User Reviews

Georg Af Klercker is a key figure in the development of Swedish film and happily a fair number of his films are now readily available. SEE my review of För fäderneslandet.

Having made films initially for the Swedish subsidiary of Pathé, Af Klercker was able,in conjunction with the photographic company Hasselblads Fotografiska AB in Göteberg, to go solo in 1915.

The theme of the film is a variant on 1)bad blood will out theme (in this case playing on the common theme of anti-theatre prejusdice (curiously far less commonly anti-cinema prejudice); the girl's mother had been an actress 2) the December-May marriage (more or less a forced marriage) with a dashing young man to complete the triangle.

The film displays all the typical Af Klercker elements - the careful mise en scène, the depth of shot, the excellent photography, all of which had by this time, largely thanks to Af Klercker, become standard features of the Swedish film. By comparison with the 1914 film För fäderneslande, Af Klercker here uses many more medium-shots and occasional close-ups. Nonetheless the concessions to US-style continuity are minor and it remains very much still a contextual film in the European style.

One tiny example (one amongst many one could cite) to show the quality of this film - a brief cut, just before the end, and at the height of the melodrama, to a scene of the poor collecting firewoood from the remains of the previous night's fatal ball... To say nothing of the final shot, from which the film derives its title. These are touches of which a Von Stroheim would have been proud.

This difference in style is parallelled by a difference in treatment. In brief, the European film aspires to be "truth" cinema; the US film aspires only to drama. Of course this is a sweeping generalisation,. European films do not have a monopoly of truth (and what is truth, as Pilate asked) and US films certainly do not have a monopoly of drama but the difference in aspiration between the two traditions remains clear. Truth, for the most part, was simply not permitted by a complex combination of public taste, prudishness and censorship.

Mary Johnson, the child-woman heroine was often compared to Mary Pickford but whereas in the Pickford "girlie" films the hebephile subtext, important though it is, is always strictly a sub-text (and where the mask of innocence favours the dirty old men); here it is explicit and the dirty old man gets the worst of it and (unimaginable in a US film) the young adulterers who are exonerated. Compare this film for instance with Daddy-Long-Legs (1919), a classic Pickford film where Marshall Neilan (who directs and stars) "grooms" the "child" Pickford to be his future wife (the teenage Pickford). This is drama (and also quite clearly fantasy), innocent on the surface, spiced as it were by its off-colour subtext; Klercker by contrast provides melodrama (and a similar hebephile pleasure for that matter) but with an edge of ugly truth.

So both in terms of style and of content, Af Klercker is an important pioneer of Swedish (and European) film style. Amongst those who realised this, one find (without surprise) Ingmar Bergman. The latter's 1995 television film Sista Striket is a poignant and fascinating fictional encounter between an ageing, drunken, disillusioned Af Klercker and the Swedish businessman/producer Charles Magnusson.

footnote: anyone in denial about the hebephile nature of Hollywood films might like to seek out the real-life biography of poor little Lucille Ricksen which can be found on IMDb. Amongst the names of those reportedly "involved" with Ricksen, one otes (without surprise) a Chaplin (Syd on this occasion) but also a certain Marshall Neilan.