Le trésor d'Arne

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.

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.

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!

In Sweden in the 16th Century, three Scottish mercenaries -- Eric Stocklassa, Bror Berger and Richard Lund -- escape from a prison and make their way to the coast. It's the dead of winter, and the sea-road to Scotland is frozen over. Maddened, they invade the home of Sir Arne, burn the place down, steal his treasure and kill everyone except Mary Johnson, who hides, and goes to live at the home of Axel Nilsson, a poor dealer in preserved fish.

Sir Arne's treasure carries a curse, however. It was stolen from a monastery when the Swedes dissolved them, and the death of Sir Arne and his wife was foredoomed. The Scottish mercenaries, however, are now likewise doomed. The seas are still frozen over, so they must wait. While they do so, they hear about Miss Johnson. They go to hear her story and Mr. Lund and she fall in love.

It's a tale of madness and horror. However, while the German movies in that still-undefined genre were psychological and used an expressionist camera, this Swedish movie by Mauritz Stiller uses an objective one, showing a more terrifying, frozen hellscape than anything Caligari's sick mind ever envisioned. This terror is not made by man or devil. It is G*d who seeks His vengeance.

Stiller and Gustaf Molander adapted a novel by Selma Lagerlöf to make this movie. Molander would direct the sound remake after the Second World War.

As far as I can tell, this is the first Swedish Silent that I've watched (I'd previously been intrigued by a solitary still – actually used for the DVD sleeve itself – found in "The Movie", a British periodical from the early 1980s); I've seen a handful of early efforts from neighboring Denmark – and the aesthetic starkness in the predominant style of both countries is pretty similar. It's also the first from Swedish master Stiller (I also own his two other well-known titles, EROTIKON [1920] and THE SAGA OF GOSTA BERLING [1924], that were released on DVD from Kino – and I may very well include the latter in my current Epic/Historical films schedule); incidentally, I've only checked out – and was duly impressed by – two American-made pictures from Victor Sjostrom, the other great director to emanate from this country during the Silent era.

SIR ARNE'S TREASURE is best described as a historical melodrama – since the elements typically expected of an epic only really come into play in the scenes involving a fire early on and a sword-fight towards the end. However, one shouldn't overlook the vast and forbidding icy landscape which not only serves as an extremely realistic backdrop to the narrative – incidentally, the quality of the cinematography throughout likens the film to an uninterrupted series of medieval tableaux – but is very much another character in it, since the villains' flight (the perpetrators of a massacre in a household, from which they also abscond with the titular fortune) is prohibited because the sea has frozen over! Notable scenes here include: a cart-wheeling horse falling head-first through cracked ice; the youngest of the thieves having ghostly visions of one of his murdered victims (as it happens, he later falls for the girl's sister…and she with him, which leads to the latter being torn whether to give her lover away or run off with him to Scotland!); the leading man ultimately using the heroine as a human shield against the oncoming soldiers; the closing procession over the ice by the townsfolk to reclaim the girl's dead body (justly considered one of the visual highlights in all of Silent cinema).

The plot also effectively incorporates the element of premonition – such as when the fish-hawker's usually docile canine companion senses impending doom and starts to howl, Sir Arne's wife literally hearing from miles away the preparations for the subsequent assault on her abode, the ship captain's tale of a previous case of poetic justice similarly brought on by severe weather conditions, and the heroine being led by her dead sister to the villains' whereabouts in a dream. The print I watched featured nice use of blue (for outdoor night-time scenes) and red (the afore-mentioned blaze) tinting; the newly-composed accompanying score is appropriately sweeping, albeit making use of mostly modern instruments. The main extras on the Kino DVD involve noted film historian Peter Cowie, who supplies an informative background to early Swedish cinema (where he also discusses the seminal contribution of authoress Selma Lagerlof – who was behind the source novel of both this and THE SAGA OF GOSTA BERLING) and, in a separate featurette, focuses exclusively on the film at hand.