A Centenary of Fantastic Films - 1921 #1 The Phantom Carriage aka Körkarlen (Sweden 1921: Dir Victor Sjöström)

Swedish director Victor Sjöström is possibly best known as stubborn old physician Professor Isak Borg in Ingmar Bergman's insightful and insular 1957 masterpiece Wild Strawberries aka Smultronstället. One of Sjöström's 44 acting credits, he also has a role in 1921's The Phantom Carriage. This was his 24th feature, made three years before he made the movie from his homeland to Hollywood at the request of Louis B. Mayer; he'd lived in the USA for six of the first seven years of his life, after his father relocated there.

Many of the director's early works before The Phantom Carriage are now lost. This film, like two of his earlier movies prior to this one, was based on 'Körkarlen' aka 'Thy Soul Shall Bear Witness!', a 1912 novel by Selma Lagerlöf. Lagerlöf was the first woman to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature: she had sold the movie rights to her unpublished works to Swedish Cinema Theatre, a company who in 1919 merged with Filmindustri AB Skandia and continued operations as Svensk Filmindustri AB. This period of Swedish cinematic history produced a wealth of output which found international popularity (The Phantom Carriage was a huge success both in and outside of Sweden) and was a cited influence on the work of Ingmar Bergman, born three years before this movie was released.

The film is set on New Year's Eve: Sister Edit (Astrid Holm), a member of the Salvation Army (the movement had been present in Sweden since the close of the 19th Century), is dying of consumption. She makes a last request to summon a man called David Holm (Sjöström) to her bedside. 

Holm is a drunk who has abandoned his wife Anna (Hilda Borgström) and their two children. When we meet him he's in a graveyard with two other drunks; he regales them with a story, told to him by his friend Georges (Tore Svennberg), that the last man to die on New Year's Eve is cursed to drive the carriage of death for the next year, collecting the souls of the newly deceased in the service of The Grim Reaper. Georges was the last person to die before the previous New Year was ushered in.

Edit's friend Gustavson (Tor Weijden) finds David and asks him to return to Edit's house; he refuses and, in a disagreement with the other drunks, David is slain just before the bells of midnight. The cart of death arrives for him and David takes over the reins from the previous driver, who is of course Georges.

The cart of death in The Phantom Carriage 

Before David takes up the job for the next year, in a series of flashbacks Georges reminds him of the consequences of his dissolution (ironic in that it was Georges who introduced the formerly upstanding David to the demon drink): how David mistreated his wife and children, leading them to walk out on him; the spells in prison; how he similarly led his brother astray, his sibling killing a man in a moment of drunkenness.

The previous New Year's Eve, riddled with consumption himself, David had drunkenly attended a Salvation Army 'pop up' mission at which he had met Edit, who looks after him, "never giving a thought to the germs she had inhaled". Edit sees David as someone worth saving, but he seems beyond hope, exclaiming: "I'm a consumptive, but I cough into people's faces, in the hope of finishing them off. Why should they be better than us?" Even her attempt to reunite David and his wife ends in disaster.

George takes David by force to meet Edit. Initially she is unable to make him repent, but David, increasingly wracked with guilt, eventually prostrates himself at her bedside, and Edit dies. Finally George takes David back to the house where Anna, living with her kids, has decided to end all their lives. This provokes a sincere outpouring of grief from the wayward husband. Georges, satisfied of this repentance, releases David's soul back into his body; alive again, he is just in time to race home and stop his wife from her actions, and they reconcile.

While The Phantom Carriage is at its heart an old fashioned morality tale - man descends to drunkenness, refuses help and finds last minute salvation - and is clearly in debt to Dickens' 'A Christmas Carol' in both time of the year and moral message, it remains a refreshingly modern looking film. The story within story flashbacks effectively break up the narrative, and while the superimposition effects may not be as impressive today, at the time they were extraordinary, particularly in that they were incorporated into the action rather than seen as stand alone gimmicks. Some still have the power to move: a scene where death picks up a body from the bottom of the sea, or walks into a house to claim the soul of a man who has just shot himself, remain powerful.

The themes of the film were remarkably topical. In Sweden at the time of filming alcohol misuse had accelerated to such a rate that, from 1919 onwards, every Swedish citizen was given an alcohol ration book which controlled how much booze they could buy each month. And following the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918 - 1920 Tuberculosis (or consumption) remained a big killer in the country, particularly of younger men.

The novel would be filmed twice more. In 1939 French director Julien Duvivier made The Phantom Wagon (original title La charrette fantôme) and then nearly twenty years later in 1958 Arne Mattsson adapted the novel again in Sweden under its original title Körkarlen.

You can watch The Phantom Carriage here. 

A Centenary of Fantastic Films - 1920 #2 The Cabinet of Dr Caligari aka Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (Germany 1920: Dir Robert Wiene)

People with an interest in film will probably automatically know the names of the directors of classic silent fright features: FW Murnau's Nosferatu (1922); Rupert Julian's The Phantom of the Opera (1925); or Paul Leni's The Man Who Laughs (1928), for example.

So the fact that Robert Wiene, the director of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, isn't so well known, is perhaps a surprise. Until you look a little deeper. For a long time the definitive critical work on the movie, Siegfried Kracauer's 1947 work 'From Caligari to Hitler,' was damning about Wiene's narrative decision, for commercial reasons, to add a 'frame' to his story of horror and madness, therefore converting it from, as Kracauer sees it, a truly 'revolutionary' movie into a 'conformist' one.

More recently Uli Jung and Walter Schatzberg's 1999 book 'Beyond Caligari: The Films of Robert Wiene' has taken a less polemic approach to the subject. They recognise, in the book's introduction, that Wiene wasn't a genius, but a relatively undistinguished but capable director representative of the type of people making films in Germany after the First World War. The period saw a huge rise in people attending cinemas in the country, and filmmakers responded to this with record numbers of new films, largely aimed at middle or lowbrow crowds, who made up the lion's share of the cinema going population. So it's therefore unsurprising that Wiene, who had worked on at least 43 films pre Caligari, should be targeting markets most likely to want to watch his movies. Admittedly with Caligari he did much more than that, which I'll cover later.

Robert Wiene was born in Poland in 1873. His father, Carl, was an actor, but Robert initially chose a different path, studying law in Vienna and later establishing a practice in Weimar. Early in the twentieth century Wiene moved into theatre management and then, in 1912, he became both film scriptwriter and director. Before Caligari his film choices had included comedies, tragedies and melodramas.
Working to a script by writers Hans Janowitz and Carl Mayer (the former of the pair also critical of Wiene's intervention in the framing element of the film) Caligari fuses a totally expressionistic look and feel with an (almost) straightforward murder story, one of the first films to incorporate the radical new art movement into film set design.

The film opens with Francis (Friedrich Feher) sitting in a garden with a friend, and seeing Jane (Lil Dagover) walk by in an apparent trance; he describes her as his "fiancée." Francis decides to tell his strange story to his friend, depicted as a flashback.  Francis tells of an old man (Werner Krauss, the film's titular doctor) who petitions the town clerk of Holstenwall to set up a sideshow at its annual fair, the focus of which is Cesare (Conrad Veidt) the somnambulist, who sleeps in a wooden box and has been borderline catatonic for all of his 23 years. Although the clerk mocks him, the permit is granted: but later that night the official is stabbed in his bed.

The sleeper awakes! Cesare (Conrad Veidt)

Francis and his friend Alan (Hans Heinrich von Twardowski), who are both vying for the affections of Jane (the character we saw at the beginning of the film) decide to visit Caligari's attraction. Once awakened, Cesare will answer any question put to him, so Alan asks how long he has left to live: a leering Cesare tells him "Till dawn tomorrow!" Accordingly Alan dies before daybreak, again stabbed by an unseen murderer. Shocked at the death of his friend, and with the assistance of Jane's father, Dr. Olsen (Rudolf Lettinger), Francis undertakes to find out the identity of the murderer. Briefly thrown off by a red herring copycat killer (Rudolf Klein-Rogge) who hopes his failed slaying attempt would be ascribed to the mass murderer, our hero discovers that the director of the local asylum, obsessed with the subject of somnambulism and an 18th century mystic called Caligari, has literally become Caligari after Cesare, the perfect subject, was admitted to his hospital.

As the story closes the director is unmasked as a madman and put in a straitjacket. We return to Francis, still narrating the story, only to find that he's an inmate in the same asylum, along with Jane (deluded that she's royalty) and Cesare, who seems to have the mind of a child; the whole story has been made up by the insane Francis.

Repeat viewings of Caligari expose the multiple layers of the story within a story (and with the mystic 'Caligari' section, a story within that too!). One looks for clues to Francis's madness within the body of the plot, chiefly illustrated by the stylised sets whose wonky angles and skewed perspectives suggest a damaged mind (it is surely no coincidence that expressionist art, which the Nazis later derided as 'degenerate,' should have such a close affinity with the dual themes of madness and the grotesque). As the events play out, with the logic and rationalism of Francis' investigations taking place against the bizarre town backdrops, the film never once fails to be unsettling. Caligari's hut, which houses the sleeping Cesare, is illuminated both by artificial light and natural sun rays painted onto the sets: and in one scene the director, obsessed with the mystic Caligari, wanders around town with the words "Du musst Caligari werden " ("You must become Caligari") appearing in the air.

The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari has been hijacked by many critics over the last hundred years to support a variety of agenda. But viewed as a piece of fantastic cinema it's a perfect melding of art and madness, where the supposedly sanest man in the story turns out to be the craziest.

You can watch The Cabinet of Dr Caligari here.

A Centenary of Fantastic Films - 1920 #1 - The Penalty (USA: Dir Wallace Worsley)

The first of an intermittent series of posts about 'fantastic' films reaching their centenary. DEoL takes a look at The Penalty one hundred years after its original release. There's a link to the movie at the bottom of the page.

Born in 1878 in New York, Wallace Ashley Worsley was a stage turned screen actor, who after appearing in front of the camera in four movies turned his attention to directing. The Penalty was his sixth credit; sadly most of his preceding films, like so many silent movies, are now lost.

Based on a 1913 serialised novel by the US author Gouverneur Morris (the great grandson of the American Founding Father of the same name), The Penalty was adapted - and fundamentally changed - for the screen by Charles Kenyon.

A year previously Leonidis (Lon) Chaney, a former stage actor, had landed the role as a contortionist who passes himself off as a man with a disability, calling himself 'The Frog', in George Loane Tucker's The Miracle Man, a movie now lost save for a few fragments. This was the first time that Chaney had experimented with manipulations of his body for film roles, and was to be a hallmark of his on screen appearances from here on in, but one should not forget that he was an actor first; in fact The Miracle Man was designed as a showcase for its lead actor Thomas Meighan, but it was Chaney that audiences remembered.

Watching Chaney in The Penalty leaves you full of admiration for his sacrifice and astonishment at the depth of his very natural acting (not something many silent movie actors could be accused of). He plays Blizzard, king of the underworld (we later learn that this is a name he gave himself to obliterate the person who he used to be). As a boy, he suffered a terrible medical error when a surgeon, Dr Ferris (Charles Clary) amputated both of his legs following an accident, a mistake for which, shockingly, he was not struck off, because his colleague covered up for him; an interaction which the boy witnesses, and unsuccessfully tries to warn his parents about.

27 years later, Blizzard's home is San Francisco, and specifically the Barbary Coast area, a den of iniquity which sprung up during the Californian gold rush of 1849. A prostitute named Barbary Nell (Doris Pawn) has been stabbed by Frisco Pete (James Mason), whom Blizzard protects, having given the order for her death. The police are in Blizzard's pay and therefore don't investigate the death.

