The odd couple… Havsgamar (1915)/ Dödskyssen (1916), Victor Sjöström 1912-17, (Part Two)

Moving on a couple of years from Sjöström’s second film, to his 19th and 29th, the director's cinematic technique has evolved and both these relatively short films show elements that would feature in his later feature work. The Sea Vultures (1915) (Havsgamar and also known as Predators of the Sea) is filmed on the same rugged coastline as A Man There Was (1917) and has some of the same ruthless nature vs nurture of the later film.  The protagonists are victims of their circumstances and it takes something truly human to changes the course of their lives, something wicked or, especially love

The Sea Vultures are hunters turned scavengers - a fisherman, Hornung (Rasmus Rasmussen) who, along with his eldest son Birger (John Ekman) are drawn into smuggling by the promise of easy money in hard times. They head out to greet a ship called The Eagle which carries illicit silk on board and, whilst the transaction goes well, they have been spotted by the local customs man, Eijvind Arnold (Richard Lund) who arrests them at gunpoint. Unbeknownst to Hornung, his youngest son, Anton has stowed on board to see what all the excitement is about, he emerges from hiding only to see his father and brother shoot the customs officer and his deputy dead, throwing them overboard before burning their boat and making good their escape.

All at sea

Years later and the two men are unaware of the impact their crime had on Anton (now Nils Elffors) who is tortured by what he saw and known as Mad Anton. But that is only the first step in fate righting their wrongs… Arnold’s son Arvid (also Richard Lund) has grown up and taken his father’s role along with the heart of Hornung’s daughter Gabrielle (Sjöström regular, Greta Almroth).

It’s not a tale full of surprises but it is well told and not lacking in tension and some gruesome retribution. Hornung’s guilt and sense of self-preservation makes him try to keep Gabrielle away from Arvid but theirs is a true love and a love much thicker than blood or water. As Hornung and Birger head out for one last big payday, the new customs officer is there to finish what his father started as Anton, fearing for his sister’s love and safety, makes a timely intervention.

Richard Lund, Greta Almroth and Rasmus Rasmussen

There’s plenty to admire in Henrik Jaenzon’s location cinematography, from sequences at sea to stark silhouettes against the rolling waves and barren rocks. Another scene has the camera pan left from scheming smugglers in one room past a wall – side-on – to show Anton listening at the door. There’s also some committed stunt work from Greta Almroth as she jumps into a boat and proceeds to row it out of the harbour; no wonder the director liked her so much!

Breaking the third wall?

The following year’s Dödskyssen, (The Kiss of Death) couldn’t be more different in style and is a crime caper, quite unlike any of the director’s other films but with narrative variations that would soon be used more extensively in The Phantom Carriage. It is not complete but most of the story and sense survives with the aid of a reconstruction from 2002 and what remains shows the influence of Louis Feuillade’s science detective adventures.

There’s an interesting structure with the story told in flashback by various witnesses to the murder of a doctor right at the start of the film and it’s a complicated tale with Sjöström taking two roles and those missing sections explained with new title cards.

Doctor Monro (Albin Lavén) is found murdered by his maid Anna Harper (Jenny Tschernichin-Larsson) who is the first to be interviewed by the Police Commissioner (Thure Holm). She explains how she found him lying unconscious next to his daughter (Wanda Rothgardt) and how a man she’d never seen before took charge of the situation and called the police.

Witness number two is Chief Engineer Weyler (Victor Sjöström) who was a patient of the Doctor having recently been struggling to complete some top secret plans for his employers. The Doctor had been unable to relieve Weyler’s inexplicable tiredness and it was going to cost him his job as well as his marriage. He was visited by an Engineer called Lebel (also Victor Sjöström) and after realising that they shared a remarkable resemblance the two agreed to swap places so that Weyler could get a break and Lebel could make sure the plans were drawn up on time. Now it is rather fortunate that one shared the other’s skillset… even more so that he could also impersonate him but, details, details… sometimes these things do happen!

Anyway, it is a fun concept and there’s excellent double exposure from cameraman Julius Jaenzon, as Victor’s characters look each other up and down in front of a mirror. As McGuffins go, this is a biggie but it does allow the plot to really take off as Weyler and his Doctor, Dr Adell (Mathias Taube) establish that Doctor Monro has been slowly poisoning his doppelganger. Meanwhile, the vital drawings are disappearing in the night and Weyler and Adell set a trap to find out how and why… things will not be quite as simple as they seem…

               

Just who is the masked man!?

The Kiss of Death is a world away from the previous year’s smugglers’ tale but shows Sjöström’s commercial nous and developing confidence; he was clearly absorbing a lot from France and Hollywood and developing his own distinctive cinematic language. The film was premiered in Stockholm only two weeks before Terje Vigen (1917) and it’s understandably overshadowed by the latter - even had it all survived and been in circulation for as long! That said, at the time, this film represented his breakthrough in France – not surprisingly given the influence and the narrative innovation – and was a big hit overseas being sold to 38 countries.

The Svenska Dagbladet was not alone in being impressed, highlighting the dircetor's acting as much as his skill behind the camera; "Excellent staging... It is Victor Sjöström who simply shines his demanding roles as well as the director. , becomes extremely exciting and interesting."

Along with The Gardener (1912), Ingeborg Holm (1913) and Judaspengar / The Price of Betrayal (1915) the two films above represent the only extant remains from the director's first 30 films and from this point, the survival rate is far higher as the quality rises with some of the defining films of the era. These early survivors do, however, indicate how he began to develop the techniques and themes that were to dominate the golden age of Swedish silent film and beyond. As an actor and filmmaker he was pretty much peerless and I'm sure Selma Lagerlöf would agree even if Mauritz Stiller would not.

