The Saga of Gosta Berling (1924)
Directed by Mauritz Stiller

Film Review

The film that set an unknown 19-year-old Swedish actress named Greta Gustafson on the road to stardom was a brave but ultimately futile attempt by the company Svensk Filmindistri to arrest the decline of the Swedish film industry, after a decade in which it had been a leading player, alongside France and the United States.  The Saga of Gosta Berling (a.k.a. Gösta Berlings saga) is reckoned to be Svensk's most expensive production, a sweeping romantic melodrama of epic proportions adapted from one of Sweden's most revered novels by the Novel Prize winning author Selma Lagerlöf.  It was the crowning achievement in the career of Mauritz Stiller, a titan among Sweden's filmmakers, whose penchant for elaborate visual flourishes and moody lyricism resound throughout the film.  Yet, whatever its artistic strengths, the film's main claim to fame is that it introduced one of cinema's most enduring icons, Greta Garbo, here credited under her adopted name for the first time in her career.

The film that was to have saved Sweden's film industry proved to be its swansong.  The Saga of Gosta Berling met with mixed reviews on its first release in Sweden and was not a great success at home.  It did far better on its international release, and this was how Garbo and Stiller came to the attention of MGM's top honcho Louis B. Mayer, the man who turned Garbo into a screen legend and (indirectly) sent Stiller to an early grave.  The Garbo that appears in a supporting role in The Saga of Gosta Berling is barely recognisable as the alluring cinematic siren that the world would come to know and love from the late 1920s onwards.  Visibly overweight, with crooked teeth and hair that looks as if it has never been near a brush let alone hair lacquer, Garbo still manages to be an enticing proposition, radiating an almost ethereal beauty in her mid-shots and close-ups, and connecting with her audience with an intensity that no one could match.  How could the world not fall for such an enchanting and devastatingly expressive creature?

The film not only helped Garbo's career, it raised the international profile of its main star, Lars Hanson, who gives a magnetic and magnificently energetic performance as the serial heart-breaker Gösta Berling.  Hanson's portrayal of Berling is memorably Byronic, a classier breed of romantic hero whose lack of social grace makes him a natural outsider in a society where strict adherence to the book of etiquette is everything.  As enjoyable as Hanson's slightly O.T.T. performance is, it is the female characters in the drama who are the most interesting.  Of these, the most well-rounded is the fiercely feisty Margaretha Samzelius, played with an almost elephantine gusto by Gerda Lundequist, known in her time as the 'Swedish Sarah Bernhardt'.  When she is not knocking over the other members of the cast like skittles, Lundequist gives a powerfully moving portrayal of a woman who falls foul of the hypocrisies and injustices that were rife in 19th century Swedish society.  Garbo's Elizabeth Dohna is also a victim of her rule-bound era but she gets off comparatively lightly.  Poor Samzelius loses everything - her home, her husband, her dignity, her mother - and as she embarks on her merciless vendetta like a crazed Horsewoman of the Apocalypse our sympathies are entirely with her.  The film should really have been titled The Saga of Margaretha Samzelius.

In common with many epics of the silent era The Saga of Gosta Berling has suffered considerably at the hands, or rather blunt, ineffectual scissors, of distributors attempting to maximise its commercial value.  The film originally ran to four hours and was released as two separate films, intended to be viewed on separate evenings.  This may have been one of the reasons for the film's poor reception in Sweden and resulted in Stiller cutting it down to a single film with a runtime of about two hours.  Further cuts were made for subsequent releases in other countries and it was only in the 1970s that the film was restored to its original two-part format, with footage that had been recovered over the intervening decades.  The most complete version that is currently available runs to just over three hours.

In its restored state, it is easy to see why the film attracted mixed reviews on its first release.  The first part of the film is languorously paced and takes its time to introduce all of the (many) protagonists in the saga.  By contrast, the second part zips along at a phenomenal pace and includes two of the most visually impressive set-pieces to feature in any Swedish film: the burning of Ekeby Manor and a dazzling sequence of a sleigh being pursued across a frozen lake by a pack of wild wolves.  It is in the film's second half that Greta Garbo comes into her own, after making only a fleeting appearance in the first half.  The aforementioned sleigh sequence in which Hanson's attempt to abscond with Garbo ends in near disaster is a cinematic tour de force - two puny creatures fleeing first from humanity and then from the more fierce savagery of wolves, amid a landscape that is as desolate as it is beautiful.  This is Stiller as his most inspired and insanely adventurous as a director - and it's no surprise that he reserves his most powerful cinematic device, the close-up, for the star he had created.  It was via these lovingly crafted close-ups - startling images of a vital young woman caught between states of terror and exhilaration - that the Garbo legend was born.  It's a moment in cinematic history to savour.

Film Synopsis

A young Swedish priest, Gösta Berling, is defrocked when his liking for the demon drink is discovered by his congregation.  Humiliated and embittered, Gösta ends up as a private tutor to Ebba Dohna, the stepdaughter of a conniving Countess.  The latter is keen for Ebba to marry a commoner so that the girl's inheritance will pass to her son Henrik and his Italian wife Elisabeth.  When Ebba finds out that Gösta is a discredited man of the cloth she rejects him and he departs, his heart broken yet again.  Arriving at a neighbouring estate, Gösta is welcomed into a group of pleasure-seeking vagabonds, the Knights of Ekeby, who are the private amusement of the lady of the manor, Margaretha Samzelius.  When, at a party, Margaretha is inadvertently exposed as an adulteress by one of the knights her husband is outraged and expels her from his household.  Reduced to the level of a beggar, Margaretha relishes the day when she can have her revenge...