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Danes, so only Swedish films, which became very popular, were left, along with some French and Italian films. With competition thus abolished, the better Danish producers felt a certain impulse to act on the silent demand for better movies, movies worthy of Danish culture in its fight against the Nazis. Many serious films were made, some based on Danish classics, some dealing with social problems. Most of the serious films were rather naive, the "seriousness" lying more in choice of theme than in treatment and direction that could raise the theme into
art'.*
Among the films on social themes were Det Brdndende Sporgsmaal (The Burning Question), a story of abortion and its consequences, with Poul Reumert and Bodil Kier, directed by Alice O'Fredericks, and Det Bodes der for (For This One Pays) (1944), a warning in narrative form against the dangers of venereal disease. Afsporet (Derailed) (1942), directed by Bodil Ipsen and Lau Lauritzen, had a strong psychological interest in its story of a young woman from a wealthy home who loses her memory and, finding herself among criminal elements in Copenhagen, gradually regains it. Bodil Ipsen, who has been described as the greatest actress in the Danish theatre, gave firm expression to the dramatic elements in the theme while Lau Lauritzen, whose father made the Pat and Patachon films, helped to shape the material into a film. Among the lighter films was Spurve under Taget (Sparrows under the Roof) (1944), a love story with a working-class setting, written and directed by Charles Tharnaes. Johan Jacobsen, who was to develop into one of the leading Danish directors, made Otte Akkorder (Eight Chords) (1944), a collection of short stories in the style of Duvivier's Tales of Manhattan, linked together by the meanderings of a gramophone record.
With these films alone, however, the Danish feature production of the Occupation years would not have merited much attention. It became a different matter when Carl Dreyer returned to the cinema to make Vredens Dag (Day of Wrath) in 1943. Since The Passion of Joan of Arc Dreyer had made one feature film. Vampyr, also known as The Strange Adventure of David Gray (1932), a remarkable fantasy that sticks in the memory like a bad dream. It was Mogens Skot-Hansen who persuaded Dreyer to leave his journalistic activities in Copenhagen and direct the short film already mentioned on the theme of help for the young unmarried mother. The experience awakened Dreyer 's latent interest in the cinema and a commission from Palladium to make Vredens Dag was the outcome.
Vredens Dag was adapted from the Norwegian classic by Wiers Jensen, 'Anne Pedersdotter', and transferred by Dreyer to a seventeenth-century Danish community gripped by the hysteria of witch-hunting and religious persecution. It was a drama of sin and expiation, of a crime of conscience and the punishment which remorselessly overtakes the guilty. The denunciation as a witch of a seemingly harmless old woman involves the essential destruction of those who take part in the crime, either directly or through acquiescence: the inquisitor who. * Hollyzvood Quarterly, Spring, 1 950.
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