Lust in the dust? The Song of Love (1924), Directed by Frances Marion, produced by Norma Talmadge

Outside of Miss Talmadge there isn't an awful lot to "The Song of Love." It is another of those desert stories, the same type more or less that went out of fashion a little over a year ago…

The Variety reviewer (1) wasn’t pulling any punches about this film or even it’s undoubtedly very popular star – the highest paid female actor at the time – although he was considerably impressed with her revealing costume. The New York Times - Mordaunt Hall? -concurred on both film and the newly discovered Talmadge torso, a step away from her usual “demure” roles…

Imagine passing into the Rivoli with a vague impression of Miss Talmadge in poke bonnet and voluminous hoop skirts that jealously guard even her ankles from view, and suddenly beholding a startling vision of undeniable beauty, clad expensively, but not extensively.

Film Daily felt Norma looked ill at ease in the revealing costume – she certainly didn’t wear anything so skimpy again – but perhaps all of this shows that even though a highly competent and versatile star, the public had an expectation of what a Norma Talmadge film should be.

Norma's saying no to Arthur Carewe

No doubt intended to cash in on the sex and sand success of The Sheik, The Song of Love is entertaining but a bit of a clunker, one of so many well made, mediocre films that have blighted Norma’s reputation in spite of the evidence of her work with Frank Borzage (Secrets (1924) and The Lady (1925)), sentimental neo-classics like Smilin’ Through and the energised comedy of Kiki. As Lea Jacobs (2) has pointed out, Norma was let down by too many weak plots and even weaker dialogue. Jeanine Basinger (3) further suggests that the oldest Talmadge was just too versatile for her own good and “never developed a single persona, a ‘role’ that audiences thought was actually her in real life…” She was considered a fine actor and one who took on all kinds of roles many of which showed her as a transitional figure; “she had one foot in the 1890s and the other in the 1920s…”

All this said, Norma Talmadge is likeable in every film I’ve seen her in and, whilst F Scott Fitzgerald described her as the epitome of glamour in Tender is the Night, he also wrote that she must be a fine noble woman beyond her loveliness. Maybe Norma’s just too nice for modern tastes?

Too nice?

She transcends the limitations of Frances Marion’s adaptation of Margaret Peterson novel’s Dust of Desire and brings out the humour in a script of varying sensibilities that leaves even Norma sometimes staring our through lines she can scarcely believe… and she was the producer! Marion co-directed with Chester M. Franklin, one of only three films she directed, the others being Mary Pickford’s The Love Light (1921) and Margaret Seddon’s Just Around the Corner (1921). It’s a competent film, enjoyable on its own terms but mostly for Norma.

Song of Love is set in the town of Ahamar in Algeria and Norma plays an exotic dancer (in old money) called Noorma-hal (see what they did?) and described as The Rose of All the World by the appreciative locals in her Uncle, Chandra-lal’s (Hector V. Sarno) gambling den. Her biggest fan, Ramlika (Arthur Edmund Carewe) just so happens to be the leader of a Tuareg uprising against the occupying French “Christian dogs” (probably) who are likeable colonialists dressed smartly and unaware of the hatred all around them

New romantic or glam? Joseph Schildkraut

Ramlika’s passion is not reciprocated by Noorma-hal and is only inflamed by her skimpy style and sure-footed gyrations – which are mostly shot at distance either to shield the delicate audience from the full-on raunch or, possibly the fact that a stand in is being used. But Norma carries it all off and Ramlika promises that when this is all over, she’ll be his.

The local colonial notables, Commissionaire Desmond (Earl Schenck), Captain Fregonne (Mario Carillo), Dr. Humbert (James Cooley) and their American friend Dick Jones (Laurence Wheat) from Grand Rapids, Michigan, USA… have gotten wind of the plotting and called in French agent Ramon Valverde (Joseph Schildkraut) but, round these parts, it’s not just walls that have ears but curtains too with Ramlika’s spy, Chamba (Albert Prisco) hearing the whole plan.

