Scandinavian film (1952)

active production company and in the first years of the war made more than three hundred films. But the market for Danish films was rapidly contracting as the war made trading conditions more and more difficult. By the end of the war it consisted of only Scandinavia and Germany. In film-making as in other matters, Denmark took seriously its position as a neutral country and in several productions sought to press the cause of peace. The Nordisk company made such films as Pax Aeterna, Pro P atria and Ned med Vabnene {Down with the Weapons). Typical of their unrealistic flavour was Himmelskibet {The Sky Ship), written by Ole Olsen. This described a rocket flight to Mars by a group of young idealists and their return with a Martian emissary to plead for peace on earth. This was a well-intentioned but misguided production trend. It is curious to note that the Second World War produced similar sermons on peace from neutral Switzerland. The end of the war found the Danish film struggling against much more powerfully equipped competitors. Hollywood had achieved a world market for its films during the war, the Swedish cinema had out-paced its smaller Scandinavian neighbour in development, and the German cinema was about to enter on its golden period. In an attempt to re-establish its popularity in the English-speaking world, the Danish companies produced film versions of novels by Dickens and Captain Marryat. A. W. Sandberg made Our Mutual Friend (1919), Great Expectations (1921), David Copperfield (1922), and Little Dorrit (1924). These films had some success in Scandinavia where their wistful sentimentality had an appeal; but for audiences in Britain and America they failed to capture the essential flavour of Dickens's work. The success of David Lean's films twenty-five years later suggests that an author's ideas can best be interpreted in his own country. It was through much less pretentious material that the Danish cinema regained part at least of its world market. The comedies which Lau Lauritzen made for the new Palladium company, with Carl Schenstrom and Harald Madsen, could not be equated with the clowning of Chaplin; but they were lively, friendly affairs which had a warm appeal for audiences all over the world in the troubled 'twenties. The comedians, tall, thin and serious Schenstrom and small, plump and merry Madsen, were given a number of names: 'Fyrtarnet og Bivognen' ('Lighthouse and Tram-Trailer') in Denmark, 'Long and Short' in Britain, 'Doublepatte and Patachon' in France. When most of the more ambitious Danish films had disappeared from the world's cinemas, these comedies were still shown regularly to audiences to whom the comedians became as familiar as Laurel and Hardy and Abbott and Costello. In ten years they made about forty films, an output equalled by few other teams of comedians. Their director, Lau Lauritzen, who knew how to get the last broad laugh out of a farcical situation, died in 1938. One figure links the Danish cinema of yesterday and to-day. Carl Theodor Dreyer began writing scripts for Nordisk about 1912 when he was a young journalist. His first film, The President, adapted from a novel by Karl Emil 3