“The Phantom Carriage” (1921)

The Phantom Carriage

Grade: A

Released in 1921, The Phantom Carriage is a silent Swedish classic that features impressive special effects, influencing directors as diverse as Ingmar Bergman, Frank Capra and Douglas Sirk. A few more notes on The Phantom Carriage:

Directing:

Director/actor/screenwriter Victor Sjöström single-handedly started cinema in Sweden, and The Phantom Carriage is his finest work. Influenced by the lighting, editing and camerawork of D.W. Griffith, Sjöström crafts cohesive imagery that both propels and enhances the storyline. His techniques might seem basic today, but they went a long way in establishing movies as a legitimate art form.

Sjöström’s greatest contribution to the craft is his revolutionary use of double exposure, which is how he makes the ghosts in The Phantom Carriage look so hauntingly realistic. For all the film’s gooey melodrama, it is downright spooky at times — even 100 years later. There’s no doubt that Sjöström’s stark personification of Death influenced Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, or that his manic depiction of an axe-wielding murder attempt influenced Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining.

Acting:

Victor Sjöström also stars as main character David Holm, a drunken ne’er-do-well who only sees the error of his ways after he’s been killed. He’s great at conveying his character’s callousness — this sonofabitch is more evil than Ebeneezer Scrooge. Along with Sjöström, the entire cast is believable and expressive without overacting their roles. In fact, the acting is quite modern when compared to the expressionist tendencies of other silent films.

Writing:

Sjöström uses the 1912 Swedish novel Körkarlen by Selma Lagerlöf as the basis for The Phantom Carriage. It’s a Dickensian tale about a man who dies, is visited by Death and takes a redemptive trip through his past. Once again, Sjöström is influenced by Griffith in the way he divides this lengthy story into different sections and lets the dialogue (i.e., title cards) drive the narrative. Perhaps there are too many title cards, but they are necessary to tell this complex story.

The film also contains a revolutionary structure, filled with flashbacks within flashbacks and stories that lead to different stories. Even though some sections are more boring than others, the mash-up of genres is quite ingenious, as the film effortlessly combines horror, melodrama and fantasy.

Music:

The Criterion DVD has music that isn’t necessarily true to the time (the jazzy interludes and avant-garde strings wouldn’t have been heard until decades later), but it does fit well with the various storylines. However, I often wonder if it’d be a better experience to just watch these century-old movies with the volume at zero.

Ending (SPOILERS):

The spirit of Death shows the ghost of David Holm a scene from the present: his wife, Anna, prepares to poison herself and their three young children. It’s all David’s fault, of course, as he abandoned them without any money, instead choosing a life of drunken licentiousness. At this point, David pleads to God that their lives be spared. Predictably, Death takes pity and returns David to his body. He saves his wife and children and vows to change his ways.

It’s an uplifting ending that’ll be echoed more famously in Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, and we can only assume that Holm will keep true to his word and swear off the booze forever. The film is extremely bleak for much of its long runtime, which is why this sentimental conclusion is well-deserved.

“Lord, please let my soul come to maturity before it is reaped.” – Georges

Why The Phantom Carriage gets an A:

With a complex modernist story and groundbreaking visuals, The Phantom Carriage deserves to be canonized as a foundational cinematic classic. It’s length can sometimes be a chore, but the film still contains entertaining thrills a century after its release.

Accolades: 

Colin’s Review Best Films of the 1920s

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