1921 - THE PHANTOM CARRIAGE, influential film on a favorite Scandanavian theme, DEATH

An acknowledged silent film classic.  An importance influence on Ingmar Bergman, with some ground breaking special effects.  The Phantom Carriage is disappointing and cheesy viewed in a more contemporary time. 

The filmmaker Victor Sjostrom, tells a conventional story about a man who submits to the evil influences of bad friends and alcohol and becomes a rather unpleasant fellow kind of like the Jack Nicholson character in The Shining.  At one point he even chops down a locked door just like Nicholson did to get at his family.

The only interesting thing about this film is the actual phantom carriage.  The carriage is essentially the Grim Reaper assigned to collect the souls of people who have died.  Sjostrom uses this plot device to rehash his silly drama in flashback which pretty much slides into melodrama with the door chopping madman at the end.

Obviously Ingmar Bergman took this personification of death and used the idea in The Seventh Seal.  Still had Bergman loaded up his films with this type of overwrought plot line, he would hardly be remembered today as one of the foremost artists who worked in film.

This film is an incredible disappointment coming from Victor Sjostrom who made the brilliant film, The Wind for MGM.

No undiscovered classic this time but short at about 75 minutes.

1926 - Sjostrom's THE WIND, A Masterpiece

This is probably the best movie I've seen in the last four months. The actress Lillian Gish approached MGM in 1926 with a novel called The Wind. The book was about a woman from Virginia relocating to the American West. She ends up in a part of the country where the wind is constantly howling. The film is a love story, a drama, a horror story and a western rolled into a psychological study of a woman's emotional breakdown.

 

Gish was the producer behind this project. She found the book, prepared a synopsis of the story, hired the screenwriter, picked the cast and arranged for the Swedish Director Victor Sjostrom to direct.

Sjostrom was literally the father of Swedish film. He was a major influence on Ingmar Bergman and appeared in one of Bergman's best films Wild Strawberries in an outstanding performance at the age of 78.

In her introduction to the film, Gish comments that it was the toughest film she ever worked on, and after watching it, she's not kidding. No wimps were allowed making this film, the cast must have taken a real beating during the production.

 

Lillian Gish was one tough little cookie. She started in movies with D.W. Griffith and was still performing at age 96. No film is perfect and apparently MGM was so apprehensive over the film that they literally stuck on a happy ending the last 3 minutes of the film, but ignore it.

The Wind is an outstanding example of a talented European director working with a superb actress and cast and using the technical facilities that a major American studio could bring to produce a brilliant film. Very highly recommended.