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Fall and rise of the Nordic manor, "the stuff of legend." Gösta Berling the defrocked vicar (Lars Hanson), "dejected by man and God," one of the knightly jesters making themselves at home at Ekeby estate. The founder of the Richard Burton School of Sexily Dissolute Clergymen, so the ladies flock: A countess' stepdaughter (Mona Mårtenson), a mistress later ravaged by smallpox (Jenny Hasselqvist), and a married Italian noblewoman (Greta Garbo) suffer for their passion. ("It was a disgrace to love him, a disgrace to be loved by him.") Pulpit ruination, penitence on the road, outcasts in furs comprise the national epic, molded by Mauritz Stiller as a tasteful sprawl rocked by emotional cyclones. The despairing hero is about to give up, "the mightiest woman in Värmland" (Gerda Lundequist) barges in with her own narrative of heartbreak and redemption: "Don't you know that most people are dead already?" Dutch masters inform the style (Vermeer for long-shot interiors, Rembrandt for close-ups), a brief glance out of the moving carriage gives Sjöström's landscapes, the Scandinavian blend of severity and romanticism in full sway. The dishonored aristocrat demands purification by fire—Lang's Kriemhild's Revenge is concurrent, it goes into Gone With the Wind for the burning of Atlanta. The other elemental set-piece unfolds on a vast frozen lake with a sleigh ride pursued by snapping wolves, just the lambent passage to visualize an uncertain relationship. (Edited to the quickening pulse of the flushed Garbo, it's a bedrock for Lean's Doctor Zhivago.) "The thirteenth guest" with forked tail and horns (cp. Bergman's The Devil's Eye), a theme dear to Ophüls, "no man who has the love of a woman is doomed." A banquet for new beginnings closes the last hurrah of Swedish silent cinema. With Sven Scholander, Ellen Hartman-Cederström, Torsten Hammarén, and Karin Swanström. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |