If you can’t stand the whole, stupid Times Square thing – which promises to be even stupider this year, in the middle of a pandemic – you could do a lot worse than to watch “The Phantom Carriage” (1921).
Based on a novel by Selma Lagerlöf (of “Gösta Berling’s Saga” fame), this New Year’s Eve ghost story is like a Swedish cousin to Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol.” The director, Victor Sjöström, plays what must be one of the least sympathetic antiheroes in all of cinema. His character, David Holm, is vindictive and mean-spirited – alcoholic, abusive, and a destructive influence on everyone around him. If there’s one character who’s beyond redemption, you figure it’s got to be Holm, who makes Ebenezer Scrooge look like a charm school graduate.
Holm hits the bottle with a couple of his drinking buddies in a cemetery a few minutes to midnight on New Year’s Eve, as saintly Salvation Army sister Edit calls for him on her deathbed. She’s dying of the consumption she contracted caring for Holm for the first time exactly one year ago. But she clings to life, waiting for confirmation of her belief in Holm’s inherent goodness.
Holm dismisses Sister Edit’s messenger and relates a story to his companions about a former acquaintance, university-educated Georges, who started him down the path of dissolution. It was Georges who introduced him to, among other things, the legend of the Phantom Carriage. The last person to die each year, we’re told, is fated to drive Death’s carriage. In this capacity, very dreary work, the departed must collect all the souls of the dead for the following year. With a sense of foreboding, Georges, the bon vivant, blanches every New Year’s Eve, climbs into his bunk, and stares at the wall.
Wouldn’t you know it, his premonition comes to pass. Georges was the last to die the previous year. And now selfish, belligerent Holm takes a fatal crack on the head just at the stroke of 12:00. Thus begins a strange reunion between master and disciple, with Georges directing Holm’s spirit to the sites of all the misery he’s caused. The rest of the story plays out like the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, without the laughs.
The film is fascinating in a way only silent movies are – especially dreamlike in its double-exposure effects of the Phantom Carriage – but the human story is also surprisingly absorbing. There’s one Holm freakout that seems to anticipate Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining.” For my money “Häxan” (1922), by Danish director Benjamin Christensen, is still the benchmark for silent lurid thrills. “The Phantom Carriage” isn’t really about that. There are no witches’ sabbaths or children being hurled into cauldrons. The power of Sjöström’s film is in its ability to reach across 100 years to engage us with its humanity.
The film opened in Scandinavia on New Year’s Day, 1921. Ingmar Bergman loved this movie, and it’s easy to see parallels between Holm’s conversations with the Grim Reaper and the iconic chess match between the Knight and implacable Death in “The Seventh Seal.” Sjöström himself would later play the lead in Bergman’s “Wild Strawberries.” Bergman first saw “The Phantom Carriage” at the age of 15 and claimed to watch it at least once every year.
It’s not a film that will bring a smile to your face on New Year’s Eve. But then, I never smile on New Year’s. Take that, you filthy Mummers.