Call us MID/MAD. It trips off the tongue with a certain knowing cheekiness, and it’s much more compact than having to say MIDCENTURY MADNESS all the time. So much easier to drop it casually into a conversation, such as “I wonder what that MID/MAD miscreant is up to this time?”
The miscreant, in fact, reshuffled the MID/MAD schedule a bit to connect some dots that he’d left unconnected in the original series lineup—and the postponement of the Easter Sunday program has permitted us to devote an entire weekend (this one, July 9/10, as always at the Roxie Theater) to some strange goings-on in mid-century Scandinavian cinema.
Swedish cinema is, of course, so dominated by the shadow of Ingmar Bergman that almost everyone else working there has been eclipsed in darkness. (Noir/melodrama specialist Hasse Ekman was brought to a Noir City one year with his GIRL WITH HYACINTHS, and more recently had a MOMA retrospective, but little else has emerged to date.) Norwegian cinema is simply unknown to us, despite evidence that one of the filmmakers we will sample, Arne Skouen, was highly regarded in Europe during the 1950s with films frequently in competition at Cannes.
We’ll begin on Saturday with a look at the “edge of disaster” oeuvre of Arne Mattsson, one of the most problematic of all Swedish directors. If you are inclined to look for a larger trove of rare/worthy Swedish titles, go here, where, amongst a group of 15 films ranging from the silent era to the 1980s, you’ll find two Mattsson films from the early 1950s (a prodigy, Mattsson began directing in 1941, at age 22). At that point, he was a “conventionally unconventional” Swedish filmmaker. That began to change as he embraced the thriller genre later in the decade, which is where we pick up his trail.
Those few film scholars who’ve studied Mattsson’s work in depth readily admit that his is a very uneven oeuvre, with disaster and disrepute looming over him almost from the start and gathering gale-force velocity in the late 1960s, when he appears to have become the Scandinavian analogue to Spain’s notorious Jesus (Jess) Franco. What’s interesting in the late 50s-early 60s work is that Mattsson seems to be toying with approaches that heighten strangeness for its own sake—and it will be interesting to see if Roxie audiences pick up on this tendency in the so-called “straightforward” thriller MANNEQUIN IN RED (1958), shot in a lustrously filtered Eastmancolor, and THE DOLL (1962), rendered in a particularly stark black-and-white.
MANNEQUIN IN RED features a series of nasty, scheming characters careening around a roundelay of murder that is eventually revealed (but not really solved) by a sleek, remote husband-and-wife detective team. Its tone is centripetally odd, however, veering from the eerie/macabre to almost slapstick moments provided by the detective team’s bumbling accomplice. Alfred Hitchcock, who enjoyed tonal shifts to an arguably excessive degree, is said to have admired Mattsson’s five “color" thrillers, of which MANNEQUIN is #2, and reportedly the one that prompted Hitch to gift Mattsson with two illegal (Cuban) cigars when they met for the only time in the early 60s.
THE DOLL, with its deliberately gear-shifted pacing, and its relentless variations on alienation and madness (the eccentric Swedish character lead Per Oscarsson is particularly adept) manages to transcend a plot that seems to revel in its implausibility. The parodic elements in the film start to careen off the walls of Oscarsson’s dingy but strangely spacious flat when the department store mannequin he brings home comes to life (or does she?) and gender-conflict motifs escalate in unpredictably predictable ways. (Much of the success in this portion of the film is due to the performance of Gio Petré as “the doll,” combining exotic allure and a sense of the alien that prevents things from collapsing into caricature.)
Given that within half a decade Mattsson’s career would essentially collapse and he would be forced to exile himself to the Continent and make various forms of exploitation films, THE DOLL might be a kind of premonition of how art can embody (and thus become vulnerable to) its own implosive energy.
THINGS are more “conventionally strange” in Norway. LAKE OF THE DEAD makes it clear that there is a common link across northernmost nations in their embrace of annoying characters, which might indicate a higher concentration of such traits in regions where the amount of sunlight is so variable. But the acting ensemble in Kare Bergstrom’s eerie, low-key thriller takes over the action so that the so-called “detective writer” (who proves to be mostly clueless as the film’s mystery reveals itself) is pushed back into a subordinate role.
That permits the setting to take root as the prime mover in the film, which benefits from the connection between the grisly legend (incest-based murder) at the remote cabin by an ominous calm lake and the neurosis welling up in the characters as the present-day body count increases. Director Bergstrom’s manipulation of the image projected by actress Henny Moan adds another gender/sexual counter-movement to the tale, which involves an odd but satisfying twist on earlier thrillers where a psychologist must find a way to play a trick on the murderer in order to prevent further bloodshed.
NINE LIVES is “strange” only in that it projects a relentless, brutal yet beautiful world trapped in the ravages of war. It is the real-life story of a Norwegian saboteur whose unit was ambushed by the Nazis during WWII and his superhuman attempts to escape them after he is the lone survivor.
The ordeal is as arduous as the terrain, but the instinct for survival matches the forbiddingly beautiful vistas that are now instead deadly impediments to his safe passage. He must depend on the kindness and courage of others who are also at risk amidst the conquering enemy. Jack Fjeldstad brings a desperate physicality to his portrayal of the real-life Jan Baalsrud, who would lose body parts due to the extreme conditions he encountered during his extended, nightmarish escape.
Director Arne Skouen, like Arne Mattsson, was in the pre-Nouvelle Vague age of pan-European cinema a highly acclaimed presence, with many screenings in Cannes; but, like so many who were inadvertently on the wrong side of that cinematic “revolution,” he has faded from view almost to the vanishing point. NINE LIVES is a first step toward permitting Skouen to escape the fate that Jan Baalstrud miraculously eluded during WWII. Let’s hope that what we start here will have follow-up from other brave and resourceful souls within the repertory cinema community…