as a friend of mine discovered when he interviewed Gish extensively about her work with D.W. Griffith, she was not always a terribly reliable source, given to telling stories long on color but short on accuracy. And I have to think that Thalberg was right about the ending of The Wind, not just because of its commercial value, but also because the concluding reconciliation of Letty and Lige feels consistent with the melodramatic story. As I've said before, drama should make you think, melodrama should make you feel. And in the absence of any real ideas to think about in The Wind, feeling bummed about the bleakness of the ending Gish and Sjöström proposed hardly makes for a satisfactory melodrama. The Wind has been hailed as a masterpiece, which I think it falls just short of being, largely because it becomes a one-woman show for Gish. She is superb, of course, but she's virtually the only character in the film with any dimensions: Roddy is a mustached rotter; Lige is a rural goof with a cornpone sidekick named Sourdough; Cora is a shrew and Beverly is a wimp. So we spend the film's 79 minutes watching Gish suffer brilliantly, responding in wholly affecting ways to the hopelessness of her life with a man she doesn't love, the bleakness of the landscape, and the constant torment of the wind. It's Gish as a grownup version of the waif she so often played for Griffith. But the film needs another substantial character: Lars Hanson is good so far as his role goes, but the screenplay stints on giving Lige a convincing character arc, from goof to spurned husband and finally to romantic hero. It's Letty who does all the heroic stuff, including shooting Roddy and trying to bury his corpse, so the reconciliation at the end, with both of them facing the wind, feels awfully one-sided. We may celebrate this as a tribute to the strong woman, but on the other hand it also feels like the wife submitting to duty to her husband.

The Phantom Carriage (Victor Sjöström, 1921)

Victor Sjöström and Tore Svennberg in The Phantom Carriage

David Holm: Victor Sjöström
Anna Holm: Hilda Borgström
Georges: Tore Svennberg
Edit: Astrid Holm
Edit's Mother: Concordia Selander
Maria: Lisa Lundholm
Gustafsson: Tor Weijden
David's Brother: Einar Axelsson

Director: Victor Sjöström
Screenplay: Victor Sjöström
Based on a novel by Selma Lagerlöf
Cinematography: Julius Jaenzon
Art direction: Alexander Bako, Axel Esbensen

In commenting on Karel Reisz's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960) recently, I observed that its ending, in which Arthur and Doreen plan a wedding and dream of a home of their own, almost took on the character of a parody of a movie "happy ending," given their previous behavior and the blighted milieu in which they live. It's almost certainly what Reisz and Alan Sillitoe, adapting his own novel, intended. They were making a drama, which depends on belief, in this case an ironic credibility in which the viewer knows the story of Arthur and Doreen hasn't really ended. If drama depends on belief, then melodrama depends on feeling: a willingness to suspend credulity in favor of a kind of emotional certainty, a feeling that the way the story ends is emotionally, if not intellectually, right. That's why I can't quarrel with the ending of The Phantom Carriage, even though I know that the supposed reformation and redemption of David Holm is scarcely credible in terms of real-world alcoholism and abusiveness. It feels right in the context of a ghost story. Victor Sjöström's movie is one of the acknowledged masterpieces of silent film, notable for its lasting influence, not only on Sjöström's compatriot Ingmar Bergman, but even on a filmmaker as recent as Stanley Kubrick, who copied the harrowing scene in which David takes an ax to the door between him and his terrified wife when he filmed the "Here's Johnny!" sequence in The Shining (1980). This is also one of the few films by an actor-director in which the actor is as successful as the director. Granted, we may quibble about a few things, such as the fact that 50-year-old Hilda Borgström was a bit too old to play the mother of two small children (who never seem to age during the film). Or that the ghost story gets jettisoned in favor of the morality tale: If David wasn't really dead, then who gets to relieve Georges of his duty of driving the carriage? But this is melodrama and it's enough to say that it feels right.

The Outlaw and His Wife (Victor Sjöström, 1918)

The Outlaw and His Wife is a standard domestic melodrama made memorable by fine performances under the restrained direction of Victor Sjöström, who doesn't allow the usual stagy gesticulations that contemporary viewers often find ludicrous in silent films. Sjöström himself gives a fine performance in the role of the outlaw, Ejvind, who in the middle of a severe famine stole a sheep to feed his family and had to flee after breaking out of jail. He appears one day in a small Icelandic village under the assumed name Kári, and soon wins the heart of Halla (Edith Erastoff), a widow who runs a prosperous farm. Halla's brother-in-law, Björn (Nils Aréhn), also has designs on Halla, and when he discovers that Kári is a wanted man, Ejvind is forced to become a fugitive. Halla gives up everything to join him, and when we see them again they are living happily in the mountains with their small daughter. They are joined by Arnes (John Ekman), who is also on the run, but when Arnes begins to lust after Halla, trouble brews, compounded by the fact that Björn has never relinquished his pursuit of the couple. The film's story, based on a play by Jóhan Sigurjónsson, gains depth from the wild natural setting -- northern Sweden posing as Iceland -- in which the strong simple emotions of the tale seem integral. Sjöström makes the most of the mountain scenery, the waterfalls and hot springs, which are well-photographed by Julius Jaenzon. Sjöström did his own stunt work in a particularly hazardous scene in which Ejvind dangles on a rope from a cliff.

