This film is the first Danish road movie. In the thirties it was unusual to take a film camera out of the studio to make your film, but this is the case here,and the documentary shots are exceptional in clarity and contrast, much more than you expect from outdoors footage. Furthermore we move through the Danish province, which was seldom in Danish films. I have a nostalgia towards this. My childhood was in the fifties, but actually not much happened to geographical sites in those twenty years. The director comes from a career within silent movies, and dialog is not his strong point, but there is a general good humor and many happy smiling faces in this film, where the moral is 'Just take it easy, problems will solve themselves giving the time to act'. This cheerfulness and lightheartedness makes you think, for just south of the border Hitler used the same romantic nationalism for quite a different purpose. His 'kraft durch Freude' police eventually evolved into a strictly unhappy situation with violence and disaster. So watching this cheerful outdoors movie from 1936 kind of makes you think. It was the last chance to catch a happy folklore mood.
Review of Sol over Danmark
