I proscritti

I have waited for years to see this film and finally caught it on Youtube - in excellent condition. It was definitely worth the wait! The film was made in 1918, a time when most cinema consisted of small segments of celluloid patched together with the standard melodramatic or comedic situations, clumsily filmed indoors on make-shift sets. This is absolutely nothing of the kind although it took Hollywood what seemed an eternity to figure out that a movie could, indeed, be shot out in the open with great success. Several reviewers have mentioned some sort of connection with early Westerns made by directors of little artistic talent and less scope. Actually, this film has nothing whatsoever to deal with standard plots with famous actors. The plot is extremely simple, as it should be in this case, and all - virtually all - of the over-the-board overacting and the theatrical motions and over-emotions suppressed, with natural gestures replacing them in natural settings...and what beautiful settings they are! No, there aren't any tied-together happy ends around and little to titillate the audience, villains with mustaches or any of the standard American clichés here. The film is Scandinavian, filmed and acted by Scandinavians, shot in North Sweden far, far away from the ole corral. I don't know how well the director, Victor Sjostrom, was acquainted with American cinema at the time - there wasn't really much of anything of much value going except from Griffith and one or two others, but the film borrows nothing and invents everything for its own uses. The cinema up there created a universe of its own, albeit a harsh one. Bergman would follow fifty years later. This was a welcome hour or so spent in the company of people who made some astoundingly good films and this is certainly one of them.

Curtis Stotlar

(1918) The Outlaw and His Wife/ Berg-Ejvind och hans hustru SILENT DRAMA

Co-written, directed and starring Victor Sjöström, he plays an unknown drifter, Kari (Victor Sjöström) looking for work and ends up working at a farm, owned by Halla (Edith Erastoff). And as they begin to fall in love, it is then his past begins to catch up with him that his name is not Kari, but is really Eyvind suspected of escaping from prison. Adapted from the play "Eyvind of the Hills" by Jóhann Sigurjónsson.

A silent Swedish film that is reminiscent of a serious love story that has a complicated situation, that can be used as a basis for movies that come after it.

The stunning Lappland scenery and seeing Victor Sjöström made this one enjoyable for me, despite a little creakiness in the early going. The setup, actually told in a flashback, reminded me of Les Miserables in that a man (Sjöström) turns to theft out of poverty, but instead of the local parson forgiving him as in that work, he jails him instead. Perhaps there is commentary on the church in this, and the need to show a little kindness to the less fortunate, since everything that happens to this decent guy stems from that incident. Anyway, he breaks out of jail, finds work on a farm, and falls in love with the owner (Edith Erastoff), but his past is never far behind.

The film gets good and the drama increases when the pair flee to the mountains, where they live a rugged life and have a baby girl. There are several moments at a cliff that are quite tense, and one that seems hard to fathom (I mean, really hard to fathom). Maybe the film shows us what desperation will drive people to, aside from the theft - jealousy, turning on one another, and acts you'd never think possible. Set against the grand scenery of those timeless mountains and waterfalls though, the human struggle seems especially small, even when it is gripping.

The pace is quite good at 73 minutes - intertitles are kept to a minimum, and the story, while simple, moves along nicely. At times it feels like the psychological drama is as claustrophobic as the wilderness is wide open. The film is obviously a bit stiff to modern eyes, but it seems clear that for 1918, it was ahead of its time.

The Outlaw and His Wife (1918) directed by Victor Sjöström is yet another impressive production in early cinema history.

The story revolves around a stranger who comes to work at a widow's (Halla's) farm. Halla and the stranger fall in love, but when he is revealed as Eyvind, an escaped thief forced into crime by his family's starvation, they flee and become two of the many outlaws of Iceland's mountains.

Victor Sjöström's early films are impressive in their own right. In The Outlaw and his Wife, he almost uses nature as a character, pressuring the humans of the film to the very brink of - and beyond - their moral values. This works effectively in driving a more abstract point of the film; what is one willing to do in order to ensure one's own safety and survival, and yet further abstract; what is good and evil as philosophical constructs?

It is similarly highly recommended for film buffs and those interested in cinema history just like Sjöström's earlier film Terje Vigen (1917), although The Outlaw and his Wife is not as contemporary as Terje Vigen. Lacking a score and being twice as long, it does not feel as focused although it definitely is more epic in its scale and production.

This film was Victor Sjöströms international break-through and it's not hard to understand why. It wasn't the first time Sjöström had used the wild and unpredictable nature as an illustrator or commentator, but this time the scenery and the acting was in the same level of quality. A wonderful piece of art.