El tesoro de Arne

The Golden Age of Swedish Cinema was in high gear when one of its country's leading directors, Mauritz Stiller, produced what is considered his masterpiece, September 1919's "Sir Arne's Treasure." Stiller had been directing and writing scripts since 1912, and is largely known for being responsible for making Greta Garbo into an international star. His adaptation of the 1903 novel "The Treasure" resulted in the sweet spot for his craft, placing all the internal and external elements of storytelling onto the screen.

Back during that Golden Age, from mid-1910s to mid-1920s, Swedish cinema had been known to incorporate Nature to explain the motivations of its characters' actions. "Sir Arne's Treasure" follows three unfairly imprisoned Scottish mercenary commanders who have escaped their jail cell. In the dead of winter they travel through Sweden's countryside in the late 1500's seeking to return to Scotland. By way of their journey, they hear of a family who harbor a large chest of silver coins. Obsessed by the treasure after experiencng their bone-chilling and starving ordeal, the three proceed to steal the chest of silver and murder the entire family, except for the daughter. A love interest develops between the surviving woman and one of the murderers, setting off a spiritual understanding of the two.

Stiller captures the elemental forces of Nature to steer the plot and explain the impulses of all concerned, including the internal forces overcoming any rational thought. And the overwhelming motive, Love, shines a light on the daughter's actions to save her murderous lover.

"Sir Arne's Treasure" played a huge influence on the composition of directors Fritz Lang and Sergei Eisenstein, the later Russian duplicating almost the exact same scene in his 1944 'Ivan The Terrible' as Stiller constructed in his finale funeral sequence in "Sir Arne's Treasure"--showing a long line of black-clad village mourners contrasted against the pure white snow tredging to the ice-bound boat to pick up the daughter's corpse.

A Scottish mercenary falls in love with the foster sister of the girl he murdered while stealing a clergyman's hoard of silver coins. A beautiful, dreamlike tale set in the frigid beauty of the snowswept landscape of rural Sweden. The characters in director Mauritz Stiller's haunting saga drift inexorably towards their tragic fates like leaves on a river. Powerful stuff.

In Sweden in the 16th Century, three Scottish mercenaries -- Eric Stocklassa, Bror Berger and Richard Lund -- escape from a prison and make their way to the coast. It's the dead of winter, and the sea-road to Scotland is frozen over. Maddened, they invade the home of Sir Arne, burn the place down, steal his treasure and kill everyone except Mary Johnson, who hides, and goes to live at the home of Axel Nilsson, a poor dealer in preserved fish.

Sir Arne's treasure carries a curse, however. It was stolen from a monastery when the Swedes dissolved them, and the death of Sir Arne and his wife was foredoomed. The Scottish mercenaries, however, are now likewise doomed. The seas are still frozen over, so they must wait. While they do so, they hear about Miss Johnson. They go to hear her story and Mr. Lund and she fall in love.

It's a tale of madness and horror. However, while the German movies in that still-undefined genre were psychological and used an expressionist camera, this Swedish movie by Mauritz Stiller uses an objective one, showing a more terrifying, frozen hellscape than anything Caligari's sick mind ever envisioned. This terror is not made by man or devil. It is G*d who seeks His vengeance.

Stiller and Gustaf Molander adapted a novel by Selma Lagerlöf to make this movie. Molander would direct the sound remake after the Second World War.

As a title in film history books, Sir Arne's Treasure always seemed like it must fall somewhere between Die Nibelungen and Ivanhoe-- an epic knightish adventure with a heavier Scandinavian feel. In fact it's a tale of guilt and doom in the classic Swedish mode, almost a chamber piece despite its grandiose division into five acts, set in an historical setting but with some of the same distilled focus and sense of inevitability as, to pick a recent example, Cronenberg's A History of Violence.

Three Scottish mercenaries (the main one, incongruously, given the jaunty name "Sir Archie"; happily his compatriots are not Sir Reggie and Sir Jughead) escape from captivity in 16th century Sweden and, driven half-mad by the winter winds and starvation, wind up slaughtering the entire household of a local lord for his treasure. Only one young, Lillian Gish-like girl, Elsalill, who hides herself during the crime, escapes-- but, being Swedish, is consumed by survivor's guilt.

This being one of those stories (like Crash or Dickens' Bleak House) where there are only eight different people in the entire country, the three, newly kitted out in finery, return to the scene of the crime and Sir Archie promptly falls in love with the survivor of his depredations and starts having guilt of his own. I'm betting you can pretty much guess how that's going to work out for the gloomy couple.

