User Reviews

This harsh, elemental story dramatizes a Danish freeholder farmer's hard-scrabble struggle to survive in 1850s Denmark. "Before the frost" ends up meaning the urgency man has to prove himself as he approaches the big chill, death. That moral imperative shadows all his worldly drives. Cow Jensen (named for his deft hand with cows) lives in constant urgency. At the beginning he rushes to complete the harvest. Then he rushes to bring in the hay before the rains rot it. Add the vertical urgency to maintain his social status. After he's forced to sell his cow Merna to feed his family, the church deacon - who represents the civil as well as religious law and order here - moves him back a pew in church, because of his reduction in possessions and status. Jensen is a widower, responsible for his blossoming daughter Signe and two young nephews, Peder (about17) and Mads (about 6). As his crops fail and his resources and prospects dwindle, he negotiates Signe's marriage to Ole, the neighbour's strapping young son Signe likes. That procures a new cow and a share of Ole's father's pension. But it fails to secure his nephews' future, so Jensen looks beyond. The rich Swede Gustav wants to buy a swamp portion of Jensen's land to cash in on the new "white gold," sugar beets. Mads and Peder have never tasted sugar. Jensen initially rejects the offer because he needs the land to feed his cows. To Gustav's manager, Jensen's rejection of the deal shows he knows more about cows than about business. Jensen proves otherwise when he breaks his deal with Ole and proposes a sweeping sale to Gustav: all the land, the cattle, the barn home, but also responsibility for Jensen, his nephew labourers - and marriage to Signe. The deal closes with a shady rider: the old home will have to be burned completely and the hefty insurance payment turned over to Gustasv. The family moves in with Gustav to prepare for the wedding. The boys get their own sparse rooms. Signe learns to play a classical piece on the piano, a step up from helping her father deliver cows. Jensen gets to wield authority over the workers. But this family doesn't name its cows. The story shows the way one dirties one's hand in getting ahead in life. Arguably Jensen's hands are never cleaner than they are when he shoves an arm up a cow to help deliver a new calf. After he washes that one up, he sinks into the swampy trenches of social advancement. In the final scene the severely soiled old farmer is dressed more finely, boasts a better seat in the church - ostensibly closer to the alter, deacon and God - and he's the happy father dancing with his beautiful well-dressed wife at her wedding. Signe radiates joy, transformed by her new station and life. But Jensen's face is a freeze of moral paralysis. The feet are bouncing but the face is stern. His ambition, proper for a father, has severely compromised his soul. Gustav's prim and stately mother puts a gloss on the murderous consequences of Jensen's deeds: "The things we do for our children."

Widower Jens owns an extensive lay of land, the one-room cottage annex stables that goes with it, and a few cows. But a series of set backs plunges him and the little congregation of family members he has taken under his wing, into starvation. He tries to save his daughter by marrying her off to a (just a little bit less poor) neighbour, whom Signe, the daughter, loves. The fortune of Signe would not include her 2 young cousins who would probably end up in the poorhouse. Almost simultanuously a far better opportunity presents itself. Jens marries Signe off against her will to a very wealthy land owner who promises to take care of all 4 of them.

I am not in favour of the reviews that state "lost his soul for money". In fact, it is the opposite. Jens is a gentle patriarch, a rarity in those days, who puts the well being of his protégés first (he himself gets the short end of the deal, resigning all his possessions). But life is harsh, especially in 19th century agricultural Denmark. At every turn of the road the viewer is forced to think beyond the old "sold his soul" and "good vs bad" clichés. What would YOU do? Can you blame him for at least trying to include the 2 brothers in the good fortune of his daughter? Definitions of good and bad tend to blurr when you plunge into history, when not all was "neat and tidy and everybody lives in comfort". "Good vs bad" is the privilege of the well fed.

A huge bonus in the good/bad balance: Signe ends up loving her rich husband, who turns out to be kind and just. So you can say: Jens has done the right thing there. That he didn't succeed that well with the nephews I can not account him for. The case of the first was an accident (yes I know, because of shady manoeuvres, but still, an accident), of the second the result of his own thirst for revenge, fueled by grief. The latter was even given a chance of escape.

If there is someone to blame, then the beastly manager. Jens, who is left to deal with a bad conscience, has done everything he could, given his ghastly circomstances.