November 16: The Phantom Carriage/Körkarlen (1921 -- Victor Sjöström)

★★★★

I was thinking Halloween movies, so it blindsided me to find that Phantom Carriage is actually a Christmas movie.  I didn’t expect to see a hooded figure with a scythe leading a sinner around to confront his malfeasance and get him to repent of his evil ways.  Of course, it’s New Year’s here and not Christmas Eve, but that’s mostly because the Swedish legend behind the story requires the sinner, David Holm, to die at midnight on New Year’s Eve in order to become Death’s carriage driver. 

One of the most compelling elements here is Holm’s sin, or more to the point, the way Victor Sjöström plays the sinner.  Holm loathes everything, including himself.  After his first effort at reform fails, he hardens into hatred of his wife, the incorruptible missionary Edit, and himself.  He bullies friends when they drink, threatens his wife, and rejects every overture from Edit, even tearing up his jacket after she has mended it.  But through all this bombast, Sjöström still manages to create a complex, conflicted human being.  I was totally captured by the scene of his tearing up the jacket, and I even felt his wonder and fear as he recognizes Death’s driver and realizes that he’s died. 

I was impressed with a lot of the storytelling, too.  Phantom Carriage opens with a series of enigmas: Who is the woman dying? Who is the other woman?  Who is the woman that the dying wants to see?  Who is Mr. Holm? Why are people against her wishes?  And I got the answers to these only gradually, staying with the film to find them.  I also like the series of flashbacks here.  Phantom Carriage uses editing to parse time, and we go from now to the past and back to now, albeit a present in a new location where Holm will meet the carriage driver.  There are flashbacks within flashbacks, too, like the sequences  of the carriage driver wearily going about his duty of collecting souls.  Sjöström has already understood the use of editing to build suspense, too.  As Holm is breaking through a door to get at his wife and children, Sjöström cuts rapidly between the huddled family and the furious father.

Of course, the famous special effects here are rightly praised since the double exposures that would have been necessary to get the dead and living in the same frame must have required mind-boggling precision.  And they’re genuinely creepy.  I got goose bumps watching the carriage drive out over the water so the driver could then pick up the drowned man’s soul, and Matti Bye’s effective score has particular resonance here.  As director, Sjöström gives us lots of information in the frame by using deep focus, and his super-realism makes the supernatural elements feel that much more real.

Even without knowing the well-documented links between Phantom Carriage and Bergman, a viewer will certainly notice connections.  Death in the Seventh Seal dresses a lot like the driver in Phantom Carriage, and there’s even a shot of the carriage going over a horizon here that looks a lot like the shot at the end of Seventh Seal as Death leads his recruits over a similar hill.  Other images from other directors also seem too similar to be coincidental.  As I watched Holm take an ax to a door to get to his family, I half expected to hear him say, “Herrrre’s Johnny!”  And I’ve yet to see a Ghost of Christmas Future that doesn’t look like the carriage driver either.  Even thematically, Edit's passion for David at times trembles at the border boundary of spiritual and carnal, a situation Melville gets much out of in Leon Morin, Priest , though Melville doesn't maintain the tension throughout in the way Sjöström does here.

There is so much to like here.  Victor Sjöström carries the film with his dynamic portrayal of David Holm, and the story and effects make the film even more engaging.  The rather saccharine ending – totally expected and totally conventional  -- don’t add a lot to Phantom Carriage but are to be somewhat forgiven in 1921.  This is a worthwhile experience by any account.