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Lang's doleful Reaper (Der Müde Tod), Carl Dreyer's grudging Lucifer—after each malefic mission, the fallen angel (Helge Nissen) gazes sadly at the Heavens and "the Lord's voice is heard: Continue thy evil doings!" Temptation and persecution through the ages, in the beginning he's a Pharisee spreading discord amid Jerusalem scribes. The Messiah (Halvard Hoff) out of Flemish paintings surrounded by lambs, elsewhere Judas (Jacob Texiere) stumbles away from the Last Supper and drops to his knees with a bag full of coins. (Dreyer's unfilmed screenplay about Jesus, complete with precise filming indications, fleshes out this early draft.) Christ turns up as a Gothic wooden statue in a 16th-century Spanish chamber, where Satan presides as Grand Inquisitor. Self-flagellation can't quite erase the astrologist's daughter (Ebon Strandin) from the mind of the monk (Johannes Meyer), easy prey for the Inquisitor's lure of power. "What is the body of the heretic to me, as long as the soul is saved?" Once corrupted, the lad recoils from his beloved's crucifix like a vampire, with consequences for Day of Wrath. Deformed religion, deformed revolution: A guillotine blocks out the sun ca. 1793, musicians during bloodthirsty turmoil (cp. Bergman's Shame) helped by a lovestruck servant (Elith Pio). Much "sang impur" to be shed, Satan is a Jacobin at the tavern, "engrossed in the new political ideas." Finally, a Finnish village under Red rule, the villain is an oddly familiar Russian mystic. Resistance is a woman or rather two, the wife (Clara Pontoppidan) who sidesteps interrogation with bread knife to bosom, plus the guerilla maiden (Karina Bell) with grenade in hand. (Bullets fly during her horseback chase, suddenly it's a William S. Hart western.) A heart-shaped pendulum fills Dreyer's screen at the close, swinging in sympathy for the Devil and all other prisoners of "divine doom." In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |