User Reviews

Thomas Graal and Bessie's life from their marriage day until their first born is about two years old.

Pleasant comedy with some very good sequences, especially the first spat. A nice look at middle class life at the time, including 'modern' child raising.

Though it has the same main characters as Thomas Graals bästa film (1917), the two films are really unrelated. Also, this film is not full of the fantasy and flashback scenes that make the other film sometimes hard to follow.

In this sequel to THOMAS GRAAL'S BEST FILM, Victor Sjöström amd Karin Molander get married. He insists they have a son, she demands a girl named Lillian. After a riot reconciles them, she gives birth to a boy, whom Sjöström adores, and Mrs. Molander rears scientifically. But the zest has gone out of their marriage.

It's an amusing comedy. However, despite the fine acting of the principals, the story advances by means of titles, which the actors then perform. It is filled with nice little visual touches, even though director Mauritz Stiller appears to lack confidence in the abilities of the audience to figure out what is going on.

"Thomas Graals Bästa Barn" ( Thomas Graal's First Child ) (1918) was the sequel to "Thomas Graals Bästa Film" (1917), again with Herr Mauritz Stiller directing and starring the same Swedish team as the first one, Herr Victor Sjöstrom and Frau Karin Molander playing the main characters. Some longhaired youngsters say that the sequel is never as good as the original but this film disproves them and is even more cynical and amusing than the original.

Frau Bessie, once a madcap, aristocratic and modernen Swedish fraulein, has become now a whimsical and conservative Swedish burgess after her marriage to Herr Thomas Graal. The destabilization of the marriage begins right at the wedding (which contains some hilarious incidents) when Frau Bessie announces the first Graal child must be a girl, creating a terrible conflict with her husband who is hoping for a boy. It takes a scandal to finally end the war between man and wife.

As even any longhaired youngster can see from the main title, finally a baby boy will be born but this doesn't mean that Frau Bessie will be at ease; she becomes very interested in new child rearing methods and neglects her own beauty care, ignoring Herr Graal entirely and making him plot how to regain his former, sexy wife.

The modernity of "Thomas Graals Bästa Barn" is as noteworthy as its many technical virtues. The film illustrates that matrimonial conflicts in the 10s of the last century are not so different from those in the 10s of this modernen age. In a sharp and tenchant way we see the peril of monotony in marriage and how children can ruin passion between a couple, a situation typical of the life of commoners but, fortunately, aristocrats don't suffer such disgraces. Wives of commoners and wives of aristocrats usually do what they please but husbands will deny this (commoners in their taverns, aristocrats in their clubs). Happily Herr Graal's clever plan finally succeeds; they recapture the thrill of their early relationship, no mean feat when boredom threatens a marriage and the husband despairs when his once appealing wife becomes fat after motherhood. Herr Stiller captures these situations with great wit in this excellent picture.

And now, if you'll allow me, I must temporarily take my leave because this German Count must avoid first-born aristocrats.

This delightful sequel to 'Thomas Graal's Best Film' seems like an absolute retraction of its predecessor's subversiveness. Where that film presented us with a heroine who ran away from home when she disagreed with her aristocratic parents, and humiliated them in the name of independence; who crossed class-barriers to work as a secretary; who did not immediately yield to a persistent lover, only giving in on her terms; here we have a woman solely defined by her home and by her role as wife and mother. Her strict aspirations for her child are made mockery of, and her adaption of an Isadora Duncan-style feminism is deemed unfeminine; she is encouraged to return to her chic, elegant, coquettish ways that are specifically infantilised.

In the first film, Graal's masculine power could only be expressed in the fantasy of his screenplay; here, his short story reveals to his wife the errors of her ways. The one narrative disruption - Graal trying to remember where he put the ring on his wedding day, he points the congregation in another direction so he can search unobserved - restores order, although it does result in a very funny set-piece.

It is easy to caricature the comedies of Stiller as mere predecessors of Lubitsch, but there is a similarity in the way both directors treat sex and the battle of the sexes as a game. The second sequence, in which husband and wife declare war because one wants a daughter and the other a son, is framed as a game, with the house a symmetrical playing board with its defining spaces from which the characters fire their volleys.

Although the argument is supposed to be about offspring (something, obviously, neither can help), it is really about frustrated consummation - when the row begins in the carriage, Bessie won't let Graal finger her posie of roses, while he destroys his hat on an immobile phallic statue in his study. It's only the threat of an outsider (a wonderfully barmy scene involving a drunken Count and poet, given a marvellously surreal entrance, stumbling down a huge flight of steps), and the spilling of a private difficulty, into a public spectacle (including the hurling of coins to the peasants in the merde-strewn streets), that decides the issue - and it is Bessie who decides it.

This sex-game motif is returned to for the climax, when Bessie seems to give in to Graal's sexist demands for femininity - she seems to give in, but she is literally playing a role, putting on a set of clothes that confer a certain identity; in the game that follows, she is in control, and once again this is figured in the house, where Bessie's sexual power is revealed in her controlling the key to her room. Her power is sophisticated and intellectual, Graal's is rather bestial, sublimated in a brutal hunting expedition with a long, loaded rifle liable to shoot off anywhere (having previously revealed himself a Bunuellian fetishist, sniffing his wife's shoes).

After all, if Bessie is infantilised at the end, than Graal has been on this level all along, not only in the relationship he has with his kid (an adorable sequence in one of the few convincing films about a baby: to amuse his kid, Graal puts a bin over their dog, to adorable effect), but in the bachelor shambles from which he emerges at the beginning, in contrast to his bride's prepared control, significantly surrounded by children.

There is a sophisticated use of mirrors in the film, not only in mirroring scenes, but in visually expressing the division inherent in these characters; for example, between what they want and what their partners want them to be. When Bessie, having been described as unfeminine, notes this division by looking in a mirror, the shot could be misogynistic, or it could be a recognition that the only way to negotiate rigid situations is to adopt various roles.

Another threat to the apparent conservatism, besides the still ironic and deflating narrator (as well as Graal's winks to camera), is the way the film is put together. It seems less a coherent narrative, than at least four different films put together - the farce of the wedding; the sex-war over the child; the domestic comedy over rearing the child; and the final comedy of identities. These four sections are obviously connected by the characters in them, but the characters themselves don't have the same attitudes or motivations in each one. This isn't poor scripting, but a recognition that people in their daily lives aren't consistent, coherent characters, but a series of different, often contradictory selves, which will always disrupt repressive attempts at uniformity.