Scott Lord: The Outlaw and His Wife (Victor Sjostrom, 1918)

After having appeared in “The Outlaw and His Wife”, actress Edith Erastoff starred with Lars Hanson and Greta Almroth In “The Flame of Life” (1919), directed by Mauritz Stiller And “Let No Man Put Asunder” (“Hogre Andamal”, 1921) directed by Rune Carlsten.
In Sweden, Victor Sjostrom continued directing in 1922 with the film “Vem domer”, starring Jenny Hasselqvist, which he co-scripted with Hjalmer Bergman.

Victor Sjostrom had written four hundred letters to Edith Erastoff, his co-star from the film “The Outlaw and His Wife”, their eventually having married during 1922.

The historiography of the film criticism that delineates the Golden Age of Swedish Silent Film was perhaps easily formulated while the films were still being screened internationally in theaters if we heed the review placed in the periodical Picture Show magazine during 1919 that astutely notes "On stage it is easy to calculate the effect of limelights....a glance at the top photographs of Seastrom (left) in 'Love the Only Law' and (right) 'A Man There Was' well illustrates how the one appealing figure dominates the immense landscape around him". The magazine quotes Victor Sjostrom explaing his liking screen adaptation over stage adaptation almost propheticly in regard to the film criticism, if not film theory, that would later follow. "One has to deal with more people', he says, 'and also with grande, terrible landscapes, with shifting effects of shade and shadow'".

Author Forsyth Hardy, in the volume Scandinavian Film written in 1952, explains the film of Victor Sjostrom as having established Sjostrom as an auteur of the Golden Age of Swedish Silent Film by his work having created a poetic cinema. Hardy writes, “There was a greater freedom of movement, an assured sense of rhythm and a fine feeling for composition. In ‘The Outlaw and His Wife’ Sjostrom used landscape with a skill which was to become part of the Swedish Film tradition. He found a way of filming the tree-lined valleys and wide arched skies of his country so that they became not merely backgrounds but organic elements in the theme in the theme. There was still, however, a lingering tendency to melodrama in the acting....the end of the film especially was marred by melodramatic excess, but despite this fault, Berg-EJvid was memorable because of its theme, and its demonstration in the earlier sequences of the film medium's affinities with poetry." During 1960, Charles L. Fuller, writing for Films in Review, succinctly described the films motifs, "Its theme was that no man escapes his fate 'though he rides faster than the wind' ".

Peter Cowie, in his volume Eighty Years of Cinema, explains, "But apart from his assured use of flashbacks, Sjostrom was the first Swedish director to realize the importance of landscape in the cinema. The solicitude and predicament Berg-EJvind and his wife speak through images with the clouds and mountains expressing a life of vigor and simplicity."

About the film, Einar Lauritzen wrote, “But Sjostrom never let the drama of human relations get lost in the grandeur of the scenery.” To this can be added that Jean Mitry, in his work The Aesthetics and Psychology of Cinema, writes of the mountain in "The Outlaw and His Wife", up to the tragic ending, is a symbol of granduer and isolation, as well as a symbol for the effort of the man and woman to reverse their fate. The snow, in Mitry's interpretation symbolizes not only purity but alao redemption.

Peter Cowie writes, "Prominent too in this masterpiece is the Scandinavian approach to the seasons. Summer is recalled in short, wrenching spasms, as the outlaw sits starving in his mountain hut toward the end; but winter, equated inthe Swedish arts with death, destroys the spirit and whips the snow over the couple's bodies with inexorable force."

"The Outlaw and His Wife" was reviewed in the United States during 1921 under the title "You and I". Motion Picture News concluded, "The picture is marred by an utterly irrelevant prolougue and epilougue which should be dispensed with immediately. It has no place in advancing the drama and really spoils the good impressions of the picture."

When Bluebook of the Screen in 1923 introduced Victor Sjostrom as then currently filming his first feature made in the United States, "Master of Men" as Victor Seastrom it related, without quoting him directly, that Sjostrom felt that his "tragedy of Iceland", "The Outlaw and His Wife", was his est work and that to him it "would not be understood or appreciated in England or America".

David Bordwell, in his paper French Impressionist Cinema, Film Culture, Film Theory and Film Style, supports the idea that "The Outlaw and his Wife" had helped mark the incipience of a Golden Age of Swedish Silent FIlm. Bordwell notes, "'The Outlaw and his Wife' had begun an "influx" of Swedish Silent Films into France by Gaumont to complement a growing avaunte garde movement of French Impressionistic films, "In one week in 1921, no fewer than eight Swedish Films were playing in Paris, nearly all by Sjostrom and Stiller. Again, the Swedes use of flamboyant lighting effects and occaisional spatial distortion (e.g. the superimpositions of Sjostrom's 'The Phantom Carriage') probably reinforced and encouraged certain tendencies in French filmmakers work." Borwell described the Swedish camera techniques as "narturalistic" when compared to other European markets. Bordwell writes that Cinea, one of the magazines founded by Louis Delluc, proponent of the French Impressionist avaunte garde film movement, devoted a large amount of space to the reviewing of the films of Sjostrom and Stiller and their having been revered in France by critics and filmmakers, which is evident by the numerous appearances of Victor Seastrom on the cover. The volume Experiment in Film, edited by Roger Manvell in 1949 opined that while the films of Victor Sjostrom inspired the film of the French Avant-Guarde movement when it "set a fashion for dreams and superimposition", German silent cinema, with Nosferatu produced "deplorable experiments in composition."

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