The initial acts of Sir Arne's Treasure take a little mental adjustment, as there's what we might call a high Guy Maddin quotient here, of over-the-top Nordic gloom-- the old crone (Mrs. Sir Arne) repeatedly shrieking "Why are they sharpening the knives at Brorhaven?" at the dinner table, the use of the phrase "fish wench" in a title, or a ship captain who believes that his ship is frozen in ice as God's punishment for some big crime he can't QUITE put his finger on.... The latter in particular shows the heavily moralistic hand of Selma Lagerlof (who also wrote Gosta Berling, The Phantom Chariot, etc.), who was good at setting up ripping plot mechanics but tended to impose a Victorian religious sensibility which you don't see in the best Swedish films, such as Sjostrom's The Outlaw and His Wife.

While there's a stark, In Cold Blood-like quality to the depiction of these violent events in a remote, snowbound location, we're impressed by the dramatic quality of the events themselves, not by any human sympathy that has particularly been built up for the characters to that point. And it is easy to see why distributors in other countries succumbed to the temptation to trim the film down, as Stiller allows many of the events to play out in real time, even when relatively little is going on.

It's when the film narrows its focus to the two main characters and their guilt-racked interactions that Stiller's deliberate storytelling begins to really justify itself-- the film is like the long walk to the electric chair in a Cagney movie from that point on, and the minutely detailed depiction of everyday activities not only makes the historical setting seem vividly real, but serves to cut off the possibility of outlandish movie-style heroics which will bring the story to any end other than the inevitable tragic one (which, nevertheless, contains a couple of shocking turns which wouldn't have passed muster for Errol Flynn at Warner Brothers in 1938).

Mention must be made (as theater reviewers say when they can't think of a better transition) of the cinematography of Julius Jaenzon, who pretty much shot everything that was anything in Swedish silent cinema. The word inevitably attached to Jaenzon's work is "landscape," which is to say, he and Stiller and Sjostrom were all masterful at using the forbidding country they lived in to help set the emotional tone of their scenes. When they want you to feel that someone's lonely, they stick him out walking on an icy fjord and by God, he's LONELY.

Also, as we all know, the moving camera as an expressive device (rather than just a way of showing off your fancy set, as in Intolerance) wasn't invented until The Last Laugh in 1924, so we can all throw out those pages of our film history books since one of the most striking things about this film is the extensive use of the moving camera throughout. Since the moving camera tends to imply the presence of the director and thus to deny the possibility of free will for the characters (which is why it works so well in things like noirs, or Max Ophuls' adaptations of Schnitzler, or Kubrick movies about unstable hotel caretakers being taken over by malevolent ghosts), it's a perfect artistic choice for this story, and one that strongly reinforces the atmosphere of destiny and doom while also keeping our focus on the mental state of characters who remain front and center within the shot, rather than on how they physically move from one place to another within a shot.

SIR ARNE'S TREASURE is one of three releases from Kino devoted to Swedish silent cinema and in particular the work of Mauritz Stiller. Stiller is remembered today, when he is remembered at all, as the man who brought Greta Garbo to America. Garbo, of course, went on to screen immortality while Stiller simply went on to his own mortality. After arguing with Louis B. Mayer and others in Hollywood while having made only one film there, Stiller returned to Sweden a broken man who died in 1928 at the age of only 45.

SIR ARNE'S TREASURE shows us what a tragic loss his early death was. A gripping, moody, and extraordinarily bleak film set in 16th century Sweden, ARNE tells a story of greed, murder, revenge, ghostly visitations, and ill-fated passion. It's influence on Eisenstein's ALEXANDER NEVSKY and Bergman's SEVENTH SEAL to name but two films is fairly obvious. SIR ARNE was in turn influenced by Stiller's fellow compatriot Victor Sjostrom's OUTLAW AND HIS WIFE from 1918.

Although extremely well acted by the ensemble cast, the real star is the Swedish landscape which is used to tremendous effect by Stiller and cameraman J. Julius (Julius Jaenzon). Shots of frozen ships, stark stone buildings, and the heavily clothed people reinforce the claustrophobic air of gloom and repression that surround even the minor characters. It's a harsh, unforgiving world that people somehow manage to live in. And this was from a man usually known for drawing room comedies such as EROTIKON (also included in this set of releases along with Garbo's first big success THE SAGA OF GOSTA BERLING).

The restoration by Svensk Filmindustri is truly handsome although at 107 minutes it's missing 15 minutes from the original release time (122 minutes according to imdb), the color tinting of blue, sepia and red is very effective, and the new music score by Matti Bye and Frederik Emilson helps to set the mood the way a proper score should especially for silent films. A most welcome addition to the ever growing list of silent restorations, it should (along with GOSTA BERLING) help to restore Mauritz Stiller to his rightful place as one of the great pioneers of silent filmmaking...For more reviews visit The Capsule Critic.