If you stay up past midnight tonight, TCM will be screening an influential supernatural film about a violent alcoholic who at one point will grab an ax to splinter down a door behind which can be found his terrified family. And, yes, ghosts are involved. And, no, it’s not The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980). The film in question is Victor Sjöström’s The Phantom Carriage, which was released in 1921. Fans of The Shining will be quick to notice that this is the same year printed at bottom of the iconic last shot of Kubrick’s film that shows us a black-and-white photograph with Jack Torrance frozen in time.
TCM will be screening The Phantom Carriage at 12:15m (eastern time). It’s too bad they couldn’t start the movie right at midnight, as the film was released in the U.S. as The Stroke of Midnight. But in a day and age where people can record and watch things on demand (and never mind the different time zones), that is a paltry matter when compared to the core subject at hand, a great unknown that will confront us all: death.
Speaking of the chimes of midnight and not asking for whom the bell tolls, let’s get back to Sjöström. Those good with names might primarily remember the Swedish director as the protagonist of Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries (1957). In that film Sjöström plays the role of Dr. Isak Borg, an old professor nearing the end of his life and confronting the emptiness of existence.
While this premise might sound rather bleak, watching Wild Strawberries is a walk in the park when compared to the isolation and desolation Bergman would yet unleash with a pending trilogy of films: Through a Glass Darkly (1961), Winter Light (1962), and The Silence (1963). Some critics have wondered if perhaps Sweden’s frosty and chilly climes might be to blame for the director’s pronounced introspection and melancholia, but keep in mind that the greatest Swedish film director before Bergman was Sjöström, and Sjöström was a humanist, a man with a soft spot who believed in grace notes. To say more would be to spoil the ending to The Phantom Carriage.
The Phantom Carriage is an amazing film. At the time of its release it was considered as important as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Robert Wiene, 1920) and Battleship Potemkin (Sergei M. Eisenstein, 1925), and Charlie Chaplin was such a fan that he proclaimed Sjöström “the greatest director in the world.” Sjöström used a tableaux style with unusual triangular compositions, and he also employed elaborate multiple-exposure effects that were all done in-camera.
Sjöström would then travel to L.A., change his name to Victor Seastrom, and there he directed several films including a sadistically uncomfortable masterpiece in 1924 titled He Who Gets Slapped, starring Lon Chaney, in which Chaney plays a several-times-betrayed scientist who takes up residency as a bitter circus-clown.
A few years later Sjöström would direct The Wind (1928), a stunning film starring Lillian Gish. Which, in a way, brings things full circle when speaking of horrifying scenes in which a person with an ax tries to break down a door with murder in mind, as Sjöström was surely influenced by the scene in Broken Blossoms (D.W. Griffith, 1919) in which Gish’s character is being terrorized by a drunk:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpQNpUCM7U4
To spice things up a bit, I’ll end with a clip that shows the musicians from KTL doing a live performance of their alternate score for The Phantom Carriage (available on the Criterion disk along with a traditional orchestral arrangement to choose from):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAxBAz1BrOQ