Valverde is no mug though and makes his first appearance in disguise looking something like Spandau Ballet’s bass player in 1983 as he listens in to the Tuareg’s plans at the gambling den. He doesn’t go unnoticed by our dancing heroine who ignores his make up sensing the goodness of the man inside. Ramlika isn’t impressed and the two men fight with Valverde making good his escape and deciding to use Noorma-hal’s attraction to him to keep tabs on the uprising.

Maude Wayne as the Other Woman

Whilst all’s fair in love and war, Valverde goes on to show us his moral fibre when he refuses to rekindle an old affair with the Commissioner’s wife Maureen (Maude Wayne). But Noorma-hal catches them in the act of not continuing and assumes, correctly based on his previous thinking, that he only wants the white Christian woman. Passions are, however, on the rise and Noorma-hal is soon stuck between a frog and a hard face as she must decide who to betray and when. The Tuareg forces are massing and only she can stave off disaster but, at what cost to herself?!

               

As the above reviews indicate even at the time this was an old tale and whilst there are twists and turns, they are mostly predictable. What saves it is Norma who is nearly always in the moment and the only really relatable character throughout.

I watched the film on the Kino Lorber Blu-ray set, Pioneers: First Women Filmmakers (4) which uses the German print which has a different ending from the US print – which is explained via title card and which is the more surprising conclusion for a number of reasons. The print quality is mostly excellent but there is some deterioration which Greta de Groat says is not present on the other surviving print held at the Library of Congress but you can’t have it all - it's a mostly fine looking 

film and inspite of the gripes, who doesn't like watching Norma T work even if it's mostly so much sand and fury signifying very little.

Norma Talmadge straight to mirror

1. Greta de Groat’s excellent website has a wealth of Norma information and links to the World-Wide-Web of Talmadge – I lifted the Variety and NYT quotes from her!

2. Writing in Idols of Modernity: Movie Stars of the 1920s, Rutgers University Press (2010)

3. Jeanine Basinger – Silent Stars, Wesleyan University Press (2000)

4. The six Blu-ray set Pioneers: First Women Filmmakers is of course essential and available direct from Kino Lorber as well as via Amazon.com – anyone else finding that export restrictions are being tightened recently?

 

The Lady of the Shadows… The Call of the Cumberlands (1916), Julia Crawford Ivers

“Mrs. Ivers has proved time and again that she yields the palm to no mere man megaphone manipulator.” Betty Compson

I don’t know about you but, like a lot of the compulsively inquisitive/acquisitive, I have a considerable archive of the un-read, the un-listened to and the un-watched. Watching Mark Cousin’s excellent new series, Women Make Film – a film school that just happens to be run by women – I reach out to the Kino Lorber *six* disc box set, Pioneers: First Women Filmmakers and select a film by a woman I’ve never heard of… this is a time to broaden our minds.

IMDB has The Call of the Cumberlands being directed by Frank Lloyd but it has now been identified as having been directed by Julia Crawford Ivers who, according to April Miller’s excellent biography on the Women’s Film Pioneer website, is chiefly remembered for scripting some twenty films for William Desmond Taylor (she was even one of those implicated in his murder in 1922).

Julia Crawford Ivers

Ivers was apparently introverted and not one to seek the limelight it seems with the few photographs that survive being testament to her reputation as “The Lady of the Shadows”. Yet, she still made her way in a notoriously male industry and directed at least four films of which Cumberlands was the second, and one of three she made in 1916. By this time, she had been working in Hollywood for three years and she’d clearly learned her trade for, whilst it follows much of the standard western feud formula, there are some unexpected twists and some impressive scenes.

 “If all scenario writers could direct at least one picture… and all directors could write just one scenario, motion pictures would benefit tremendously…”

Ivers clearly understood structure and Cumberlands fits a lot of scenes into a relatively modest running time, she wrote the scenario based on the novel by Charles Neville Buck, a Kentuckian who saw that changes was coming and that the traditional blood rivalries would be swept away. To Ivers credit, the source complexity doesn’t get in the way of the film’s range or flow and she covers the ground well. 

