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Sjöström – From National to International 25 in a Swedish interview in the magazine Filmjournalen turned out to be prophetic: Your stories are too heavy for American audiences. Not for some of us – but for public success. To me, it seems as stupid to ask you to make other stories – as to ask a great artist to make the cover for a commonplace magazine. For the success of your films, however, it seems necessary to “compromise” in that direction. But it is sad that it should be needed! 24 As Terriss seemed to have foreseen, The Phantom Carriage completely failed with the American audience. Now, SF instead put great faith in the next, more internationally oriented production, Love’s Crucible, though without the expected outcome as Goldwyn declined the offer to import the film. Swedish films, therefore, seem to have been successful in America only to the degree that they were different. As soon as the former “national style” was changed to “international”, the interest faded. To compete with Hollywood on their own conditions turned out to be more difficult than the Swedish producers had expected. However, Goldwyn’s decision to invite Sjöström to Hollywood was undoubtedly just as much based on the great success of his films with critics and audiences alike in Europe, and not least in France: a promise for the future as to export possibilities. 25 American critics, however, do not always seem to have shared the general enthusiasm of the producers concerning the import of European directors. With eye-catching headlines such as “With Berlin Foreign Center; Famous Shuffling Directors”, “The Foreign Legion in Hollywood” or “The Swedish Invasion”, the American press hailed the European colony of film workers that arrived in Hollywood during the 1920s invited by several American production companies. Captions such as “Metro’s bringing them in by car load”, clearly demonstrate the sceptical or at least ambivalent attitude in the public sphere of the receiving country towards this potential assault. 26 Critical comments speak of the immigrants keeping closely together in the new context, and note that consequently only a few of them really become Americans. Rhetorical remarks mention that these adventurers or “foreign invaders” want to capture the American film industry and American dollars. But there are also more positive comments on the competence of the imported film workers, pointing towards a potential creative exchange. A few individuals are mentioned (e.g. scriptwriter Hanns Kräly, who accompanied Ernst Lubitsch to Hollywood and “made the screen better for his coming”), but in general focus lies on the contrasts between “them” and “us”. 27 There is more to this rhetoric than historical curiosity only. It points to the dividing line between Europe and the United States in film production that might easily be interpreted as razor-sharp – a view that, as we shall see, might have to be revised or at least nuanced. In the European press of the period,
26 Transition and Transformation however, it also has its counterparts – as eloquent as they are frequent – in headlines as “Europe Gets Plundered”, “German Sale” or “European Invasion”, with the following rhetorical question whether the renewal of American cinema is in the hands of the Europeans. 28 In both Germany and Sweden several commentators presumed that the export of film workers to Hollywood was less the result of a genuine interest in European talent than dictated by the intention to drain other countries’ national production cultures. 29 Thus, according to those critics, any risk of competition was eliminated in favour of American hegemony on the world market. The critical question for this study, then, remains: what actually happened with Sjöström through his transition to Seastrom?
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Film Culture in Transition General
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Marijke de Valck and Malte Hagener
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