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.

A dangerous deposit… A Lover in Pawn (1920)

This misanthropic social comedy was sandwiched between the critical and commercial disappointment of Karin Ingmarsdotter (1920) and Sjöström’s masterpiece, The Phantom Carriage (1921). Viewed from a solid century away if feels like Victor taking a break from “serious” before a return to the complexities of Selma Lagerlöf and it is indeed refreshingly amusing with a lower budget and a lighter touch than the epics around it. It is, however, not exactly light or frothy…

There’s a lovely sequence when Sjöström’s starchy pawnbroker is visited by the mother of his intended and the two share the most awkward of silences waiting for a tea to be made. All he can think of by way of conversation if the weather which was “nice today” as, by chance it had been yesterday and probably will be tomorrow… we’ve all been there and his toe-curling awkwardness is almost Keatonesque – we don’t talk nearly enough about Sjöström the comedian do we?

That said, he’s also playing an almost tragically bad humoured pawn broker, Sammel Eneman – nicknamed Mästerman,  who has almost the entire village in hock to him as he hands out tickets in exchange for meagre amounts of cash to a hard up fishing community. Everybody needs him but pretty much everybody hates him and his approach to customer service hardly endears him especially as he is the richest man in town with a house packed full of possessions he doesn’t need (writer looks nervously around his loft…) every one weighing him down with the burning resentment of their impoverished former owners.

Victor Sjöström and Concordia Selander

Mean Mr Mästerman may well be but he is not alone and at  various points every major character lets you down and the film plays with your expectations of hero and villain but, in typical Sjöström fashion, everyone’s a bit of both, flawed and human. You’re left to hope that they’ll at least learn a lesson before he delivers a knockout punch that satisfies and leaves you smiling.

Mutter Boman (Concordia Selander) a formidable local inn owner has a pretty young daughter, Tora (Greta Almroth, who was so good in Dreyer's The Parson's Widow (1920)) who is engaged to a sailor called Knut (Harald Schwenzen) who, I have to say, doesn’t look that ready to settle down. He drinks and he gambles and he drinks and he loses money as he gambles… as with many of the sailors, he gets by with the help of pawning whatever he can to Mästerman. There's no love lost for the pawn broker and even when he rescues Tora from assault and carries her back to the inn they mock him and offer him money for his good deed; he pockets it for a rainy day, never intending to keep this insult.

Naughty Knut and Mutter Boman

One night Knut goes just too far as he borrows money from Mutter Boman’s draw and blows the lot. They say love is blind, (but I don’t know, as I say love is kind...) and Tora offers to pawn herself to Mästerman in exchange for refilling her mother’s draw and preventing Knut from being found out. For his part, possibly in shame, Knut heads North vowing to earn enough to buy back the precious item listed in this case with a deposit number 1313.

The old pawnbroker is at first reluctant to accept the deal but he realises that Tora can do a lot of good for his warehouse home. He is delighted by her initial efforts as his store is soon revealed to be a smart sitting room and even the stuffed crocodiles are dusted back to life. Tora also starts to upgrade his opinion presenting him with a smart set of clothes he’d forgotten he had as she encourages him to be more lenient with his customers.

"You are a dangerous deposit, Tora..."

Seeing what he has in the store, he realises how much he doesn’t need and lets Tora do with it as she wants. She soon starts to hand out items to the locals and persuades her boss/master that it will help make him popular as indeed it does although he looks on with concern as his assets drain away.

It’s been said, and not just in my house, that, there’s no fool like and old fool and Mästerman begins to look on his young helper with more than contractual affection. She has brought laughter and light into his home and, she has also brought love. So much so that in a conversation about church she creates the impression that, at the right time, she would happily walk with him to church and sit next to him.

Greta Almroth, Victor and Harald Schwenzen

Now, with this unexpected re-emergence of his long-dormant romantic prospects, he clumsily assumes that Tora has agreed to marriage especially when her mother comes to tea. After absenting himself from the horror of small talk, he leans against the parlour door, and listens to the conversation within during which Tora laughingly reveals that she’s playing the old fella for a fool and only wants to marry Knut. This is unexpected because we were liking Tora and her decent attempts to both level up the local distribution of wealth as well as make a better man out of Mästerman. Now, however, she’s about to find out how sharper than a stuffed alligator’s tooth it is to have an ungrateful and exceptionally angry pawn broker.

Whilst not unexpected, Tora’s true motives feel like a shock and a betrayal of our narrative trust, with Mästerman threatening to slyly revert to type with the most vicious revenge and, well, Knut being Knut, we’re at a loss as to how this could possibly end well.

Bad faith trailing behind him, Mästerman heads to his finale

But, in Sjostrom we trust and Victor is victorious just as the final whistle approaches and the prospect of extra time looms. There's another special scene as Mästerman walks towards his wedding only to be followed by a mocking procession formed by Knut's mates... it's another example of the director's visual imagination and perfectly encapsulates the view of the local community for this man who, they are sure, can only do bad things. Wherever we walk, we all have a phantom procession of doubters trailing us... the trick is to ignore their pursuit and to carry on to your destination, not theirs.

Whilst not a straight-ahead comedy, Mästerman is very enjoyable and with Julius Jaenzon on hand we get a great depth of feel for the period, people and location. It’s a competent film and we should give thanks that so many of the director’s features seem to have survived from this time; he is so surefooted and always seems to seek out the dramatically different as his next Lagerlöf adaptation was to show.

All images purloined from the Swedish Film Institute database where the film survives as a 35mm acetate print and duplicate negative.