The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (390 page)

There is no clear consistency in Sjöberg, and his last four films were ordinary, but there seems every reason to reappraise those ten years after the war.

Victor Sjöström/Seastrom
(1879–1960), b. Silbodal, Sweden
1912:
Tradgardsmastaren; Ett Hemligt Giftermal; En Sommarsaga
. 1913:
Aktenskapsbyran; Lojen och Tarar; Blodets Rost; Lady Marions Sommarflirt; Ingeborg Holm; Prasten; Lirets Konflikter
. 1914:
Karlek Starkare an Hat; Harlblod; Miraklet; Domen Icke; Bra Flicka Reder Sig Sjalv; Gatans Barn; Hogfjallets Dotter; Hjartan som Motas
. 1915:
Strejken; En av de Manga; Sonad Skuld; Skomakare bliv vid Bin Last; Judaspengar;
Landshovdingens Dottrar; Havsgamarna; Det Var i Maj
. 1916:
I Provningens Stund; Skepp som Motas; Hon Segrade; Therese
. 1917:
Dodskyssen; Terje Vigen; Tosen fran Stormyrtorpet
. 1918:
Berg-Ejvind och hans Hustru/The Outlaw and His Wife
. 1919:
Ingmarssonerna, pts 1 and 2; Hans nads Testamente
. 1920:
Klostret i Sendomir; Karin Ingmarsdotter; Masterman
. 1921:
Korkarlen/The Phantom Carriage
. 1922:
Vem Domer?; Eld Ombord; Det Omringade Huset
. 1924:
He Who Gets Slapped; Name the Man
. 1925:
Confessions of a Queen; The Tower of Lies
. 1926:
The Scarlet Letter
. 1928:
The Divine Woman; The Masks of the Devil; The Wind
. 1930:
A Lady to Love; Markurells i Wadkoping
. 1937:
Under the Red Robe
.

Sjöström is the father figure of Swedish cinema, a man who produced major films around 1920, went on to a varied and striking period in Hollywood, and—unlike his contemporary, Stiller—returned to influence succeeding generations. But that epitaph too easily obscures the worth of his Hollywood films and the fact that he is the author of a body of early fiction films that gives him more than a national role in cinema history. Sjöström before 1924, no matter how isolated Sweden was, is of importance in the blending of popular melodrama and intense naturalism. Thus to have founded Swedish cinema is the more significant because of Sweden’s special acumen for moralizing allied to nature. All the potential of joy and anguish in sun and rain had been signaled in Sjöström’s films, and with an intensity that often wears better than Griffith.

He spent much of his childhood in New York and made his Swedish debut as an actor in 1896. In 1912, he joined Svenska Bio and worked as a director and actor. He played in several of Mauritz Stiller’s films:
De Svarta Maskerna
(12);
Vampyren
(13);
Nar Karleken Dodar
(13);
Thomas Graals Basta Film
(17); and
Thomas Graals Basta Barn
(18)—in the two latter he played the author/filmmaker of the title.

But Sjöström’s own films were very different from Stiller’s comedy of manners and identity. It accounts in part for his success in America that Sjöström had a profound feeling for narrative melodrama and for the relationship between characters and landscape. He preferred subjects that dealt with fishermen or peasants and he managed to mix social consciousness, a taste for the morbid, and a mystical view of wild scenery.
Ingeborg Holm
was a social tract about a widow who is driven mad when she has to sell her children.
Terje Vigen
is a story of the Napoleonic wars in which a fisherman becomes a recluse when his family starves while he runs the English blockade. Sjöström himself played the leading part and the theme of physical isolation expressing emotional loss is repeated in
The Outlaw and His Wife
, Sjöström’s masterpiece. In it, he plays a man charged with sheep-stealing who flees to the mountains with the woman landowner who loves him. They live there for years in solitary happiness before they are compelled to retreat farther and farther into the wilderness. Eventually they commit suicide. The great passion in the exteriors, the brooding fatalism, and the elegy that precedes it are all main themes in Swedish cinema—not least in
Elvira Madigan
and the earlier films of Bergman.

