Scott Lord Silent Film: Lillian Gish in The Scarlet Letter (Victor Seast...

What is most important to Bo Florin, Stockholm University is the question of film style when looking at Victor Sjostrom directing in the United States as Victor Seastrom, the films an inevitable transformation from his having established the Golden Age of Swedish Silent Film with director Mauritz Stiller. It might also be irresistable, Sjostrom having made two films with actress Lillian Gish, to evaluate the work Victor Sjostrom to that of D.W. Griffith, who, during 1926 was filming "The Sorrows of Satan" with Carol Dempster. Peter Cowie in fact likens Victor Sjostrom to D.W. Griffith by noting Sjostrom's admiration for Griffith with the observation thst both directors saw "the human conscience as a register of emotion". Peter Cowie, in his volume Swedish Cinema" goes so far as to write that of the films Sjostrom directed in the United States only the two films Victor Sjostrom made with Lillian Gish are of "lasting importance". Cowie explains that even Sjostrom himself felt that the films he directed after the Golden Age of Swedish Silent Film would in fact be "transformations". "Everyone praised the visual beauty of the film, but many in it a decline of Sjostrom's vitality. 'Det Omringade huset' (1922) and 'Eld omboard' were disappointing, and in 1923 Sjostrom left for Hollywood on account of the lucrative offer from M.G.M and because of an urgent need within himself to find the magic for producing pictures of an international appeal." It had been Victor Sjostrom who had convinced Mauritz Stiller to depart for America in order to meet his artistic aspirations. Admittedly, the films made in the United States are transformations of genre in regard to narrative conventions and transformations of genre in regard to literarary adaptation if in a sense of transnational analysis in the use of genre by an auteur, the auteur Seastrom/Sjostrom with whom Stiller had given up filming comedies after "Erotikon" to film "particularly Scandinavian drama". Of "The Scarlet Letter" Peter Cowie writes,"Both this film and 'The Wind' are given an undeniably Scandinavian character by the intensity of Sjostrom's direction."

Actress Lillian Gish, in her autobiography The movies, Mr. Griffith and me, writes, "I found Victor's Seastrom's direction an education in itself. The Italian school of acting was one of elaboration, the Swedish was one of repression. Lars Hanson played his scenes in Swedish, I in English, neither of us understanding the other."

Paul Rotha in his volume The Film Till Now looked at Victor Sjostrom in the United States directing as Victor Seastrom, "The theme of 'The Scarlet Letter' was gloomy, but Seastrom raised its gloom to moments of great beauty....Seastrom's sweeping sense of landscape, evident in his early Swedish pictures was expanded and gave an enchanting atmosphere to the first love scenes between Miss Gish and Lars Hanson....This feeling for depth and space was common to all the Scandinavian directors in their pre-American work."

Puritanism itself can be reflected in the poetry of Anne Bradstreet, Samuel Sewall, Edward Taylor, Michael Wigglesworth and Cotton Mather, The Puritan Errand, the Scarlet Letter having taking place during the two decades after 1630 when most of the oldest cities near Boston, where Elizabeth Pain the inspiration for Hester Prynne, is buried, were first incorporated.

