Herr Arnes pengar

The Golden Age of Swedish Cinema was in high gear when one of its country's leading directors, Mauritz Stiller, produced what is considered his masterpiece, September 1919's "Sir Arne's Treasure." Stiller had been directing and writing scripts since 1912, and is largely known for being responsible for making Greta Garbo into an international star. His adaptation of the 1903 novel "The Treasure" resulted in the sweet spot for his craft, placing all the internal and external elements of storytelling onto the screen.

Back during that Golden Age, from mid-1910s to mid-1920s, Swedish cinema had been known to incorporate Nature to explain the motivations of its characters' actions. "Sir Arne's Treasure" follows three unfairly imprisoned Scottish mercenary commanders who have escaped their jail cell. In the dead of winter they travel through Sweden's countryside in the late 1500's seeking to return to Scotland. By way of their journey, they hear of a family who harbor a large chest of silver coins. Obsessed by the treasure after experiencng their bone-chilling and starving ordeal, the three proceed to steal the chest of silver and murder the entire family, except for the daughter. A love interest develops between the surviving woman and one of the murderers, setting off a spiritual understanding of the two.

Stiller captures the elemental forces of Nature to steer the plot and explain the impulses of all concerned, including the internal forces overcoming any rational thought. And the overwhelming motive, Love, shines a light on the daughter's actions to save her murderous lover.

"Sir Arne's Treasure" played a huge influence on the composition of directors Fritz Lang and Sergei Eisenstein, the later Russian duplicating almost the exact same scene in his 1944 'Ivan The Terrible' as Stiller constructed in his finale funeral sequence in "Sir Arne's Treasure"--showing a long line of black-clad village mourners contrasted against the pure white snow tredging to the ice-bound boat to pick up the daughter's corpse.

As a title in film history books, Sir Arne's Treasure always seemed like it must fall somewhere between Die Nibelungen and Ivanhoe-- an epic knightish adventure with a heavier Scandinavian feel. In fact it's a tale of guilt and doom in the classic Swedish mode, almost a chamber piece despite its grandiose division into five acts, set in an historical setting but with some of the same distilled focus and sense of inevitability as, to pick a recent example, Cronenberg's A History of Violence.

Three Scottish mercenaries (the main one, incongruously, given the jaunty name "Sir Archie"; happily his compatriots are not Sir Reggie and Sir Jughead) escape from captivity in 16th century Sweden and, driven half-mad by the winter winds and starvation, wind up slaughtering the entire household of a local lord for his treasure. Only one young, Lillian Gish-like girl, Elsalill, who hides herself during the crime, escapes-- but, being Swedish, is consumed by survivor's guilt.

This being one of those stories (like Crash or Dickens' Bleak House) where there are only eight different people in the entire country, the three, newly kitted out in finery, return to the scene of the crime and Sir Archie promptly falls in love with the survivor of his depredations and starts having guilt of his own. I'm betting you can pretty much guess how that's going to work out for the gloomy couple.

The initial acts of Sir Arne's Treasure take a little mental adjustment, as there's what we might call a high Guy Maddin quotient here, of over-the-top Nordic gloom-- the old crone (Mrs. Sir Arne) repeatedly shrieking "Why are they sharpening the knives at Brorhaven?" at the dinner table, the use of the phrase "fish wench" in a title, or a ship captain who believes that his ship is frozen in ice as God's punishment for some big crime he can't QUITE put his finger on.... The latter in particular shows the heavily moralistic hand of Selma Lagerlof (who also wrote Gosta Berling, The Phantom Chariot, etc.), who was good at setting up ripping plot mechanics but tended to impose a Victorian religious sensibility which you don't see in the best Swedish films, such as Sjostrom's The Outlaw and His Wife.

While there's a stark, In Cold Blood-like quality to the depiction of these violent events in a remote, snowbound location, we're impressed by the dramatic quality of the events themselves, not by any human sympathy that has particularly been built up for the characters to that point. And it is easy to see why distributors in other countries succumbed to the temptation to trim the film down, as Stiller allows many of the events to play out in real time, even when relatively little is going on.

It's when the film narrows its focus to the two main characters and their guilt-racked interactions that Stiller's deliberate storytelling begins to really justify itself-- the film is like the long walk to the electric chair in a Cagney movie from that point on, and the minutely detailed depiction of everyday activities not only makes the historical setting seem vividly real, but serves to cut off the possibility of outlandish movie-style heroics which will bring the story to any end other than the inevitable tragic one (which, nevertheless, contains a couple of shocking turns which wouldn't have passed muster for Errol Flynn at Warner Brothers in 1938).

Mention must be made (as theater reviewers say when they can't think of a better transition) of the cinematography of Julius Jaenzon, who pretty much shot everything that was anything in Swedish silent cinema. The word inevitably attached to Jaenzon's work is "landscape," which is to say, he and Stiller and Sjostrom were all masterful at using the forbidding country they lived in to help set the emotional tone of their scenes. When they want you to feel that someone's lonely, they stick him out walking on an icy fjord and by God, he's LONELY.

Also, as we all know, the moving camera as an expressive device (rather than just a way of showing off your fancy set, as in Intolerance) wasn't invented until The Last Laugh in 1924, so we can all throw out those pages of our film history books since one of the most striking things about this film is the extensive use of the moving camera throughout. Since the moving camera tends to imply the presence of the director and thus to deny the possibility of free will for the characters (which is why it works so well in things like noirs, or Max Ophuls' adaptations of Schnitzler, or Kubrick movies about unstable hotel caretakers being taken over by malevolent ghosts), it's a perfect artistic choice for this story, and one that strongly reinforces the atmosphere of destiny and doom while also keeping our focus on the mental state of characters who remain front and center within the shot, rather than on how they physically move from one place to another within a shot.

Herr Arnes Pengar / Sir Arne's Treasure (1919) : Brief Review -

Evil vs Love vs Justice. A visually appealing and honest adaptation of Selma Lagerlöf's novel. I knew Mauritz Stiller's name for giving a domestic break to legendary actress Greta Garbo, but this is my first film of him. I am impressed with his storytelling and vision to look at things that were slightly higher than what the graph suggested at that time for Swedish filmmakers. When Selma Lagerlöf's novel The Treasure came out in 1903, Swedish cinema was not even born properly. But even by 1919, nobody had seen such an engrossing storyline in the cinema world. This tale has three basic elements that form a human and its surroundings. Evil, love, and justice. If you try to think about these three things at the same time, it sounds like a weird combo. Evil is the opposite of love, and if evil and love meet each other, they can't do justice. That's where Mauritz Stiller's adaptation has you in for a show, with due credit to the novel, of course. The story takes place on the Swedish west coast during the 16th century and revolves around a Scottish mercenary who murders a wealthy family for treasure with his companions, only to unwittingly begin a relationship with the surviving daughter of the family. Will their love story make things difficult for him and her? Will they ever get together after knowing the truth? Sir Arne's Treasure is more about this philosophical conflict than just Arne's treasure. It has some fantastic visuals that will wow you. I loved those dream sequences and still wonder how they did it with such less advanced technologies. Mauritz Stiller and the technical team deserve full credit for that, and the actors have done a nice job too. Overall, it's a think-about kind of film, which I believe has explored new dimensions in love stories and crime dramas.

RATING - 7/10*

By - #samthebestest.

A Scottish mercenary falls in love with the foster sister of the girl he murdered while stealing a clergyman's hoard of silver coins. A beautiful, dreamlike tale set in the frigid beauty of the snowswept landscape of rural Sweden. The characters in director Mauritz Stiller's haunting saga drift inexorably towards their tragic fates like leaves on a river. Powerful stuff.

I have two favorite silent films, "The Penalty" (1920) with Lon Chaney, Sr. and "Herr Arnes pengar" ("Sir Arne's Treasure") (1919), a Swedish film directed by Mauritz Stiller. I again watched "Sir Arne's Treasure" (1919) with Richard Lund, Erik Stocklassa, Bror Berger, Mary Johnson, Axel Nilsson, Hjalmar Selander, Concordia Selander, Gösta Gustafson, and many others. Based on the novel The Treasure by Selma Lagerlöf, this explores Scottish mercenary soldiers during the sixteenth century going to Sweden during the reign of King Johan III who throws them out of the realm for conspiratorial behavior undermining the Swedish army. Three officers are put into prison, Sir Archi, Sir Filip, and Sir Donald. They escape and brutally murder a number of guards in their escape. After some time, famished and freezing in the gripping icy and snowy winter weather, they enter a home and take food and lots and lots of drink... Drunken and wild with cold, the three go to a monastery where the head, Sir Arne, has his family and relatives and...a very heavy and full chest of silver coins, a collection supposedly taken from other monasteries by Sir Arne over time and greedily kept where he now is. The three kill all but one girl, the foster sister of another who was stabbed through the heart by a wild and drunken Sir Archi... The one survivor is Elsalill (Johnson)... She's found by others while the monastery burns to the ground, taken to live with distant relatives who can barely afford to keep her. Eventually, she meets Sir Archi, still around and trying to find a way back to Scotland; and she falls in love with him - and he with her... The story progresses from here to a foregone ending that has to be tragic.

Told nearly in a Shakespearean manner, the story is magnificently moved forward by Stiller, acted nearly perfectly, and the photography is some of the finest in all silent film. Tinted and toned in hues that amplify the cold and winter weather, the hardship that existed in the sixteenth century, and the natural toughness of the characters who lived in these harsh conditions, the story also contains an overlying superstitious faith that plays constantly into the goings-on.

The mise-en-scene is equal to any that has ever been done and which tries to capture the harsh conditions of winter weather in Sweden and the type of living conditions that existed during the sixteenth century. The buildings, down to the types of doors and how they fitted, the furnishings within, the outbuildings, the iciness and slipperiness of snow as horses proceed in the weather - just everything...is done with a studied precision that is stupefying for a 1919 film.

I have the Kino release, a 107 minute print of what was a 122 minute release. To understand the greatness of silent film, this film should be on everybody's watch list. For me, this film gets better and better with each viewing!