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"Remarkably grizzled" is the description of the protagonist, thus Victor Sjöström artificially aged in an inescapable foreglimpse of the codger he will become in Wild Strawberries. (Out of makeup, he's burly and hale like Charles Bickford.) The Norwegian sailor goes home to wife and baby, their happiness is curtailed by famine during the Napoleonic Wars. "Two brawny arms were no match for disease and death." Food is the precious contraband beyond the blockade, his skiff launches into the aquatic vastness in a shot sustained to give the depth of the image from foreground to background. He helps himself to local verdure as improvised camouflage but his rowboat proves no match for the British frigate, home is no longer his upon release from jail. "They strike. They sink. But the sea is still." Ibsen verses, adapted by Gustaf Molander, visualized by Sjöström in his breakthrough exploration of the elemental. (Griffith's The Unchanging Sea is the mainstay.) Sequestered in an island, stewing in bitterness, the mariner stands before the boiling waves and shakes his fists at the externalization of his own spiritual turbulence. "Until now my blood was frozen," the thaw is the grin of vengeful glee that spreads as he realizes that the desperate man aboard the foundering yacht is the limey captain who long ago captured him, "a smile for the long-sought, found." A mother's cry dissipates the haze of hatred, and damned if the avenger doesn't awaken with a child in his arms like John Wayne seizing Natalie Wood in The Searchers. The coda silhouettes crosses at the coastal cemetery, "wild flowers bloomed in between." With Edith Erastoff, August Falck, and Bergliot Husberg. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |