"Karin, Daughter of Ingmar" (1920) - hidden gem
Tor Weijden, Victor Sjöström and Tora Teje
This film is part of our Silent Gems Collection and the DVD is available on Ebay.
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This film is part of our series 'Hidden Gems'. It can be watched by registered users who make a donation. For more details, please click here.
"Karin, Daughter of Ingmar" is a drama featuring director Victor Sjöström (Seastrom), a star of Silent Hall of Fame. It is based on a novel by the Nobel-prize winning novelist Selma Lagerlöf.
Victor Seastrom was successful in his native Sweden before making a career in the USA in 1924-1930. His Hollywood films are still copyrighted, this is why we show you a film from his previous years.
A young woman can't forgive her fiance for getting drunk and rejects him. In an ironic twist of fate, the man she marries becomes an alcoholic.
Here is a review of the film, written by our esteemed member Zach Snow.
Following the success of his melodrama Ingmar's Sons, Swedish filmmaker Victor Sjöström followed up with this similarly ambitious sequel. The second part of his adaptation of Selma Lagerlof’s novel Jerusalem failed to make the same impact among viewers who expected another sweeping epic. Instead this film is more subdued, which may be why more recent viewers have ranked it among the director’s earliest gems. Karin rejects the love of good man Halfvor in favor of Elias, a drunken lout who abuses her after family patriarch Ingmar is killed in a flood. After some years have passed, Halfvor cannot forget the love of his life and agrees to watch over the handicapped Elias for her; when the drunkard dies, suspicion in the town falls on the reunited couple.
Lagerlof’s story is pure old-fashioned melodrama, rife with familial tensions and unrequited love, though the film version has certainly been enhanced by Sjöström’s artistic production. Produced through the Swedish company Biograph AB, this second installment displays a new maturity for Sjöström in the presentation of landscape shots, period costumes, and performances which feel more naturalistic than in the popular first film. Not the most accessible of his silent productions, since Sjöström really began to blossom as a filmmaker with The Phantom Carriage and his Hollywood dramas, his chronicle of the old-fashioned Ingmar family remains fascinating and further indicates why its creator was heralded as a pioneer of the Swedish film industry.
Best remembered as the old man of Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, which indicates how much subsequent generations thought of his work, Victor Sjöström began his career as an actor when motion pictures were still an oddity in Sweden; here he reprises his role as Ingmar, the ill-fated patriarch whose spirit continues to haunt and demand virtue from his family. Tora Teje, who would also appear in Haxan two years later, is lovely if a bit too stiff as the put upon daughter Karin, with Tor Weijden as her spurned suitor and Bertil Malmstedt as her frail younger brother. Nils Lundell overacts a bit as the often pathetic husband Elias, though ultimately makes for an effective heavy. The initial failure of this film with viewers and critics led Sjöström to abandon plans to complete a trilogy, part three was made by Gustof Molander seven years later, though in retrospect it offers early evidence of what he, and Sweden’s film industry, had to offer.
You can find more of Zach Snow's work here.
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Below is a short preview of the film.