Director: Victor Sjostrom
Writers: Selma Lagerlof, Victor Sjostrom
Composer: Matti Bye (for the 1998 release?)
Starring: Victor Sjostrom, Hilda Borgstrom, Tore Svennberg, Astrid Holm, Concordia Selander, Lisa Lundholm, Tor Weijden, Einar Axelsson
More info: IMDb
Tagline: Metro's Sensational Production
Plot: On New Year's Eve, the driver of a ghostly carriage forces a drunken man to reflect on his selfish, wasted life.
My rating: 7.5/10
Will I watch it again? Yes.
It's so rare that I watch silent pictures and it's not by design. I just don't seem to get around to them as much as I'd like. This one's been on my radar for a few years and I'm glad I finally got around to it. I loved it. Victor Sjostrom as David Holm is fantastic and he plays a real bastard. The little things he does facially are remarkable. They brought me further into not only the story but it gave him even more depth. There's a nice use of tinting like having blue for night and so on. And that got even better when the neat visual effects were thrown in.
There are several nice shots, shots that I wouldn't have expected in a movie made almost a hundred years ago. Another thing I dug was the scenes aren't chronological. There's a good deal of skipping around with the timeline. It made for a little confusion at times but it also helped hold my attention. Some of it was possibly unnecessary, and so were some of the scenes which led to covering the same ground story-wise. Hey, does this look familiar?
"Here's Davey!"
When David started going to town on the door to get to his wife I was hoping for a shot similar to THE SHINING (1980) but this is as close as Sjostrom got. The ending had me all choked up. Call me surprised. It was heartbreaking and beautiful and it's all thanks to Sjostrom's performance. He really is magnificent in this. I would've preferred a much darker ending (which it looked like it was going there but turned on me) but I'm happy with what is there. The score by Matti Bye is gorgeous. I see YouTube has the movie in full with a much darker score. I watched a few minutes of it and it sounds like that will be the one I watch the next time. If you've never seen a silent film or only a few, you might want to start somewhere else as this one runs about an hour and forty-seven minutes which is probably more than what most people are willing to take in that are unfamiliar with type of thing. I really enjoyed it and I look forward to seeing it again someday and with this other contemporary score. Congratulations for reading this far. This picture is less of a horror movie than a drama but it does have horror and fantasy elements which might be enough to draw the horror fans in. That's what prompted me to see it and I'm not disappointed in the least.
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