Although within the historiography of silent film review and theory, Joe Franklin, author of Classics of the Silent Screen, a pictorial history, may be seen more as a proponent of silent film, a poularizer of silent film during the advent of television using publicity still to raise the public's consciousness of the heyday of the art form during the era of Paul Killiam and William K. Everson, he is correct while reviewing "The Scarlet Letter" when writing that there "were no fewer than three more versions were made before the Lillian Gish version for M.G.M. in 1926." He does not list them, but they were: "The Scarlet Letter" (one reel, Tucker, Smiley, Independent Moving Picture Company, 1911), "The Scarlett Letter" (David Miles,1913) with actress Linda Arvidson as Hester Prynne, "The Scarlet Letter" (fives reels, Carl Harbugh, 1917) for the Fox Film Corporation with Mary Martin as Hester Prynne and "The Scarlet Letter" (1922, Challis Sanderson) with Sybil Thorndike as Hester Prynne. The periodical The Moving Picture World praised the Kinemacolor version of 1913 and its direction, "He has gone to great pains to recreate the early colonial atmosphere: he has succedded , especially in his backgrounds, his settings and his costumes....Linda Griffith gives a splendid portrayal of Hester Prynne. She is the embodiment of Hawthorne's creation-the high type of woman who under a calm exterior conceals her suffering as she conceals her love.". Motion Picture World praised the 1917 adaptation as being "as authentic, as exalted, and as appealing as the immortal book from which it was taken...Mary Martin as Hester Prynne, the sufferer from the stern Puritanical judgement, is as sweet a figure as was ever crushed by justice gone wrong." When pieced together within the historiography of film reviews leading up to the Victor Sjostrom adaptation with Lillian Gish there seems a hint of the star system just beginning with the novel being a character driven narrative, the earlier versions lacking a commercial commodity that could be exploited within the audience expectations of the developing genre of historical costume drama but the story of "The Scarlet Letter" allowing for a dynamic protagonist.

Victor Seastrom

"It was Hawthorne's first sustained effort and of all his works, we still read first the supreme romance of the Puritan conscience in self-torment, 'The Scarlet Letter', with its climax of penance and demoniac triumph at Dimmesdale's shame."

The book below, printed by Metro Goldwyn Mayer, was only sold in theaters where the film was being shown as a souvenier program.

Victor Sjostrom

One quote that can be excerpted explains that although Victor Sjostrom's directing depicted man's relationship to the enviornment, his personification of landscape itself into a character dynamicly delineating the protagonist as the story unfolded, his directing in the United States, after having left Sweden took a turn toward relecting the psychological interior of the character. "With the production of 'The Scarlet Letter', Sjostrom becomes known as the first director to experiment with and successfully accomplish the strange feat of photographing thoughts--putting on the screen what goes on inside man's mind."

When advertizing 'The Scarlet Letter' along with its many other productions soon to be featured on the marquee, the M.G.M. studio proclaimed that the film was of "legitimate attraction size.".

The souvenier program points out that during six years as an actor at Swedish Biograph,Lars Hanson had worked with both Sjostroms, with the director Victor Sjostrom in the film "Jerusalem", and with Mrs. Victor Sjostrom (Edythe Erastoff) in "Song of the Blood Red Flower", prior to that his having portrayed the titular role in Auguste Strindberg's Gustav the Third.

During 1927, actress Lillian Gish was assigned director Fred Niblo, who directed her in the film "The Enemy", photographed by Oliver Marsh, the photoplay having been written by Agnes Christine Johnston and adapted from play described by author Gary Cary as a "virulently anti-war play" in his volume Lost Films. The film was at the time of the 1970 publication of Cary's volume a Lost Silent Film. Eight of the films nine reels have been since found.

Perhaps it makes it easier when thinking in terms of Lost Film, Found Magazines to speculate on what the missing footage of "The Enemy" looked like on screen due to the missing reel having been the last reel of the film and it requiring us to find out about how the ending was written. H.A. Potamkin described the on screen acting of Lillian Gish in the periodical Close Up, "If, on rare moments, Lillian Gish seems to have achieved genuine condensation of power, that is simply because her habitiual mincing acting has coincided with the necessities of those moments...her clipped movements, timed to the surimpression of the soldier's march, appear to explode with compressed anquish."

Victor Sjostrom

Scott Lord Scandinavian Film: Lars Hanson in A Dangerous Proposal (Ett Farlit Frieri, Rune Carlsten, 1919)

The first film directed by Rune Carlsten, an adaptation of a story by Bjornestejerne Bjornson which Carlsten coscripted with Sam Ask, was for Filmindustri Skandia, a short lived merger which shortly thereafter merged again, other directors for the company having been Elis Ellis and John Brunius. "A Dangerous Wooing/A Dangerous Courtshipt" (Ett Farlit Frieri) was the first of five films directed by Rune Carlsten to be photographed by Raol Reynolds. The film stars actress Gun Cronvall in her only on screen performance. Actor Lars Hanson also during 1919 starred underthe direction of Mauritz Stiller with actress Greta Almroth in the film "The Song of the Scarlet Flower" as well as under the direction of Swedish Silent Film director John Brunius in the 1919 film "Synnove Solbakken", with actress Karen Molander, who, then married to director Gustaf Molander, was later to become Lars Hanson's wife. Silent Film Lars Hanson Victor Sjostrom

