Victor and Selma go filmmaking... The Lass from the Stormy Croft (1917)

Apparently, it was after seeing Victor Sjöström's Terje Vigen that Swedish Nobel literature winning novelist Selma Lagerlöf decided to sign a deal allowing A-B Svenska Biografteatern the rights to adapt her films, with the studio committing to one a year. She had previously resisted any cinematic adaptations but saw in Sjöström a man with a similar vision of life and landscape as well as someone who would respect the authorial intent of his source literature. She wanted him to do for her what he had done for Henrik Ibsen and to not sensationalise the moral issues at the heart of her work.

As Aleksander Kwiatkowski wrote in Swedish Film Classics (1983), “… Sjöström's adaptations remained completely faithful to the original works as well as the environments he was constructing,” aiming, as Danish director Benjamin Christensen observed, to imitate “the very rhythm of life.” This was unlike Mauritz Stiller and, later, Gustaf Molander, who both had lighter agendas and more overtly populist entertainments to make. For them, sometimes, the Swedish landscape could be a background, whereas for Sjöström it was a character with its own contribution to human stories, so too with tradition and the nature of rural economies.

Lars Hanson and Hjalmar Selander face a reckoning

This film, more properly translated as The Girl from the Great Marsh (Tenant) Farm, shows that he and Selma Lagerlöf were on the same page right from the start even though the filmmaker did not follow the flashback format of the author’s story; which he also doesn’t do with Jerusalem. It was the first of A-B Svenska’s adaptations and stays as close to her tone as Sons of Ingmar (1919) and Karin, Daughter of Ingmar (1920) do to the novel Jerusalem. It also pays due respect to the setting and the culture with a stunning set up for a wedding showing all the trappings of a village celebration along with less formal trips to church and even the magistrate’s courtroom.

I also like the subtleties the theatrically-trained Sjöström is introducing to his cinematic language, a coffee cup falls to the floor when a character suspects himself of murder and as he struggles to pick up the pieces, the hot coffee stains his hands as he tries to think through the drunken night before. A groom’s father nervously wrings his hands as the family of his intended realise their serving girl has a past and, after a wedding is halted prematurely the camera focuses on disappointed hands silencing the strings on an otherwise jaunty violin.

The Sjostrom Touch?

There is so much to enjoy in this film and, as is usual, Sjöström directs the best out of his players especially an youthful Lars Hanson, actually just turned 31 and still five years away from marrying another of the film’s stars, Karin Molander who was then still with director Gutsaf Molander. She is good too but the plum role goes to Greta Almroth as Helga Nilsdotter, the titular lass from a humble homestead on the marshier end of the town’s agricultural land.

Helga has had a baby with a married man, Per Mårtensson (Gösta Cederlund) who refuses to accept that the child is his. In most cinematic cultures of the time, this is breath-taking set up – you can imagine Griffith moralising already – and yet we immediately feel sympathy for Helga and that only grows after she and her father (William Larsson) try and get Mårtensson to accept his responsibility. There is no option but to take him to court and face the opprobrium of the entire community.

Greta Almroth is also in A Lover in Pawn (1920), The Parsons Widow (1920) and with Lars in The Flame of Life aka Song of the Scarlet Flower (1919) as screened at last year's Il Cinema Ritrovato

Helga encounters Gudmund Erlandsson (Lars Hanson) on route to the hearing and, by this time expecting negative attention jumps out of his horse and court before he can question her. He shakes his head; he is not dishonourable but young enough to take everything at face value.

In the court there is a bravura Lagerlöf twist as Helga, out-gunned and out-flanked by lawyers and hypocrites, refuses to let Mårtensson swear an oath on the bible as she does not want him to perjure himself. This wins her the admiration of the judge and many in the room, a selfless act in the most demeaning of situations. Gudmund is impressed and asks the young woman to become his housekeeper. Helga soon proves her worth and greatly impresses Gudmund’s parents, Erland (Hjalmar Selander) and Ingeborg (Concordia Selander) with her cooking and cleaning.

Nice use of mirror by Sjöström and cameraman Henrik Jaenzon

But Helga cannot escape her shame as Gudmund is due to marry Hildur Persson (Karin Molander), daughter of a well-to-do family who seeing the Erlandsson’s new domestic immediately issue a no-Hildur-with-Helga ultimatum. The family have little option although Ingeborg offers any help the outcast Helga may need saying that Hildur who is one of those people who see their own needs first…

Things progress and with days to go to the big wedding, Gudmund has a night out with the lads he is going to regret. A drunken brawl results in a man being killed and it is only in the light of day with his hangover clearing does he hear of the killing and of a broken pen knife found embedded in the victim’s skull. Reaching down for his own knife he finds the blade has been broken off… is he the killer? Can he be forgiven and can he be saved? No spoiling today!!

Karin Molander and Greta Almroth

At every turn, Helga does the right thing and what she feels she must do for everyone else, she is the most morally consistent character and whilst other’s learn from their mistakes as they go they, eventually learn from her too. The woman at the heart of this story is a single parent, with a child born out of wedlock and she is the hero!

The Lass from the Stormy Croft seems to have been a success and, influential too with author Peter Cowie, writing in Scandinavian Cinema, that Sjöström’s film influenced Carl Theodor Dreyer's The Parson's Widow (1920). The author herself was impressed as related by John Fullerton, in his article Notes on the Cultural Context of Reception: The Girl from Marsh Croft 1917, quotes her as having said that despite the length of some title cards “…she was in tears like everyone else who had seen the ending of the scene”. Lagerlof reportedly said that 'film is much better and stronger that drama...Never before have the different roles in a dialogue scene been so thoroughly or excellently realized." She was not so much in accord with Stiller but that is for another day…

Arriving for the big wedding...

The film is only available digitally on YouTube but the Swedish Film Institute have copies including 35mm positives and a duplicate negative.

You can read the source material too with the novella available of the oddly-named The Selma Lagerlof Megapack: 31 Classic Novels and Stories Kindle Edition. Fill your boots but the translations are mostly from American Velma Swanston Howard who was not always as faithful to her author as Victor Sjostrom.