Karin Swanström | Flickan i frack (The Girl in Tails) / 1926

a gentleman for the night

by Douglas Messerli

 

Hjalmar Bergman (screenplay, based on his 1925 novella), Karin Swanström (director) Flickan i frack (The Girl in Tails) / 1926 [Difficult to obtain]

 

An important movie of its time for both its statement about women’s rights and its satiric look at small town social oppression, Swedish director Karin Swanström’s 1926 silent film adaptation of writer Hjalmar Bergman’s novella Flickan i frack (The Girl in Tails) is also the story of a girl who intentionally flouts the rules of gender.

     A bit like Cinderella, Katja Kock (Magda Holm) spends most of her days sewing and mending clothes for her brother (Erik Zetterström) and humoring her ill-tempered widowed father (Nils Aréhn). An intelligent girl, she’s also been asked to tutor the son of a wealthy landowner outside of town, Ludwig (Einar Axelsson), a pleasant but completely unmotivated boy in danger of not graduating from school. Through Katja’s hard work he successfully raises his grades, and plans to celebrate the fact by attending the annual ball.

     Katja feels she has the right to award herself by attending the ball as well. But her father who has no patience with the desires of women, spends the little money they have on her brother’s tuxedo, explaining to her that it is important for young men to look their best at such occasions. Katja is left nothing to wear but rags.

      Feeling the injustice of his decision, Katja decides to go to the ball anyway...dressed in her brother’s tuxedo. The count’s snooty aristocratic family, shocked by the appearance of a woman dressed as a man, are outraged, particularly the family matriarch, the widow Hyltenius (played the director herself), who when Katja goes so far as to actually smoke a cigar and dance with another woman, slaps Katja’s face.

      The event becomes the town scandal, and since everyone lives by the small-town social conventions, even her father disowns her. Katja has no other place to go than to the estate where she has tutored Ludwig, further fanning the growing affection between the two of them.

      But everything is a stalemate until Mrs. Hyltenius becomes pacified. The school headmaster steps in, who gives her straight-forward advice: “Forgiveness is a gift we can give to others and ourselves only while we are alive.” Hyltenius finally relents and travels to her grandson’s estate where the first thing she spies is the count snuggling up to his temporary maid, Katja. Still, she forgives the girl, but only if Katja promises that she will never again wear male clothing, to which Katja agrees, while—as a commentator has suggested—we and she both know she will probably soon commit an act for more subversive than cross-dressing.

      In its open declaration of female rights and equality, this film was far ahead of almost all the films of its day, except perhaps for Alice Guy Blaché Les résultats du féminisme (The Consequences of Feminism) (1906), Marío Raoncoroni’s Italian-made film Filibus (1915), and fellow Scandinavian director Sven Gade’s Hamlet (1921).

      Although Katja in no manner represents a gay or truly transgender figure, she is certainly willing to truly explore what it means in such patriarchal worlds, even if controlled by traditional matriarchs, to be a man with all his privileges.

       In 1956, with the English title without the article, Girl in Tails, Arne Mattsson directed a rewrite of the movie by Herbert Grevenius, starring Maj-Britt Nilsson and Folke Sundquist.

 

Los Angeles, March 31, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2002).