undoing the past
by Douglas Messerli
Frances Marion (screenwriter and
titles, based on the novel by Nathaniel Hawthorne), Victor Sjöstrom (director) The Scarlet Letter / 1926
Swedish director Victor Sjöstrom’s
film adaptation of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The
Scarlet Letter, during the director’s short “Hollywood” period, is surely
one of his best films, and perhaps the most powerful performance ever of its
central actor, Lillian Gish. By comparison to this silent work, Gish’s work in
the 1930 talkie I watched immediately after viewing this film on TCM, One Romantic Night, seemed somewhat
bland and unexpressive. Not so in The
Scarlet Letter in which Gish, quite literally, lets her beautiful hair down
several times, particularly early in the film when she goes rushing into the
woods after her escaped bird. This series of events, beautifully filmed by
Sjöstrom and his cinematographer Hendrik Sartov, as his camera fluidly tracks
the beautiful young woman dressed all in white—as opposed to the church-going
Puritans, clad mostly in black—says almost everything that needs to be said
about this oppressive culture, where even allowing a bird to sing on the
Sabbath, let alone running and chasing after it, is deeply forbidden, as if joy
and beauty were an anathema to God.
In the closed and claustrophobic world of Sjöstrom’s Boston, nothing can
be hidden from the sight of nosy and viciously gossiping neighbors such as
Mistress Hibbins (Marcelle Corday); and punishment for the young steamstress’
transgressions immediately follows, ordered by the elders. It is not enough
that she be brought before the kinder church minister, The Reverend Arthur
Dimmesdale (played by the striking Swedish actor Lars Hanson) to be scolded
before the entire community, but the now seemingly innocent act puts Hester
Prynne in the pillories for her “crime.”
Unlike in Hawthorne’s tale, accordingly, where we only gradually
discover the intense sexual relationship between the minister and Hester, here
everything is established from the beginning. And the director makes clear from
the very first scenes that the hugs and touches between these two beautiful
beings is against not only community norms but law, as soon after, we comically
observe the wooing of the work’s dunce-like Master Giles and a young woman
wherein they are forced to speak to one another over a table through a tube-like
device that keeps them worlds apart. A quick, stolen goodbye kiss, ends in his
being ousted not only from the house but from his would-be lover’s life.
In Hawthorne the gradual discovery of the relationship between
Dimmesdale and Hester only reiterates his and the community’s hypocrisy. But
here (Hanson speaking in Swedish, Gish in English) we are presented with the
background events of Dimmesdale’s later “treason,” which create a far deeper
sense of sympathy for both the minister and Hester. Here we see both her own
flirtations and demurrals as well as the powerful forces of love emanating from
the Reverend. As Hester states the obvious, they live in a world that is
“afraid of love,” a community terrorized by even the vision of women’s
undergarments.
The lies indeed insinuate themselves into the lives of all, but
particularly into the heart of this more appealing Dimmesdale, who, after
saving Pearl from being taken from Hester by baptizing his daughter (itself, in
this society, surely a sacrilegious act) spends much of the rest of the film
with hand over heart, as he wastes away, daily retreating from living.
Sjöstrom doubles the couple’s torture by bringing back Hester’s missing
husband, Chillingworth, who, as a doctor saves Pearl’s life, but as a husband
determines to revenge his wife and, more indirectly than in Hawthorne’s work,
Dimmesdale by simply reappearing at auspicious moments. If the letter A she is
forced to wear to the end of her life might remind her of her supposed sin, the
more frightening punishment is Chillingworth’s constant reminder of his
knowledge about the truth of the events.
And it is Chillingworth’s presence once again that finally forces
Dimmesdale to make a public confession about his involvement, revealing, in his
personal anguish, that the same letter attached to Hester’s dress has been
branded by iron upon his chest. Whereas Hawthorne may wonder if this was
miraculous event wrought by the hand of God, in Sjöstrom’s far more corporeal
rendering of the tale we have no question that the A upon the minister’s chest
is a self-inflicted punishment for his own lack of moral daring. Yet again the
Swedish director fully redeems Dimmesdale through the man’s confession, which
itself, temporarily at least, saves his community by revealing the truth, that
all men are sinners, that the mud they sling upon Hester and Pearl is that in
which they themselves also walk.
If the film version differs, quite radically at times, from the beloved
fiction, it works as an adaptation that raises most of Hawthorne’s themes while
presenting the work’s heroes in more humane terms. And upon Dimmesdale’s death,
in our empathy, we are quite ready to forgive his long silence. This silent
film, after all, has audibly asserted what was in his heart.
Los Angeles, October 15, 2013
Reprinted from International Cinema Review (October 2013).
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