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A for Adultery – The Scarlet Letter 65
the characteristic use of dissolve. Finally, I will briefly discuss the construction
of this film as particularly “Swedish”, grounded already in Gish’s original
choice of director.
Frances Marion recounts in her autobiography her experiences working with
Victor Sjöström on both The Scarlet Letter and his next film, The Wind. She
mentions that he “gave to his direction the rare quality of reality, and never
permitted a dramatic scene to become flagrant melodrama”, and equally points
to Sjöström’s praise for Lillian Gish, and that he claimed always to be able to tell
when an actor had worked for D. W. Griffith: “He expects stark realism and the
stamina that it takes to make it believable.” 4 This image of Sjöström as a realist
director has been prevailing, but will, as we shall see, be further nuanced by
Symbolist elements.
In her analysis of Marion’s scripts, Anke Brouwers in addition to her analysis
of The Scarlet Letter also briefly mentions Marion’s second script to be directed
by Sjöström, that for The Wind. According to Brouwers, a main contribution
by Marion as scriptwriter to those two films was the comic accent that she
put to the stories, first in “the otherwise quite faithful adaptation of
Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter”, 5 where Brouwers distinguishes not only two
comic scenes, but also one slapstick scene, when the town-beadle raps Giles on
the head with a long stick when he cannot refrain from sneezing in church. In
the same vein, Brouwers also notes the comic duo of Lige and Sourdough in
The Wind, characters around which several funny scenes in the film are
centred. According to Brouwers, “compared to the type of material usually
handled by Victor Sjöström, whose (Swedish) films had been invariably bleak
explorations of moral dilemmas or tragic lives, the comic relief can be considered
to be a-typical”. 6
In this case, however, Brouwers does nothing but follow other interpreters, as
for example Graham Petrie, who states that “As Sjöström had rarely included
comic interludes of this kind in his Swedish films, it seems likely that they were
a deliberate concession to the presumed taste of an American audience and its
unwillingness to sit through ninety minutes of unrelieved seriousness.” 7 While
Brouwers (and others) may be right about Marion as scriptwriter being responsible
for including these particular comic scenes, she is however far too schematic
in making them the antithesis of Sjöström’s supposedly always tragic
moralities from the Swedish years. The reason for this might be that those of his
films that are lighter in tone are perhaps less known internationally. 8
However, a film like Hans nåds testamente (His Lord’s Will) directed by
Sjöström in 1919 and scripted by Hjalmar Bergman, is no less than a comedy
throughout, and even other films, for example, The Girl from the Marsh
Croft, his first Selma Lagerlöf adaptation from 1917, included several comic
moments. 9 Thus, it might rather be concluded that Sjöström as a director gener-