Sjöström went to America, for Goldwyn in the first instance. However, all but one of his films were made at MGM, under the name Seastrom. He adapted easily to American emotional drama, even if he introduced a fresh emphasis on real locations and naturalistic acting once he became established.
He Who Gets Slapped
is a stirring melodrama, with Lon Chaney as a wronged man who takes to the circus and meets Norma Shearer.
Confessions of a Queen
is from Daudet with Alice Terry and Lewis Stone. But gradually Sjöström flexed his muscles.
Name the Man
is one of cinema’s few movies set on the Isle of Man; while
The Tower of Lies
(with Chaney and Shearer again) is from Selma Lagerlof and set in Sweden.
The Divine Woman
was conventional studio romance, but it allowed him to pair Garbo with Lars Hanson, whom Sjöström had called over from Sweden.

Hanson also appeared with Lillian Gish in Sjöström’s two finest American pictures:
The Scarlet Letter
and
The Wind
. The first is from the Hawthorne novel, predictably relating American puritanism and Swedish attitudes toward guilt. It is hard to think of another MGM director of that time who could have conveyed its passion with such restraint.
The Wind
is far better, a prairie story of a girl who marries another man because her real love is already married, and is eventually driven to kill another man to save her virtue. The melodrama is subdued by the conviction of Gish’s performance and by the way Sjöström rediscovers primitive nature in the Midwest emptiness. Louise Brooks said: “They were meant for each other—Seastrom and Gish—like the perfume and the rose”—and yet she had never heard of
The Wind
until 1956, so little did MGM promote it. It remains one of the greatest silent films—and one of our great movies.

Sjöström returned to Sweden in 1930, but—apart from
Under the Red Robe
, made in England for Korda—he mysteriously abandoned direction for acting. He played in
Walborgsmassoafton
(35, Gustaf Edgren);
Gubben Kommer
(39, Per Lindberg);
Striden gar Vidare
(41, Gustaf Molander);
Ordet
(43, Molander); and
Det Brinner en Eld
(43, Molander). From 1943–49—the period of
Frenzy
and Bergman’s first films—Sjöström was artistic director at Svensk Filmindustri. Even in his last years, he remained busy as an actor;
To Joy
(49, Bergman);
Kvartetten som Sprangdes
(50, Molander);
Hard Klang
(52, Arne Mattson);
Mannen i Morker
(55, Mattson); and unforgettably, as Professor Borg, the man on the brink of death, in
Wild Strawberries
(57, Bergman).

That part was not only an advance in Bergman’s pursuit of the intellectual passions but a tribute to Sjöström’s vital presence in Swedish cinema. More than that, the ending of
Wild Strawberries
is the most tranquil scene in all Bergman’s work. It is a fascinating comparison of the two men to note Bergman’s words recording the filming of that moment: “[Sjöström’s] face shone with secretive light, as if reflected from another reality. His features became suddenly mild, almost effete. His look was open, smiling, tender. It was like a miracle.… Yet it was all nothing more than a piece of acting in a dirty studio.… This exceedingly shy human being would never have shown us lookerson this deeply buried treasure of sensitive purity, if it had not been in a piece of acting.…” That may help to explain the sense in much of Sjöström’s work of wild feelings bursting through moral and social inhibition.

Stellan Skarsgård
, b. Gothenburg, Sweden, 1951
By the age of fifty, Stellan Skarsgård had over seventy film or television credits as an actor. No one would claim that every one of them is glowing or even fit to be reviewed now. But actors are—above and beyond geniuses—craftsmen and professionals who develop their craft slowly, and who need nothing so much as work. So, if Stellan Skarsgård has by now, unobtrusively, pressed himself upon us as a rare, versatile, and humane actor, don’t forget the advantage of steady work and ordinary payment.

The list that follows is far from complete, and it passes over the fact that, from 1972–88, Skarsgård was a working member of the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm. Skarsgård made a name first as the lead in the Swedish TV miniseries about teenagers,
Bombi Bitt och Jag
(68). These are some major events that followed:
Firmafesten
(72, Jan Halldoff);
Tabu
(77, Vilgot Sjöman); a breakthrough performance of extraordinary pathos in
The SimpleMinded Murderer
(82, Hans Alfredson); he played Hamlet on Swedish TV in 1984, and then Strindberg in 1985;
Hip Hip Hurrah!
(87, Kjell Grede); his first English–anguage role, in
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
(88, Philip Kaufman);
Kvinnorna på Taket
(89, Carl-Gustaf Nykvist);
The Hunt for Red October
(90, John McTiernan).

