The Lass from the Stormy Croft (1917)
Directed by Victor Sjöström

Film Review

The Lass from the Stormy Croft (also known as The Woman He Chose or Tösen från Stormyrtorpet) was the first in an impressive series of films that the Swedish filmmaker Victor Sjöström adapted from the novels of Selma Lagerlöf.  The Nobel Prize winning author had long resisted selling the film rights to her work but was moved to enter into a contract with the company Svenska Biografteatern (later to become Svensk Filmindustri) after she had seen Sjöström's Terje Vigen (1917), inspired by one of Henrik Ibsen's poems.  Sjöström would adapt several of Lagerlöf's best-known works, the most celebrated being his hauntingly poetic masterpiece The Phantom Carriage (1921).

By the time he came to direct The Lass from the Stormy Croft, Sjöström was well into his stride and had developed his own unique style, which was similar to but subtly different from that of his mentor Mauritz Stiller.  Like Stiller, Sjöström had a preference for real locations over studio sets and would use natural landscapes as a kind of 'living tapestry' within which his protagonists would be embedded.  Sjöström was, however, far more concerned with naturalism, so his films have a more realistic, prosaic feel to them.  For his first Lagerlöf adaptation, a comfortable mix of harsh social commentary and old-fashioned melodrama, Sjöström places his characters in natural settings in a way that lends a striking immediacy and poignancy to his film.  Rarely in a Victor Sjöström film do we passively watch characters acting out a play.  Instead, we become actively involved with real people coping with real crises in a real life.

Over the five year period that elapsed between Sjöström's first film and this one there is a discernible change in technique, although the director's commitment to depicting life as authentically as possible appears unchanged.  The five years from 1912 to 1917 brought some significant innovations to the rapidly evolving new artistic medium of cinema, so it would be surprising if these had passed the great Swedish filmmaker by.  Sjöström was one of the first film directors to appreciate the power of the close-up, and he uses this extensively in The Lass from the Stormy Croft, often with an iris effect as a kind of narrative punctuation.  Some years before Sergei Eisenstein had developed his theories of montage, Sjöström was already employing sophisticated editing techniques in his films.  Crosscutting is confidently used here to build tension, most noticeably towards the end of the film where the hero begins to suspect he is a murderer.

As is pretty universal in Sjöström's cinema, the performances are remarkably naturalistic for a film of this time, with little of the exaggerated facial expressions and body movements that were commonplace in the silent era.  There are no matinee idols with drop-dead good looks, and most of the cast of The Lass from the Stormy Croft look like a job lot from an Italian neo-realist drama.  You can easily believe they have spent their lives at the mercy of the elements, eking out a meagre existence on the land.  The main attraction of the film's heroine, Helga, is her ordinariness.  As played by Greta Almroth, she is one of life's innocents, ill-used by others, prone to making mistakes, but essentially a good girl at heart.  Although the character who ends up as her amorous rival, Hildur Persson, is more physically attractive, we taken an immediate dislike to her - her external beauty betrays her flawed inner traits.

As for the central male protagonist, Gudmund, Lars Hanson portrays him somewhat ambiguously, far more subtly than his interpretation of the title character in Stiller's magnum opus The Saga of Gosta Berling (1924), his most famous screen role.  At the start of the film, we are unsure whether Gudmund's interest in Helga is genuinely benign or whether there is a darker motive afoot.  Gudmund's actions throughout the film are morally questionable and it is easy to believe that his intentions for Helga are far from honorable.  It takes one near-disaster and a self-sacrificing act from an unlikely quarter to bring Gudmund's true character out of the shadows.  If there was one film director who could be relied upon to translate the psychological depth and narrative complexity of Selma Lagerlöf's novel to the screen that director was Victor Sjöström, and by the standards of its time The Lass from the Stormy Croft is as sophisticated and technically advanced a piece of cinema as you could wish for.

Film Synopsis

In a close-knit Swedish farming community, Helga Nilsdotter becomes a social outcast when she bears an illegitimate child.  Having failed to get the child's father, the already married Per Mårtensson, to admit paternity Helga's father takes him to court.  Helga knows that Mårtensson will deny the child is his, so rather than see him committing the unpardonable crime of perjury, she withdraws the charge against him.  Some see this as further proof of the young woman's wicked nature, but others are impressed by what they regard as moral courage.  Gudmund Erlandsson, one of Helga's wealthier neighbours, is so taken by her innate goodness that he invites her to stay at his house, as a companion to his chair-bound old mother.  The one person who does not take kindly to this turn of events is Gudmund's fiancée Hildur, who, seeing Helga as a person of low morals, insists that she be sent packing.  On the eve of his wedding, Gudmund gets himself blind drunk whilst enjoying his last hours of bachelorhood with his friends.  The following morning, he can vaguely remember getting into a fight, but no more.  It turns out that the night before, a man was stabbed to death near the tavern where Gudmund and his friends were carousing.  The only clue to the man's attacker is a broken blade of a knife found lodged in his skull.  Fearing the worst, Gudmund examines his own pocket knife and finds that one of its blades has been broken off...