LGM Film Club, Part 550: Swedenheilms

Gustaf Molander’s 1935 film Swedenheilms is a light family drama about a brilliant but financially irresponsible scientist, his really super irresponsible spoiled spendthrift children, and the maid keeping it all together. It’s adapted from Hjalmar Bergman’s 1923 play. If this is known for anything, it’s that Ingrid Bergman has a small but important role as the girlfriend of one of the sons and not only is she, of course, incredibly beautiful, but she’s also in fact very tall and American directors went far to obscure the fact that she was taller than many of the leading men she worked with. Molander didn’t care about this. Swedish films between Victor Sjostrom and Ingmar Bergman are rarely seen and so this film was interesting just for that alone. The plot revolves around whether the father is going to win the Nobel Prize, which at this time was really still mostly a Scandinavian thing and he really needs that for his credit line. It’s hard to take the drama too seriously since you know it will work out in the end and you don’t really care about these characters anyway since they are all spoiled and kind of suck, which the exception of the maid and Bergman’s girlfriend character. The father has this overbearing sense of honor, though he’s too silly of a man or played that way to really pull it off, and the sons have inherited this unfortunate characteristic. Of course, it’s easy to have these principles when you aren’t the one life has compromised and that becomes the hinge of the last half of the film. Again, it’s kind of whatever, but no worse than a standard Hollywood film from the 30s, which is why people are so excited by the Pre-Code stuff today more than the late 30s pablum being pushed out by the studios.

Incidentally, as a habitual listkeeper, I have a list of my favorite films by year. For most years, I’ve seen many films. But the lowest of all time is 1935. I’ve seen plenty of films from 1936. But the only 1935 film I had ever seen before this is Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps, which is of course completely brilliant. So now I’ve seen two films from 1935.

Finally, I was reminded at the end of this film, as I am reminded at the end of all old films from this country, that the Swedish word for “THE END” is “SLUT”.

There’s a terrible copy of a 2 minute clip on YouTube, so we will have to live with that tonight.