The Outlaw and His Wife (1918)
Directed by Victor Sjöström

Film Review

Man's physical and spiritual connection with the natural world is a defining characteristic of the work of Swedish film director Victor Sjöström. Nowhere is this more evident than in his silent masterpiece The Outlaw and His Wife (a.k.a. Berg-Ejvind och hans hustru), an inspired naturalistic rendering of the 1911 play Fjalla-Eyvindur by Icelandic playwright Jóhann Sigurjónsson.  As in his previous film A Man There Was (1917), Sjöström both directs and assumes the lead role in a powerful redemption saga in which a majestic Scandinavian setting becomes the driving protagonist in the drama.  The similarities between these two films is striking but what connects them most is the sublime artistry of Sjöström's cinematographer, Julius Jaenzon.  Like the landscapes of the German romantic painter Caspar Friedrich, Jaenzon's photography is so intensely expressive that it endows the wild location with a soul, and rarely in a film of this era is the natural world represented with so much heartaching beauty and awesome might.

The Outlaw and His Wife possesses a realism and modernity that is striking even for those who are familiar with Sjöström's work.  This shows not only in Jaenzon's near-documentary style of photography but also in the authentic character portrayals. Each of the protagonists in the drama is a fully developed human being who behaves exactly as a psychologically complex being should behave, his or her striving for personal happiness constantly at odds with those internal and external forces that decide an individual's destiny.  In one horrific scene, the heroine is driven to throw her baby daughter over the edge of a precipice.  Sjöström doesn't dwell on this - it is merely a woman's instinctive reaction to a crisis that she is presented with, a moment of madness of the kind to which humanity is prone.  In another scene, one character contemplates murder - his crisis of conscience is powerfully expressed through a combination of inspired editing and deft camerawork.

There is also an intense lyrical quality to this film, carried by the stunning mountain views that are barely contained by the physical dimensions of the frame.  Jaenzon gives the film an almost ethereal, fairytale quality by frequently arranging shots with the sun in the background, overexposing the film and bathing the protagonists in an eerie glow.  Long shots with the characters silhouetted against the mountain are a constant reminder of how small they are, completely dwarfed by their surroundings, mere ants in the hand of a benign but capricious giant.  You feel sure that the classic American western owes a great deal to this film, particularly in the way that the location becomes a living part of the fabric of the narrative, not merely a pretty backdrop.

The Outlaw and His Wife is not just about man's relation to nature, it is also a brutally honest dissection of the relationship between a man and his wife.  The final passage of the film, depicting the titular protagonists in the bleak winter of their marriage, might well have been written and filmed by Sjöström's eminent successor, Ingmar Bergman.  As in Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage (1973), the husband and wife appear to have arrived at the end of their relationship and are seen struggling to comprehend what has become of their erstwhile love.  Worn down by age and adversity, they have grown contemptuous of one another and resort to hurling abuse at each other between bouts of sickening self-pity.  With the account of their idyllic early life together still fresh in our minds, these last scenes have a crushing cruelty to them.  (Victor Sjöström, who plays the main character Ejvind, would marry his on-screen wife Edith Erastoff four years after making this film.)  The final shot, in which the husband and wife are reconciled in death, is quite possibly the most viscerally poignant in Sjöström's entire oeuvre, and so emblematic of his uniquely rugged, Friedrich-esque form of romanticism.

Film Synopsis

Iceland, in the mid-18th century.  Kari is an itinerant labourer who persuades a wealthy widow, Halla, to give him work on her farm.  Halla is being pressurised by her brother-in-law, a feared local bailiff, to marry him.  Knowing that the bailiff is only after her land Halla refuses him and ends up falling in love with Kari.  The bailiff then discovers that Kari is an escaped prisoner named Ejvind, who was sent to prison for stealing a sheep.  When she hears of this, Halla confronts Kari and he admits that he is a fugitive from justice, his one crime being to steal food to keep his family alive during a cold winter.  Instead of sending Ejvind away, as the bailiff insisted, Halla decides to elope with him to the mountains, where they live as man and wife according to the laws of nature, not man.  Five years later, the couple has a baby daughter and are joined by one of Halla's former farmhands, Arnes, who has also become an outlaw.  For a while, the three people live together quite happily, until Arnes discovers that he is violently attracted to Halla.  How easy it would be for Ejvind to meet with a fatal accident...