Dark deeds afoot...

It begins in the mountainous woodlands of Kentucky with the latest events of a family feud between the Souths and the Hollmans, no relation to the Hatfield–McCoys or the Hamilton–Burrs. The families have been in a truce for two years but dark deeds are afoot and Ivers shoots in near darkness as a sniper takes aim at Jesse Purvy one of the senior members of the Hollman clan. He’s badly wounded but asks his kin to kill Samson South to avenge him if he dies.

There’s further impressive use of shadow as Ivers’ cameraman, Dal Clawson, catches the dappled shadow and bright light on young Sally Spicer (Winifred Kingston), one of the South clan who is radiant innocence watching the birds in the woodland. She comes across an abandoned oil painting and finds its painter, George Lescott (Michael Hallvard) unconscious in the shadows having slipped whilst engrossed in his view.

Dappled shadows as Sally looks for the missing painter.

We cut to Samson South (Dustin Farnum), “a fighter and a dreamer…” who is perhaps surprisingly sketching his own less sophisticated picture of the glorious scenery. Here’s a tie back to Mark Cousin’s opening episode of Women Make Film on introductions, Ivers deflty establishing the main characters and the main thrust of the story all within three short and technically proficient scenes. Lescott will prove to be an agent for change just as the blood feud is a direct threat to Samson’s ability to progress with his art and with his love… Sally’s not just there for the doves and squirrels after all.

Sally takes Lescott back home to recuperate and whilst Samson’s father isn’t keen on allowing strangers to stay, he starts to bond with the painter over their love of art; trying to capture views that make the “eyes sing”. Meanwhile, the Hollmans are trailing the attempted assassin with bloodhounds and there’s some gorgeous night-shots of men with torches heading inexorably to the South’s land.

Richard L'Estrange, Dustin Farnum and Winifred Kingston

Samson’s useless/devious cousin, Tamarack Spicer (Richard L'Estrange) pops up trying to implicate him and to stake his own claim on Sally. The Hollman’s arrive and the hounds find no incriminating odours on Samson… as Sally, as you’d expect of a wild woodland spirit, hides in the trunk of an ancient tree praying for her love’s innocence. The identity of the gunman will remain a secret for later as the story shifts to focus more on Samson’s relationship with Sally and his artistic ambition when, Lescott invites him to New York to develop his art. There's an eye-popping scene involving gracefully draped semi-nude women, interesting that three of the prime examples of female silent nudity come from Ivers, Lois Weber (Hypocrites (1915) and Nell Shipman (Back to God's Country (1919)) who asked, "is the nude rude?" Not so much under the female gaze Nell.

Samson has a good look in the life class...

Here’s the nub of things, in New York, distant from the Cumberlands in time as much as space, Samson develops aesthetically and forms a bond with Lescott’s sister Adrienne (Myrtle Stedman) who decides to teach him the manners of polite society. But is Manhattan society polite? Not so much that they all tolerate Samson and there’s feuds here of a different more political and capitalist nature. Will Samson be drawn into these dirty deeds and will he forget about his Sally who, even as he is playing tennis with Adrienne, is teaching herself to read and write. None of the characters stop moving and that family feud isn’t going to stop either; will Samson go all soft when it comes to defending his family?

Sally confronts Tamarack

"Ye lies, Tam'rack," she said, in a very low and steady voice-a voice that could not be mistaken, a voice relentlessly resolute and purposeful. "Ye lies like ye always lies. Yore heart's black an' dirty. Ye're a murderer an' a coward. Samson's a-comin' back ter me.... I'm a-goin' ter be Samson's wife." From Charles Neville Buck’s original novel.

Ivers makes light work of Neville Buck’s overwrought prose - though many title cards reflect that local dialect - and adapts with a subtle dynamism. The story grabs the attention even now despite being plagued by some chemical deterioration in some of the middle sections – as you can see most of the film looks sharp! It’s a genre film made with confidence and confidence to take a few risks with images and storyline.

