Sweden, 1921
Directed by Victor Sjöström
With Victor Sjöström (David Holm), Astrid Holm (Edit), Hilda Borgström (Mrs. Holm), Tore Svennberg (Georges)
As she lies dying a young Salvation Army worker asks to meet a man she tried to help. Two of her colleagues scour the city right away, but quite unenthusiastic: David Holm seems to have been a hell of a problem, even a nuisance – as she wakes her daughter, Edit’s mother has begged the Salvation Army workers not to answer Edit’s request. And he does prove hard to find: one of the workers can only bring to Edit’s house the wife of David Holm, a destitute and distraught woman well in her forties (and looking terribly older and poignantly helpless). But the other ends up luckier: he sees the guy talking to others in a cemetery.
This is not, however, a discovery to the audience: the chase for the man Edit is so eager to chat with and the death throes of Edit, two interlocked developments standing as complementary streams of action have long been cut into that cemetery conversation. So David Holm was already a known figure before getting named, and not a wholly sympathetic one: he is a garrulous bum drinking too much. He turns out also to enjoy spinning a yarn, and the cemetery scene gives way to a flashback featuring a dear old friend of his, Georges, and the flashback actually introduces a legendary tale which is vividly illustrated – and which will be later at the core of the film’s narrative. That is a lot of layers even as the film has not even reached a third of its 107 minutes running time.
The film will walk down the same, amazingly meandering, intricate, and subtle narrative path: and that may be the first great element setting it apart in the silent era’s abundant production. It segues seamlessly from present to past and the other way around, mixing all along realistic developments with supernatural ones, carefully spreading information to build, one memory at a time, one emotion at a time, the precise and sad story of a man’s failure to remain the dignified and happy worker, father, and husband he should have been, as he became an alcoholic under the unwelcome influence of a friend, that famous Georges, growing into a boorish and misanthropic tramp hating fiercely his wife and much of the mankind and contaminating folks with tuberculosis without remorse but instead with mirth. This could have been a thoroughly dark and hopeless chronicle of meanness, and the lead character would not have it otherwise anyway, so bad and brutal he insists to be, but David Holm repeatedly bumps into the compassion of Edit: she emerges as the light – and how radiant, bright Edit’s face is all along the film, including on her sickbed – suddenly appearing in the dark (indeed, both meet first in the middle of the night, the tramp knocking at the door of the brand-new shelter she is running) and struggling to keep darkness away. The chronicle ends up relating a battle of wills that Edit – and Mrs. Holm with her – seems to have lost as far as mere facts can be understood.
But her faith and her love – for she has explained how much she is love with him, a rather counterintuitive development – still drive her to push facts aside and to believe the deeper movements of the soul can hold the only truth and the only hope: perhaps, just one year after they first met, something may be changing in David Holm. Here is a character sustained by faith and sentiment and this is why she both raises as an annoying challenge to the tramp and stands out as a beacon for the audience and the mean to alter a story, to bring the melodrama a really happy ending and a redemptive message filling the audience’s expectations.
The wagoner of the original Swedish title is the character that ties the various strands of the narrative: it is a fantasy creation tugging at our strongest fears and our fate’s tragedy – Death, the various ways it hits people and its absolute inevitability – and anchoring the film in the horror genre. The legend a worried Georges tells to his fellow bums deals about this wagoner – and in a narratively very convenient way but also in a truly bitter irony Georges turns out to have been Death’s aide for the year drawing to an end as the film begins. This legend claims that the man dying in the very last minutes of the New Year’s Eve is doomed to draw the phantom carriage Death uses to collect the dead, a transport as dreadfully reliable and effective as it is invisible to living men. The fact that just before clocks strike a new midnight, starting a new year, David Holm can view the carriage and its driver is genuinely terrifying: does the brawl he had with the other tramps really kill him? It sounds it has – and that he is prisoner of his fate. Yet the legend is right away tweaked: Georges does not hand over the reins, but keep driving with seemingly the sole purpose of showing to his old pal how folks suffered because of his cruelty. David Holm’s maiden voyage on the Death carriage becomes a morality tale connecting past and present.
More strikingly Georges accepts the impossible: to give a few hours’ reprieve to a beseeching Edit, who can wait a few more hours before dying to see if David Holm can amend himself – even if Georges all the way explains he has no power on the living. And then comes the miracle: as Mrs. Holm gets ready to poison her daughters and herself, David Holm cries he atones himself, vows he will change, begs for mercy – and comes back from the dead’s world in time to save his wife and children. Fate can be reversed, death can be cheated, hope is possible. The phantom carriage would of course keep touring the Earth, only with a new, unknown driver – but in this deeply religious and heartening tale it has given an amazing, precious, unique opportunity to a miscreant to redeem himself, and for life to snatch a few more moments, even years, from the nothingness. A very grim portrait of a sinner, it still conveys a positive message, boldly using the tropes of horror and the fear of death to create a complex melodramatic plot, where the sinner is cleverly forced to face up to his wrongs, a turn in the past that gives more meaning and urgency to the present.
An adaptation of one of the many tales and short stories that made writer Selma Lagerlöf so popular and influential, “Körkarlen – The Phantom Carriage” relies on double exposure to show the dead and their carriage moving among the living. The pictures get an eerie and riveting quality, technically blending realism and supernatural. This film of Victor Sjöström also features editing techniques and clever shots that help the story to pivot from one time frame to another smoothly, in an appealing, fascinating manner: thus a flashback scene – the Holm family in happier days resting on a patch of a meadow during a picnic – morphs, thanks to a dissolve delicately composed, into a flash-forward scene – a meeting of drunk bums pointing to the decisive, tragic change in David Holm’s mind – though the new scene is still in the past while the narrator, Georges, keeps relating to David Holm how he erred and the ghosts of the two men magically float in a real, present-time street. Narrative complexity is bolstered by technical craft, technical craft makes narrative complexity more solid and spellbinding. This is arguably a splendid and poignant film, replete with episodes shot and composed with flair, vivid illustrations of the fight between righteous behaviors and devilish ones served by strong performances.