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subjects of the old. Sigurd Wallen, who had directed and acted in films over many years, made Hemsbborna {The People of Hemsb) (1944), which caught the penetrative quality of Strindberg's novel of life in this archipelago. Gustaf Molander made a new version of Selma Lagerlof's novel, Kejsarn av Portngallien (1944). which Victor Sjostrom had directed in Hollywood with Norma Shearer and Lon Chaney. Sjostrom himself played the old man who goes mad with love for his daughter and Gunn Wallgren took the part of the girl who goes to the city, becomes a prostitute and, returning to her home in the country, finds her father imagines himself to be the Emperor of Portugal. Although Sjostrom's intense acting often made the film moving, it was curiously out of sympathy with the new atmosphere of production. So also was Gustaf Edgren's Tbsen frdn Stormyrtorpet, adapted from the novel by Selma Lagerlof. Despite the skilled craftsmanship in the treatment of landscape and costume, its literary origin hung heavily on the film which seemed a rather ponderous echo. Edgren was more successful with a simpler film in the same style, Driver Dagg, Faller Regn (1946), whose naively romantic story, adapted from a novel by Margit Soderholm, developed considerable charm through the performances of Mai Zetterling and Alf Kjellin. and through Martin Bodin's sensitive photography of the Swedish countryside. There was more substance in Edgren's Katrina (1943), a full-length portrait of a Swedish mother bedevilled by poverty and adversity, adapted from a novel by ( Sally Salminen. The film had an impressive sea and landscape setting in the Aaland Islands, and Marta Ekstrom gave a memorable study of maternal selfsacrifice and devotion.
It was not in the sphere of folk-lore, however, that the new note was to be most firmly struck. Although Sigfrid Siwertz's play was well known in the theatre, there had been nothing like Ett Brott in the Swedish cinema when Lorens Marmstedt and his director Anders Henrikson decided in 1940 to make it into a film. Its inspiration was entirely contemporary: there were no backward-looking glances into Sweden's past. Its psychological attack was direct: there was nothing to cushion the impact. It was the tragedy of the downfall of a family, whose decline has been held in check by a strict father until on his sixtieth birthday his sons stage a revolt and the tension explodes in a crime. It was in its content and in this treatment of character rather than in its cinematic properties that the film broke new ground. Henrikson succeeded in stripping away all the frothy falsity which had spread stickily over Swedish films in the 'thirties and in establishing a naturalistic atmosphere in which his problem of human relationships could be convincingly discussed. In style Ett Brott {A Crime) stood nearest to the pre-war French films, although it was not difficult to hear echoes in the theme of Kbrkarlen and even of Ingeborg Holm.
The same year, 1940, marked the return to the cinema of Alf Sjoberg, who had not been in a studio since his curiously neglected film Den Starkaste had been shown. As that silent film had revealed, Sjoberg had a feeling for the cinema;
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