One of a whole series of sophisticated thrillers produced by Nordisk in 1914, this film by Hjalmar Davidsen is a fine noir story of a very ordinary businessman who falls prey to a diabolical rival (nice sinister performance by Svend Aggerstrom) who obsessively pursues his ruin by any means. The claustrophobic mise en scène and effective use of shadow adds to the sense of psychological horror while the climax, though worthy of this growing North European genre that came to be known as Sensationfilm, remains entirely within the psychological frame of the film as a whole. .
A very interesting aspect of the mise en scène is the manner in which the settings, at first strictly naturalistic, become increasingly expressionistic as the story proceeds, reflecting the nightmarish situation in which the protagoonist finds himself.
One of the most inetresting things to emerge from our much increaesed knowledge of the Dutch, German and Danish films of this period is to what degree the later films of Hitccock - often regarded in the past as compleetly sui generis by his rather naive admirers (including Truffaut and Deleuze) - can in fact now seen to have developed very naturally out of the thrillers of the teens and the twenties, a fact that the wily old master of suspense was always rather careful to conceal. They also paved the way for the film noir.
As one sees very clearly from the review that appears here, with its rather pathetic demand for the "pleasing" and the "pleasant, the US market was not really yet at all ready for this kind of noirceur which did however find a ready market in world cinema's second most important market-place, Russia..
A very interesting aspect of the mise en scène is the manner in which the settings, at first strictly naturalistic, become increasingly expressionistic as the story proceeds, reflecting the nightmarish situation in which the protagoonist finds himself.
One of the most inetresting things to emerge from our much increaesed knowledge of the Dutch, German and Danish films of this period is to what degree the later films of Hitccock - often regarded in the past as compleetly sui generis by his rather naive admirers (including Truffaut and Deleuze) - can in fact now seen to have developed very naturally out of the thrillers of the teens and the twenties, a fact that the wily old master of suspense was always rather careful to conceal. They also paved the way for the film noir.
As one sees very clearly from the review that appears here, with its rather pathetic demand for the "pleasing" and the "pleasant, the US market was not really yet at all ready for this kind of noirceur which did however find a ready market in world cinema's second most important market-place, Russia..