Wild Strawberries (Ingmar Bergman, 1957)

The portrait of old age in Wild Strawberries was created by a writer-director who was 39, which is about the right time for someone to become obsessed with the past and with the portents of dreams. In the film, Isak Borg (Victor Sjöström) is 78, and by that time -- speaking as one who is nearing that age -- most of us have come to terms with the past and made sense of (or perhaps just accepted as a given) the memories and dreams that persist in haunting us. But although Bergman's film, one of the handful of breakthrough films he made in the mid-1950s, may not ring entirely true psychologically, it holds up thematically. Isak Borg is about to be commemorated with an honorary degree, one that stamps him as over the hill, and it's not surprising that it forces him to reflections about the course of his life. He is not about to go gentle into a night that he thinks of as neither good nor bad, but the journey he takes during the film -- this is an Ingmar Bergman "road movie," after all -- helps him decide to accept his life, mistakes and all. The brilliantly crabby performance by Sjöström holds it all together, even though the movie occasionally misfires: The squabbling young hitchhikers Anders (Folke Sundquist) and Viktor (Björn Bjelfenstam), who come to blows over religious faith, could almost be a self-parody of Bergman's own obsession, which would play itself out rather tiresomely in his "trilogy of faith," Through a Glass Darkly (1961), Winter Light (1963), and The Silence (1963). And the dream sequence in which Borg sees his late wife (Gertrud Fridh) and her lover (Åke Fridell) adds little to our understanding of the character. It's also possible to find the reconciliation of Borg's son (Gunnar Björnstrand) and daughter-in-law (Ingrid Thulin) a little too easily achieved, as if thrown in as a correlative to Borg's own affirmation. The radiant performance of Bibi Andersson in the double role of Borg's cousin Sara and the young hitchhiker who shares her name, however, almost brings the film into convincing focus. I don't think Wild Strawberries is a masterpiece, but it's certainly one of the essential films in the Bergman oeuvre. 

The Scarlet Letter (Victor Sjöström, 1926)

It's been many a year since I read The Scarlet Letter, but I'm pretty sure that any high school students who think they can get by watching Frances Marion's adaptation of it instead of reading Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel are likely to be disappointed in English class. That said, no film version is going to reproduce the depth of characterization, the symbolic force, or the intellectual density of Hawthorne, so we should be grateful for what this one does give us: one of Lillian Gish's greatest performances. This was Gish's second film for MGM, after La Bohème, and it suggests that her talents were better suited to a contemplative director like Victor Sjöström -- or Seastrom, as MGM insisted on anglicizing his name -- than to King Vidor's more action-oriented style. If her Mimi in La Bohème was disturbingly hyperactive, her Hester Prynne is a marvel of understated acting. She uses her eyes and mouth and the tilt of her chin to convey a miraculous range of emotions, from stubbornness to fear, from strength to frailty. It's a pity that her Dimmesdale, Lars Hanson, doesn't match her in subtlety. He's more successful in this regard in their 1928 collaboration The Wind, which was also directed by Sjöström.

A Lon Chaney Double Feature

He Who Gets Slapped, Victor Sjöström, 1924
The more I see of the young Norma Shearer, the more I like her. I recently watched The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg (Ernst Lubitsch, 1927), in which she's paired with Ramon Novarro, and was struck by how fresh and natural she was as an actress, and the same holds true in He Who Gets Slapped, where her love interest is John Gilbert. Both movies are silents, of course. It was only after the advent of sound that her husband, MGM's creative director Irving G. Thalberg, decided to make her into a great lady, the cinematic equivalent of Katharine Cornell, putting her into remakes of Broadway hits like The Barretts of Wimpole Street (Sidney Franklin, 1934), which had starred Cornell, or Strange Interlude (Robert Z. Leonard, 1932), which had featured another theatrical diva, Lynn Fontanne. She was also miscast as Juliet in Romeo and Juliet (George Cukor, 1936), a role that, at 34, she was much too old to play. She is barely in her 20s in He Who Gets Slapped, however, and she's delightful. This is not a film for coulrophobes (people with a fear of clowns), however. It's crawling with them, performing antics that are supposed to be, to judge from the hilarity they induce in the audiences shown in the film, side-splittingly funny. The film is based on the highly dubious premise that watching someone get slapped repeatedly is one of the funniest things ever. There may be people who think so -- to judge from the perennial popularity of the Three Stooges -- but I'm not one of them. The whole movie is an artificial concoction, anyway, and only the brilliance of Lon Chaney gives it some grounding in real-life feeling. It was one of the films that launched the MGM studios on the road to Hollywood dominance, and the first one to feature Leo the Lion in the credits.

Laugh, Clown, Laugh, Herbert Brenon, 1928
This is a grand showcase for Chaney, whose reputation as the man of a thousand faces was somewhat misleading. Chaney had one well-worn face that, no matter how much he distorted or disguised it, shone through. Here he's given an opportunity to perform without disguise through much of the film, and the range of expressions available to him is astonishing. The leading lady is 14-year-old Loretta Young. That she often looks her age is one of the more disturbing things about the film, in which she's supposed to be in love with both Chaney, who was 45, and the improbably pretty Nils Asther, who was 31. The cinematography is by James Wong Howe. Laugh, Clown, Laugh was eligible for Oscar nominations in the first year of the Academy Awards, and Chaney should have received one. The closest the film came to an award was the one that Joseph Farnham received for title writing (the one and only time the award was presented). But Farnham's award was for the body of his work over the nomination period, and not for a particular film.