In 1990, he played the Swedish diplomat in
God Afton, Herr Wallenberg
(Grede);
The Ox
(91, Sven Nykvist);
Wind
(92, Carroll Ballard);
Breaking the Waves
(96, Lars von Trier);
Insomnia
(97, Erik Skjoldbjærg);
My Son the Fanatic
(97, Udayan Prasad);
Amistad
(97, Steven Spielberg);
Good Will Hunting
(97, Gus Van Sant);
Ronin
(98, John Frankenheimer);
Deep Blue Sea
(99, Renny Harlin);
Passion of Mind
(00, Alain Berliner);
Timecode
(00, Mike Figgis);
Dancer in the Dark
(00, von Trier);
Aberdeen
(00, Hans Petter Moland);
The Glass House
(01, Daniel Sackheim).

He played Wilhelm Furtwängler in
Taking Sides
(01, István Szabó);
D-dag
(01, Søren Kragh-Jacobsen);
The House on Turk Street
(01, Bob Rafelson);
City of Ghosts
(02, Matt Dillon); as Theseus in
Helen of Troy
(03, John Kent Harrison);
Dogville
(03, von Trier); as young Father Merrin in
Exorcist: The Beginning
(Paul Schrader), which was then reassigned to Renny Harlin; as Cedric in
King Arthur
(04, Antoine Fuqua).

Skarsgård is a better actor than his work shows, available as a knight, a hulk, or a rogue:
Beowulf & Grendel
(05, Sturla Gunnarsson);
Kill Your Darlings
(06, Björne Larson);
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest
(06, Gore Verbinski); as Goya in
Goya’s Ghosts
(06, Milos Forman);
Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End
(07, Verbinski);
Arn—The Knight Templar
(07, Peter Flinth);
God on Trial
(08, Andy de Emmincey);
Arn—The Kingdom at Road’s End
(08, Peter Flinth);
Mamma Mia!
(08, Phyllida Law);
Boogie Woogie
(09, Duncan Ward);
Angels & Demons
(09, Ron Howard);
Frankie and Alice
(09, Geoffrey Sax.)
Jerzy Skolimowski
, b. Warsaw, Poland, 1938
1964:
Rysopis/Identification Marks: None
. 1965:
Walkover
. 1966:
Bariera/Barrier
. 1967:
Le Départ; Rece do Gory/Hands Up!
. 1968: an episode from
Dialog
. 1970:
The Adventures of Gerard; Deep End
. 1972:
King, Queen, Knave
. 1978:
The Shout
. 1981:
Hands Up!
(revised). 1982:
Moonlighting
. 1984:
Success Is the Best Revenge
. 1985:
The Lightship
. 1989:
Torrents of Spring
. 1993:
30 Door Key
. 2010:
Essential Killing
.

Skolimowski is a director who stalks us like a fighter, with stunning blows in either hand. But there remains something incomplete, or reticent, in the performance. Skolimowski moves with arbitrary agility, a flurry of spectacular effects culminating in the cinematic equivalent of a knockout—a momentary glimpse of the sublime whereby we lose our senses long enough to be counted out. And all the while Skolimowski hunches up within that rather contrived pose of threatening hostility in which a boxer enwraps himself in shadow boxing. But the classic knockout is precisely timed: in fifteen seconds we are on our feet, in a minute ourselves again, and soon bewildered that something so slight as the flick of a fist won the contest.

That said, knockouts are rare.
Deep End
, for instance, is a positive barrage of delicious punches in our sensibility: the realization of a shabby suburban swimming bath; Diana Dors working herself into a goalmouth mêlée; the adolescent view of a neon city; the amazing London shrewishness of Jane Asher; the whore with a broken leg; the hot-dog salesman; the blue movie intercut with such innocent overtures in the cinema itself; the diamond in the snow; and the final seduction in the empty swimming bath when sexuality is swept away in the rush of blood and water.
Deep End
is another of those British films made by a foreigner—even if much of it was shot in Munich—that ought to shame the British cinema. It is funny, touching, sexy, surreal, and tragic—all at the same time and all with the sting of a punch in the nose.

Skolimowski has told rather proudly how he took the entrance exam for the Lodz film school on impulse and on the advice of Andrzej Wajda. He had studied ethnography at Warsaw University and already published some poetry and short stories. While at Lodz—where he did poorly—he collaborated on the scripts of
Innocent Sorcerers
(60, Wajda), and
Knife in the Water
(62, Roman Polanski), acted a little, filmed a documentary on boxing (he had himself been a boxer), and made
Rysopis
for himself.