Lon Chaney strapping himself in for his
role as 'Blizzard' in The Penalty

Lichtenstein of the Federal Secret Service (Milton Ross), who tracks Blizzard's every move, wants to know why he has pulled all of his working girls off the streets and got them making hats. He suggests that one of his operatives, Rose (Ethel Grey Terry) should go undercover and infiltrate Blizzard's setup. He warns her that she risks a fate worse than death in so doing but she says it's all in a day’s work.

Dr. Ferris now has a daughter, Barbara (Claire Adams) who wants to pursue a career as a sculptress, much to the annoyance of her father and Ferris's colleague Dr Wilmot Allen (Kenneth Harlan) who is in love with her. She is working on a piece called 'After the Fall of Satan' and places an ad in the paper for Satan lookie likies. Guess who applies? Yep, you're right. And guess who uses their henchmen to scare off all the other possibles so that Blizzard gets the gig? Right again. For this is part one of the plan: for Blizzard to seek revenge on Dr Ferris via his daughter whom he plans to marry!

Meanwhile Rose, trusted by Blizzard because she's really good at moving the pedals on his piano while he plays, is left to her own devices in his home while he's off standing in for Satan; she starts snooping around and discovers, behind a secret panel, steps leading down to a fully equipped operating room and a well stocked arsenal. And herein lies the second part of the plan: to mobilise his forces to attack and loot the City (having diverted all of the police to carefully arranged skirmishes in the suburbs) and, while getting rich quick, to con Dr Ferris into grafting Wilmot's legs on to him! "They will be very becoming!" he cackles.

Ultimately none of these things come to pass. Barbara does sort of fall for Blizzard (as does Rose, in a very bad example of Stockholm syndrome at work) - "You've made him what he is" Barbara accuses her father. Our legless fried does manage to blackmail Dr Ferris to operate on him, but the operation is not the expected one. It seems that Ferris finds a contusion on Blizzard's brain - the result of the accident all those years ago - and removes it: this has the effect of removing all traces of evil from him, and making him pledge to undo his evil handiwork. United in love, Rose and Blizzard sit at the piano, only to have one of Blizzard's henchmen shoot him through an open window for fear he will betray them. And the finished sculpture is observed to have a face which combines "an evil mask of a great soul."

Worsley uses different techniques to tell this story; there's flashbacks to Blizzard's past, future dreams (the looting of the City), cross cutting and tracking shots on vehicles. Kenyon's adaptation wisely discards many characters from the source material and concentrates on Blizzard.

There are some big themes at work in The Penalty, not least of which is the capacity for people to choose whether they direct all their energies into being a force for good or evil; the Satan sculpture represents this, and Blizzard's love of music, which at one point is the only thing that stops him killing with his bare hands - his playing is the only time in the film when he needs the assistance of another person. Blizzard's obsession with regaining his legs to restore his place as a fully functioning human is also fascinating, on one occasion referring to himself as a "cripple." His dialogue is littered with his need to be whole again: "And I shall walk a new walk," he declares at one point, "and for my mangled years the City shall pay me with the pleasures of a Nero and the powers of a Caesar!" Also; "What an adorable pair of legs. I gave mine to science!"

Chaney’s performance is nothing short of astonishing, combining nuance with physical abnormality and sometimes almost superhuman strength (as in the scene where he uses his hands to climb some rungs in the wall in order to spy on people unobserved). For the role Chaney's legs were bent completely back and tied in place: his knees were covered with buckets and leather straps, and adjustments were made to the size of his costume to compensate for the arrangement of his limbs. It's an amazing piece of acting, his intensity surely heightened by the pain endured - by all accounts he could only act for ten minutes at a time in the position, and sustained permanent injuries to his knees as a result.

Although now lost, the original release of the film included footage of Chaney without makeup, walking around, to remind the audience that Blizzard was not real. What a great testament to an actor, and what a great film, which would act as Chaney's calling card for bigger and better roles, including The Hunchback of Notre Dame in 1923 (which Worsley also directed, and Rupert Julian's The Phantom of the Opera (1925).

You can watch The Penalty here!