The Phantom Carriage (1921)

Director: Victor Sjöström                                Writer: Victor Sjöström
Art Direction: Alexander Bako                         Cinematography: Julius Jaenzon
Starring: Victor Sjöström, Hilda Borgström, Tore Svennberg and Astrid Holm

The great Victor Sjöström (Seastrom) directed some of the most influential silent films in Swedish history, and then continued acting into the sound era for other great Swedish directors like Ingmar Bergman. It was The Phantom Carriage that actually brought him to the attention of Louis B. Mayer and began his career in Hollywood. He changed his last name to Seastrom, and directed the likes of Lon Chaney and Lillian Gish before returning to Sweden at the advent of the sound era and acted for the rest of his career, most notably in Bergman’s Wild Strawberries for which he won three international film awards.

The film begins on New Year’s Eve, a poorhouse nurse dying of consumption asks to see one of the poor people she works with before she dies, Sjöström himself as David Holm. While another nurse is out looking for him, he tells a story to friends who are drinking with him in the graveyard about an old professor who would become morose on New Years Eve because of the legend that the last person who dies on that day must drive Death’s carriage around for the next year collecting the dead. The images of the ghostly driver picking up corpses is incredibly haunting. The film drags in the middle, as it turns into something of a domestic drama centered on the evils of drinking, but the ending is interesting and surprisingly moving, like something out of Dickens.

Sjöström is a great actor and carries the film rather nicely. It would have been nice if Hilda Borgström’s part had been bigger as Mrs. Holmes. She has a great screen presence and would have been fantastic in Hollywood, reminiscent of someone like Janet Gaynor. The direction is very good as well. Sjöström makes use of double exposure techniques to animate the dead as well as the phantom carriage itself. But even the rest of the shooting is very well done. The production design is as good as anything being produced in the U.S. at the time, and it’s a beautiful looking picture. It’s no wonder he was lured to the States after this.

The film is not so much a ghost story as it is a morality tale. Still, it is told with a deft hand by Sjöström and is a brilliant silent film from an era which has sadly seen the vast majority of its product--eighty percent by some estimates--disappear into the mists of time. The Phantom Carriage is not only one of the great films in Swedish history, but one of the great silent films of all time and comes highly recommended.