Thomas Graals bästa film

Frau Bessie is a Swedish, madcap und aristocratic fraulein, too modernen for German aristocrat parameters certainly because she leaps at the occasion of running away from home in order to live thrilling adventures away from her rich parents. In the city, Frau Bessie will meet an uninspired writer, Herr Thomas Graal, who will hire her as his personal secretary and soon become fatally attracted to her.

"Thomas Graals Bästa Film" ( Thomas Graal's Best Film ) (1917) is a good example of the early film mastery achieved by the great Swedish director, Herr Mauritz Stiller; the film is a sarcastic, skillful comedy absolutely brilliant in its style and with a very funny story.

The film depicts the Swedish idle aristocratic life of Frau Bessie and her parents who, like other European aristocrats, spend most of their time doing nothing ( this can be hard work and requires years of experience and practice to achieve excellence in these matters, ja wohl! ) . However, Herr Graals's commoner life is equally idle since he lacks inspiration and prefers wool-gathering ( a shameful habit this for a commoner, neglecting his duties and obligations! ); thus the different social classes are caricatured and satirized in a hilarious way in many sequences in the film.

Frau Bessie is a cathartic character who abandons tranquillity to become an independent fraulein who makes her own decisions and will influence the people around her. She comes to terms with her parents about her new life and inspires Herr Graal to do a film script about her adventures (even though we know she's often lying about them).

The film narrative is brilliant; Herr Stiller intertwines fiction (Herr Graal's script) and reality on many levels in an excellent job of editing. It's a tricky balancing act that only great directors can succeed at. An added bonus, in addition to the many outdoor settings, is the look at the early film business and filmmaking (which adds still another dimension to the back and forth between the real and the imaginary).

The film stars Herr Victor Sjöström (later to become a great director himself) and Frau Karin Molander, who will work closely with both Sjöström and Stiller. So much talent explains why early Swedish silent films were so inventive and ahead of their time

And now, if you'll allow me, I must temporarily take my leave because this German Count must prevent modernen aristocratic Swedish frauleins from entering through the Schloss gates.

Bessie has again run away from her proper and domineering mother and her bumbling father to go to the big city, where she claims that her parents are poor and mistreat her to get a job as a secretary for screenwriter Thomas Graal. She runs away from his kisses and embraces and is forced to go back to her parent's home by family servants. Thomas Graal has run out of ideas, so he embroiders Bessie's tall tales to create a screenplay and insists that Bessie must be found to play the leads with him in order to meet her again.

The bulk of the picture is a series of flashbacks and fantasies based on Thomas Graal's script and on his imaginings and so can be distracting. The comedy is mostly thin, but some of the jokes are standard in backstage at a movie studio picture.

You mention Swedish films to me, and comedies don't spring to mind. Speak of Mauritz Stiller, Gustav Molander and Victor Sjöström working together and I think of something really deep dish, involving people suffering, stormy weather and thorough misery. Oh, you might get a structural comedy, in which some petty autocrat in a priest's collar learns that other people are humans too, but mostly I expect a lot of snow and anguish, maybe a curse or two. At best, there's a homicidal clown or a series of ex-lovers looking at a corpse. Yet here's Sjöström starring in a comedy written by Molander and directed by Stiller. Well, maybe the unnamed editor had a hand in it.

Karin Molander is a high-spirited girl. When her squire of a father talks about a marriage to a rich count, she'll have none of it, so she runs away to the big city, where she meets writer Sjöström and tells him about her cruel, impoverished life. He's quite willing to believe it, so he offers her a job as his secretary. She accepts, but soon enough he kisses her and she runs back home. So he tells his friend the film producer about it and turns it into a script, while the producer puts a notice in the paper, offering her a job as an actress.

It's a situational comedy, rather than the sort of slapstick that you got in the rest of the world. The gags are limited to the untrained actress performing dramatic roles in a mirror, Sjöström going bumpity-bump down a flight of stairs, and other such moments of hilarity. As a movie farce, it's all right at best. As a Swedish comedy, it's in the top ten.

Swedish cinema in the period 1917-21 was arguably the most sophisticated in the world, its major figure being the actor-director Victor Sjostrom, whose magnificently downbeat films combined literary adaptation, action, melodrama and astonishing natural backdrops. There are some of us, however, who prefer comedy to action melodramas, Lubitsch to Ford, and for this we turn to Sjostrom's contemporary, Mauritz Stiller, unfairly relegated in history to 'The Man Who Discovered Greta Garbo'.

'Thomas Graal's Best Film' is one of the best comedies of the silent era. It works as an adorable romantic comedy about a concupiscent novelist who falls for his secretary; as a startling social tract, with the dessicated aristocracy giving onto the modern world of cinema, entrepreneurs and the New Woman; as one of the first films about filmmaking - there is an exquisite parody of Griffith's monumental 'Intolerance', as the actor playing a hanged criminal complains about the pain of being hoist from a ceiling.

As early as 1917, before Hollywood was even heard of, we meet the philistine mogul hurling scripts into a wastepaper basket; the hysterical director; the overwrought, melodramatic actors. There is a wonderful scene where Bessie on horseback sees a man attacking a woman on a country road; coming cracking her whip to the rescue, she notices that a film crew are standing beside the roadside; she has mistaken fantasy for reality. This is the film's main theme, and the longest sequence features the title hero writing a screenplay after his mauling Bessie has forced her to flee; he imagines a desperate background of poverty for her from which he rescues her - this is the Best Film of the title.

Stiller's movie shows a thrilling modernity in this sequence as it blurs not only the reality of Graal's writing and the fantasy he imagines, but also intrudes Bessie's own story: she disrupts his narrative just as she disrupts all the forces of (male) power that would try to pin her down. Bessie is one of the great heroines of silent film, permanantly amused by the absurd complacency of the inferiors surrounding her, with a gorgeous, generous grin suggesting both a taste for playfulness, and a voracious sexual appetite. The scene where she flees her father and ritualistically forces him to abandon his paternalistic intentions by destroying the bridge between them is hilarious but provocative.

Graal's screenplay is not merely amusing for the gap between his assumptions and the actual truth. The imagined scene where the aristocratic parents become peasants, the father violent and drunk is subversive in itself (gentry reduced to peasants), but is also an apt metaphor for the patriarchal assumptions of the aristocracy.

Another aspect of the film's modernity is its narration, expressed through intertitles, sarcastic at the expense of the characters, suggesting melodramatic attitudes appropriate to the plot, than showing a very different reality (eg the despairing lover Graal sunbathing merrily on a country lake). There is a ritualistic sexual content (eg the scene in the boat where Graal blows on the window), and a willingness to sidetrack on 'irrelevant' bits (eg the cigarette tricks) that also excite the viewer; while the Surreal/Magritte/Feuillade-like abduction scene, fragmented and seemingly arbitrary, where bowler-hatted servants wait to pounce on Bessie, is spooky.

What makes 'Thomas Graal' a true classic though, and nearer to Sjostrom (who is terrific, his overacting more suited to comedy than drama), is the way the defiant artifice of the drama is shot against natural locations, producing a fruitful, jarring effect - Graal chasing Bessie through a country lane, slipping and losing his hat; a desperate Graal pushing a little old lady and stealing her boat, foreshadowing Seinfeld and a famous loaf of rye. There is a startling scene in a butcher's shop, a gallery of fresh carcass bloating the screen.