The Blizzard

This is Nobel prize winner Selma Lagerlof's most poetic work although in prose, but the story beams poetic beauty all through, like an advanced development of an H. C. Andersen tale, for Lagerlof was an expert on making tales into novels, (like "Nils Holgersson"). Mauritz Stiller has handled her novel with great piety and care, actually succeeding in transmitting the poetry to the screen, especially accentuated by all the scenes with the poor orphan girl playing the violin. Unfortunately you cannot hear what she played, and the music later attached to the film was not always in congruence with the sensitive poetic character of the story. The cinematography as so often in Stiller's films is very impressive, the major alteration he has made from the novel is to turn the goats into reindeers, which he used for the greatest sequences of the film: the struggle in the snow storm with the reindeer chaos is simply cinematographically sensational. The acting is not exceptional but very in accordance with the novel, and on the large he has succeeded in squeezing a literary masterpiece into almost an equally ranking movie masterpiece. Later he would turn Mrs Lagerlof's first novel "Gosta Berling" into a great film, using the same kind of advanced and effective dramaturgy to fit the novel into a film, which Mrs Lagerlof had some objections against - she did not recognize her novel any more. The film is different from the novel but equally great but in another way. He later brought Greta Garbo to Hollywood.