A sick unmarried mother writes on her death bed a letter to the father of her daughter. The father lets young widow Sara Andersson take care of his daughter, and he has no idea that she will be forced to begging.
Director: Paul Garbagni. AKA The Springtime of Life
Stars: Victor Sjöström, Mauritz Stiller, Georg af Klercker, Selma Wiklund af Klercker, Anna Norrie, Astrid Engelbrecht, Victor Arfvidson.
The difficulties in watching, old vintage film is that you must accept the limitations of the years with the idea of what we think any film should be. I LIFVETS VARS is indeed a product of its time & place. It is a cliched story even by 1912’s limited reach about an orphan girl struggling to find a comfortable place for herself even as she grows and finds herself being pursued by three men, one a cad (played by Victor Sjorstrom). a kind-hearted foster father and an elder roue (played by Mauritz Stiller) who also happens to be his real father. The narratives uses the hand-written note as a motif to cary the numerous subtitles because all the characters keep jotting down memos for each other. Nothing to report on plotline, but a chance to see Stiller & Sjorstrom as actors in their early years. Thanks Jon.
While utterly ridiculous even by the standards of melodrama, this film was still a delight to watch from beginning to end. The foolishness of the plot would have bogged the film down if any of it were truly lingered upon, but everything moves at such a breezy pace that it feels like the kind of thing that would have been wonderful to go see with family for a meaningless afternoon treat at the time that it was initially shown. It’s a shame there’s no accompanying score.
Many of the creative choices made in the movie seem rather tame and rote: stale camerawork even for the time (the cinematography in Porter’s “The Gay Shoe Clerk” a decade earlier was already more inventive and more wry) along with perfectly safe and even expected tinting choices (blue for crime, green for the great outdoors, red for danger–nothing with any real emotive or thematic power like the alternating warm-and-cold tinting choices Hitchcock would make the following decade for “The Pleasure Garden”). I also felt the film leaned rather too heavily on handwritten notes to communicate to the audience–surely Gerda’s goodbye could have been communicated more simply (and less absurdly) with a simple “She’s gone!” intertitle at most? That being said, there were aspects that rose above the rest: The theater sets with painted moveable backdrops were just lovely, and the writing had some clever moments of humor here and there–notably Gerda and Alm each cravenly refusing to send notes to the other, as well as the decision to bring Sara back into the plot with her having given up none of her crookedness in the intervening twenty-two years.
There’s nothing wrong with a by-the-numbers production; as I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to really appreciate works of reliable mediocrity. I don’t always want to be riveted or distressed or profoundly altered–most of the time I’d just as soon enjoy a pleasant romp through a meaningless tale. I love silent cinema, and “I lifvets vår” was a lovely way to spend an hour. I’m astonished at how little damage the surviving print sustained. I don’t know how or where you heard of this little film, Jon, but I’m glad you did. Thank you for providing this copy!