I love this shot through the window of Samson greeting Adrienne in a car...

I like Ivers treatment of Sally and she places her in a number of inventive shots that emphasise her connection to nature and commitment to her Samson; she's a key part of his loyalties and the highest of stakes when he's being lured by East Coast aesthetics, society and Adrienne. The painter's sister is herself a free spirit but one operating within the learned behaviours of classical music, etiquette and even the sport of kings. Ivers pre-figures Nell Shipman with Sally's imagined comparison of a similar life versus woodland frolics with friendly bears and she also lifts a shot or two from Lois Webber's Shoes as Sally looks into a mirror realising that she can't change who she is.

Influenced by Lois Webber and influencing Nell Shipman?

As April Miller notes, Ivers was generally well-reviewed and this film was no different with Margaret I MacDonald writing that whilst “the production is not an altogether perfect one… “there were “scenes that could scarcely be excelled”. Cumberlands is an exciting romp that takes in East cost cultural improvement and Western family values; a man can be true to both and still be true in love.

April Miller’s biography on Ivers can be found on the Women’s Film Pioneer website.

There is also a new Kino Lorber disc, The Intrigue: The Films of Julia Crawford Ivers which has four films including A Son of Erin (1916) which she directed after Cumberlands. It’s available from Kino Lorber direct and it's on my birthday list!

Bonus screen shots!!

Right here, right now… Women Make Film (2020), BFI Player and Blu-ray

"Our story is about 183 film makers, as artists. Ours is the story of their work..."

I watched a preview of this series in an actual cinema, sat next to people after drinking in a bar! This was way back in early March and now, as the BFI is about to unleash the entire series on the BFIPlayer, there could not be a better time for us to receive the benefit of Mark Cousins' - and his team's - endless research and informed recommendations.

There’s a certain irony in watching excerpts from a film based almost entirely on excerpts from other films and not being quite certain how it ultimately holds together but this taster more than whet the appetite. There are 40 episodes in Mark Cousins’ mammoth documentary which took years to assemble and which includes some 1,000 snippets from 183 different film makers from around the world. I watched a preview of just four and, I suspect the pattern builds the more you watch and the more you watch the more you want to watch. As with Cousins’ Story of Film, throughout there were films that I instantly wanted to see in their entirety and you will find yourself frequently pausing to note them down, keep a pen and paper next to your drink of choice!

This undertaking is firmly focused on the work of these filmmakers and there is no biographical element examining just why so many are not better known or have been almost forgotten. The Director instead wanted to answer direct questions about movies, “… how do you do a great opening shot, a great tracking shot? How do you film work, politics and love?” In using their work to provide the answers Cousins hopes to be “an ally with the great female activists pushing for change…” and whilst he wrote and directed, he chose his collaborators well with narration from executive producer, Tilda Swinton along with Jane Fonda, Kerry Fox, Thandie Newton and others.

Women who made film.

As lauded film historian Cari Beauchamp says in her introduction to the impending Blu-ray: "Perhaps Women Make Film is a bit of a misnomer. It definitely gives away the punch line. Maybe calling it Chapters in Filmmaking is too on the nose but that is what it is – an examination of different aspects of making a movie where all of the teachers are women."

The opening section, on opening sections... , worked perhaps the most successfully starting off with a superb opening sequence from Bika Zhelyazkova’s 1961 war film, We Were Young in which a young man goes looking for his lover and all we see is there two torch lights on the floor before the briefest of reunions is interrupted by Nazi troops. It is so well done, characters, narrative and tension is established in a few minutes of expert direction. The film won a prize at the Moscow Film Festival in 1962 and over half the adult population of Bulgaria saw it and yet it is not widely known now.

This was followed by some delicious footage from British director Wendy Toye’s On the 12^th Day of Christmas, which is funny, strikingly designed and, incidentally, produced by silent film legend (it says here) George K Arthur. Three films in and that’s two I definitely want to watch and right now – luckily 12^th Day is on the BFI Player.

Rumyana Karabelova in Bika Zhelyazkova’s We Were Young (1961) 

The hits keep on coming all introduced by Tilda Swinton driving through endless roads from nameless countries; the subtitle of the series being A New Road Movie Through Cinema. The films travel through time as well as space in service to the theme and the “Openings” episodes features a Dorothy Arzner from 1948 as well as Lotte Reiniger’s Thumbelina (1965) all the way up to Mia Hansen Love’s Things to Come from 2016. It’s a deluge of new references – for me – and, as Cousins says, “all are instructive in how to create an immediate world”.

How to create an impactful opening is probably an easier question for Cousins’ compiled narrative to answer than more general ones about Bodies and Sex, the next two episodes. Jane Fonda narrates Bodies and I could listen to that voice all day as she highlighted the expertise Claire Denis brings to physicality in Beau Travail (1999) and Celine Sciamma in Tomboy (2011) in which physical presence is key to character and plot.

It was pleasing to see a clip from Lois Weber’s Hypocrites (1915) in which a naked woman is used as a motif for pure truth in the face of so much dishonesty. Margaret Edwards, former winner of a body beautiful competition - "the most perfectly formed girl in the world..." wore a body stocking but this remains a brave device from Weber, one rooted so much in the Christian sensibilities of the era yet which, at the same time, made it guaranteed to offend some/many folk.

Not Joe Wicks. Claire Denis' Beau Travail (1999)

This clip is immediately followed by one from Mary Harron’s American Psycho (2000) in which Christian Bale’s body is used to illustrate his fantasy world and his self-absorbed self-deception. Nakedness is not truth and Patrick Bateman is one of the most entertainingly unreliable witnesses in film – I mean, did he really prefer Genesis with Phil Collins' lead vocals?

There’s more than 85 years between these two films and it is a lot to take in which is where the calm voices of the actors and the intercutting of the gentle road trips help to pace the points Cousins is trying to make. The episode on Sex or, Sexysode if you will, is narrated by Kerry Fox – yes, I remember – and has more explaining to do than answering.

It’s easy to see the skill in Andrea Arnold’s American Honey for example where her actors are believable and well-choreographed, sex scenes probably rely more on context than almost any other narrative moments. Donna Deitch’s Desert Hearts features one of the most genuinely sensitive scenes – Greta Garbo was so moved she wrote to Helen Shaver, whilst my friend Beverly was – literally – never the same again, which is why I remember this film so well. More than sex though, Desert Hearts is a love story and you need to see it all to appreciate why the two women are doing what they’re doing. This will always be the issue with Cousins’ methodology but there's so much ground to cover; this is a series you'll want to study rather than simply watch.

Donna Deitch’s Desert Hearts

The last excerpt was from the Scif-fi episode, narrated by Thandie Newton, which ranged from the Wachowski’s The Matrix (1999), Rachel Talalay’s Tank Girl (1995) to The Handmaid’s Tale (2017). That’s quite the stretch in terms of tone especially when Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman (2017) is included. Jenkins the first woman to direct a huge-budget superhero film and shows how a woman can treat genre fiction differently, with Diana Prince going over the top to help allied troops advance against the Germans in WWI. She’s woman from an isolated race of Amazons seeing “Man’s World” for the first time and finding only slaughter; she takes the side of what she sees as honourable men, enabling their victory not winning it on her own as Superman usually does.

Every snippet tells a story that can only be truly understood through viewing the films in their entirety and following this screening there are so many added to my watch list. That is Cousins’ success with this celebration but the road is long with many a revelatory wind and turn; best to enjoy the journey and let Tilda, Jane, Kerry, Thandie and friends take the wheel.

Women Make Film starts streaming on the BFIPlayer from Monday 18th May - there's a mouth-watering trailer here. Parts 1 – 5 are up first and the next four more segments will follow each week until 15th June.

You can see the whole thing though as it's also released on a four-disc Blu-ray on 18th and available from the BFI Shop.