Greta Garbo before Hollywood- Lars Hanson

The 1927 article "Swedish Hospitality featured in Motion Picture Magazine gave an account of journalist Rilla Page Palmborg, author of "The Private Life of Greta Garbo", being entertained by actor Lars Hanson and his wife, Swedish actress Karin Molander. It began, " 'And now we shall see if you like real Swedish cooking,' said Lars Hanson as he escorted us across the velvety green lawn of his walled garden, where for the past hour we had sat enthralled by the tales he and his charming wife had told us of their native land...This was a Sunday supper to which we had been invited. 'My wife prepared everything when I her that I had promised you real Swedish cooking.' Said Mr. Hanson as we took our places at a long refectory table in a long, rather narrow and dignified dining-room."

Fact may be just as exiciting as fiction to historians when we think that the events of the nineteenth century, depicted in the twentieth, are already culturally different from ours, especially in film the show the humanity that we still do have in common, or rather psychological insights about characters in moral dilemas; in fact Moving Picture World contrasted the character portrayed by Lars Hanson in John Robertson's film with a "more straitlaced" character that Hanson had played earlier for Victor Sjostrom in his depiction of Puritan Colonialism, "The Scarlet Letter". Photoplay reviewed the film. "A well knit drama is this story of how the gospel ship came into being." A ship embarks from the Boston waterfront and is saved from shipwreck off to become apparently a then "floating church" The film might be historically inaccurate about the date triangular trade hade ended in regard to the War of 1812. Motion Picture News subtitled their review with a "Rugged, Well Acted Story of the first Gospel Ship" while the periodical Motion Picture News subtitled their review with "Lars Hanson and Pauline Starke in Gripping Drama of Founding of First Gospel Ship". The subtitles used in Motion Picture World were directed more toward the jazz age- one page announcing the film "Flesh and the Devil" in which Lars Hanson, starred with Greta Garbo and John Gilbert, as being busy "Cleaning Up" at the box office, while "Captain Salvation" was in production for Cosmopolitan with "Wild Crew Now Sails the Main". Motion Picture World announced that the seventy five actors of the studio were filming exterior scenes ar Catalina Island, the "dramatic action" filmed after having "set sail" on the "high seas".

Picture Play magazine during 1927 featured stills from the eight reel film "Captain Salvation", starring Lars Hanson. They were captioned with, "Lars Hanson has another intensely dramatic role in 'Captain Salvation', that of a young New Englander whose heart is in the sea, but who is forced his uncle to go onto the ministry...Marceleine Day as the girl who waits for him at home." Motion Picture News Booking Guide during 1927 provided a brief synopsis of the film, "Theme: Melodrama of the sea. Adaptation of the novel by Fredrick William Wallace, Divinity Student forsakes the pulpit for the sea, forgets his faith and becomes aide of a much feared skipper. His regeneration is brought about through an unfortunate girl he befriends. After her death he is reunited with his sweetheart." The cameraman to the film is listed as William Daniels and the scenarist as Jack Dunningham. Photoplay Magazine reviewed the eight reel silent film, "Pauline Starke is Excellant as the waterfront derelict." In a photo caption to a full page portrait of Pauline Starke, Picture Play magazine introduced her upcoming film, "If you saw 'Captain Salvation' you have no doubt of Pauline Starke's dramatic gifts. If you did not, you will find proof of them in 'Fallen Angles'". Magazine advertisements published by the studio announced that "Captain Salvation" was a Cosmopolitan production for M.G.M. "on a lavish scale" ephasizing that the novel by Frederick William Wallace was soon to be serialized for millions of readers and an "unprecedented promotion campaign" would be launched by Hearst newspapers.