HERR ARNES PENGAR / SIR ARNE'S TREASURE (1919)

Now a tangential figure from cinema’s distant past, fitfully remembered as the man who groomed Greta Garbo for stardom before losing both her and his career to Hollywood, Mauritz Stiller was (along with Victor Sjöström) the standard-bearer of early Swedish cinema. While most of his work is now lost, this superb, technically advanced historical drama helps make up for much that is missing. Taken from a novel by Nobel Laureate Selma Lagerlöf, the dark 16th century tale follows three Scottish mercenaries on the lam after a prison escape. The opening scenes have some of the most startling effects in the film, especially a tracking shot following a guard as he walks around a stone passage encircling the prisoners’ jail cell. An interior dolly set up, it looks for all the world like the first ever SteadiCam shot, taken about six decades before such things existed. In general, cinematographer Julius Jaenzon makes striking use of minimal camera movement and maximal location shooting on the frozen lakes & land of a bitter winter. One where an escaped prisoner will find the love of a young woman not enough to save him from a deserved fate as murderer and, of course, as treasure thief. (See title!) There’s a mystical thread to some of the action (did George R.R. Martin know the film or the novel?) that adds unusual undercurrents to the largely naturalistic tone & events. And while the film doesn’t consistently maintain narrative line, the big set pieces, moving from action to processional, are compelling and impressive.

DOUBLE-BILL: Of Stiller’s surviving films, it’s possible to see EROTIKON/’20 (a sex comedy that sounds naughty, but isn’t); THE SAGA OF GÖSTA BERLING/’24 (a fallen minister tale/with Garbo; Lars Hanson; and amazing nighttime cinematography, especially on the ice, from Julius Jaenzon); and the fine Hollywood feature he finally made, HOTEL IMPERIAL/’27 with a tamed Pola Negri in a war story about a hotel situated on a malleable front line. Remade in 1939 (not seen here); and then again in 1943 by Billy Wilder as the excellent FIVE GRAVES TO CAIRO with Franchot Tone, Anne Baxter, Akim Tamiroff & Erich von Stroheim.