There's a fascinating making of film over on Vimeo, it's key to understanding Cousins' objectives and method as well as the team around him, men and women, who helped cover the ground and turned his hand-written lists and notations into the work we can start seeing today.

By the end of the series you will know who all these women are and be compulsively watching their films!

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.

The woman always pays… The Gardener (1912), Victor Sjöström 1912-1917 (Part One)

We are lucky that almost all of the feature films Victor Sjöström made after A Man There Was (Terje Vigen) (1917) through to his last in Hollywood, A Lady to Love (1930) survive and that there are only two missing, one from the US and another, The House Surrounded (1922), from Sweden. Yet, of the thirty films he made from 1912 to 1917, only five survive… and even these are sometimes incomplete.

The main exception is, of course, Ingeborg Holm (1913) – reviewed elsewhere on this blog – along with the recently rediscovered and restored Judaspengar / The Price of Betrayal (1915), screened at last year’s Le Giornate del Cinema Muto in Pordenone. Most of the others were lost in a fire in the vaults of Svensk Filmindustri in 1941 although the damage was far worse for Mauritz Stiller’s work.

Half these films were shorts and the remainder were features of up to an hour or so in length – as with Ingeborg Holm and Terje Vigen -  and, whilst we can only wonder at the possibilities of the quality matching those two films, it is well worth viewing what remains.

Lili and Gösta go boating

The earliest survivor and, indeed, the director’s second film, is The Gardener (Trädgårdsmästaren) from 1912 also known as The Broken Spring Rose the first Swedish film to be banned for reasons that will become clear. This was the year when Svenska Bio’s Charles Magnusson hired theatrical actor-directors Sjöström and Stiller and the latter provides the script for this film as well as popping up as brief romantic interest for the lead character. The triumvirate of leading lights is completed by cameraman Julius Jaenzon, who captures some stunning locations and moves his camera with some assurance for 1912.

Originally three reels and some thirty minutes, what remains is just over 23 admittedly running a little fast on the YouTube copy I saw transferred from a VHS too; in these times it’s so difficult to pop over to Sweden isn’t it?

Lili Bech plays our young Spring Rose who is seen frolicking at the film’s start with Gösta Ekman (later to star in Faust, Intermezzo and many more) who is the son of a well-to-do gardener played by Victor Sjöström. The two are in love and a perfect pair only the grumpy gardener does not agree pulling them apart even after his son returns from college. He has designs of his own though and in still harrowing scenes, pursues the young woman through his greenhouse…

The Gardener (Victor Sjöström) takes an interest...

Next, we see Rose she is distraught and has a tear in her skirt, she has clearly been molested – hence the film’s ban. The gardener then throws her and her father off his land and they have to travel to the city to live in poverty. Luckily, an old General (John Ekman) Rose previously befriended at the café where she worked, lends them a hand and offers her work at his home. After her father dies, she is adopted by him but can’t cement her place in society so, when he too passes on, his family unite to kick her out and she is once again alone.

This is going to be another in the timeless strand of films in which the woman pays… there’s no doubt where the filmmakers’ sympathy lies and, pre-figuring the social concern of the following year’s Ingeborg Holm (1913), Sjöström is asking questions about a woman’s rights to live unmolested and secure in tenancy as well as providing a critique of class prejudice: she’s not good enough for the Gardener or his son and she’s not good enough for the General’s family or money.

Unable to fit in with polite society...

There’s a lot packed into the story and already Sjöström’s control of narrative is firm even allowing for the tableaux form and title cards that give away the action to come rather than reflect dialogue; it’s like an early “demo” with some rough edges but clearly leading up to the expertise of his first album, or at least the earliest left extant, Ingeborg Holm.

The scenes of rural life – the café, the boating and the marker gardening are also well captured and the director’s concern with these details prefigure cinema verité and neo-realism even with the technology and technique of 1912. Far more was to come of course but the including of these details allied to Jaenzon’s glorious sweeps of land and lake, add so much satisfying depth to the tale.

Mauritz is onboard!

Landscaped intimacies