The Phantom Carriage (Svensk Filmindustri, 1021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After watching the 65th annual Grammy Awards I turned to Turner Classic Movies for what turned out to be a quite good film, a Swedish production from 1921 called The Phantom Carriage (Körkaten). It was a Swedish production by the government-owned studio Svensk Filmindustri, and it was directed by, writte by and starred Victor Sjöstrom. Sjöstrom was a pioneering Swedish director and protégé of Mauritz Stiller, who’s best known for discoveirng Greta Garbo and giving her her first starring role in a major film, The Saga of Gösta Berling. Like The Saga of Gösta Berling, The Phantom Carriage was based on a novel by popular and prolific Swedish novelist Selma Lagerlöf. It’s based on an old legend that the last person to die on December 31 is condemned to spend the next year driving the titular phantom carriage and picking up the souls of recently departed people to transport them to the underworld. The film actually opens in what’s billed in the English-language subtitles (this is one of those reissues in which the original intertitles are in another language and English subtitles appear under the original title cards in (in this case) Swedish. It begins in a settlement run by the Salvation Army – at least that’s what it’s called in the English subtitles, though it may be a different but analogous group in Sweden – where Sister Edit (Astrid Holm) is on her deathbed from tuberculosis. Much to the disgust of her mother (Concordia Selander), the person Edit wants to see on her deathbed is David Holm (Victor Sjöstrom).

Next we see David Holm drinking and carousing with some of his buddies, including Georges (Tore Svennberg), who led David down the primrose path in the first place and led him to abandon his wife (Hilda Bergström) and their two children. David’s descent into the demi-monde also inspired his brother to do the same, only instead of just becoming an alcoholic and abandoning his family, David’s brother committed murder and is just being released from prison – and when David’s brother is let out a guard tells David he should have served the sentence instead of his brother. The film flashes back one year to show how Georges became the driver of the phantom carriage before yielding the reins to David, who blows off Edit’s request to visit her on her deathbed and instead becomes the last one to croak on this New Year’s eve. In one of the film’s many flashback scenes we see how Sister Edit got tuberculosis in the first place: when David Holm showed up at the mission to spend the night, without asking him and against the advice of her mother – who warned her that the mission’s sterilizing oven was out of order – she mended the tears in his coat and thereby got the disease. What’s worse, her sacrifice was for nothing because as soon as David woke up and realized his coat had been mended, he tore it up again because he was more comfortable with it torn. David treks to Sweden and ultimately finds his wife and kids, who had settled in a different part of the country precisely so he would never be able to find them.

Eventually David tracks them down, only to watch helplessly as his wife prepares a pot of tea and laces it with poison, intending to kill both her children and herself. David pleads with Georges for another shot at life to spare his wife and kids from the murder-suicide she has in mind for them,and in the end he gets a year’s reprieve and his return to life is marked by the change in his image from a double exposure to a solid shot. He intervenes to stop his wife from feeding the poisoned tea to their kids and drinking it herself. Though David Holm’s ruination as a human being is the opposite of Ebenezer Scrooge’s – Scrooge became obsessed with wealth and neglected everything else about life in its pursuit, while David descended into drink and degradation – the film’s story reminded me a good deal of A Christmas Carol, especially in the whole idea of a ghost seeking his own salvation by reconnecting with the living world and redeeming someone else. Victor Sjöstrom had an international hit with this film, and when Louis B. Mayer went on a talent-scouting trip to Europe in 1924 he signed both Sjöstrom and his original mentor, Mauritz Stiller, to directorial contracts at the newly formed MGM. Stiller bombed out at MGM after he was fired in the middle of directing The Temptress, the second MGN film for his protégé Garbo (whom he had insisted on bringing along with him), but Sjöstrom, who Anglicized his last name to “Seastrom,” did much better.

In 1924 he directed the first film released under the MGM banner, He Who Gets Slapped, wit na all-star cast oif John Gilbert, Norma Shearer and Lon Chaney, and he went on to make two films with Lillian Gish, The Scarlet Letter (1926) and The Wind (1928), but after sound came in Sjöstrom decided to give up filmmaking and return to Sweden to direct plays. In 1957 Ingmar Bergman cast the then 78-year-old Sjöstrom as the star of Wild Strawberries, about a newly retired college professor contemplating his own mortality. The film was an international hit and rekindled interest in Sjöstrom’s career, though he didn’t live to see much benefit from that since he died for real three years later. Bergman said The Phantom Carriage was one of the first films he ever saw; he watched it when he was 12 and made a point of seeing it again every year during most of his adult career – which rather begs the question of why, if he liked it so much, he didn’t remake it.

One of the most amazing things about The Phantom Carriage is the sheer number and complexity of the special-effects shots, especially the many double-exposed scenes to give the deceased characters a properly “ghostly” look and distinguish them from the people who are still normally alive. At the time the only way to do shots like that was to wind the film through the camera, rewind it without exposing and ruining it, and then shoot over it a second time. There was no way to do this sort of effect in post-production. So Sjöstrom and his cinematographer, Julius Jaenzon, had to work out these complicated, painstaking shots literally on the fly – including one audacious scene in which the phantom carriage is driving along on the ocean floor to pick up people who have perished in aa shipwreck. The effects work is marvelous and convincing – I suspect it was this film that established the use of double exposure to depict ghosts on screen and differentiate them from the living – and yet it adds to the power and conviction of the story instead of just being there to show off, as is the case in all too many modern-day effects-driven films.