This is another fine film from Georg af Klercker and one that is, still today, both thought-provoking and rather disturbing.
It poses what must have been a common postwar dilemma even if less so in neutral Sweden than elsewhere, a fact that perhaps in part explains the cool, unsentimental regard with which the subject is treated. A doctor and his nurse/fiancée Violet are working for the Red Cross at a hospital-camp during the war when an air-raid very seriously injures her (mortally, it is thought) and a later cavalry raid leads to him being made a prisoner of war. In between the two raids he, in fact a brilliant young surgeon, has been able to perform an operation on Violet although he is not very hopeful of the result.
While a prisoner, he works on parole amongst war-refugees and in this way meets and has a relationship with a certain Olga, by whom he has a son. Whether the two are ever actually married remains unclear; the implication is that such formalities had little meaning in wartime, which was no doubt often realistically the case. Only at the end of the war does Dr. Arel learn that Violet has, thanks to his efforts, survived, but that she is a cripple, confined permanently to a wheelchair.
Unwilling to hurt either party, Arel returns home with Olga and son but passes the off simply as refugees he has met and taken under his wing. This leads to a curious ménage à trois, where Olga acts as companion to the crippled "wife" (again whether a marriage takes place is left unclear) and becomes understandably resentful of the situation as well as quite violently jealous of a relationship formed between Violet (unable to ever have children herself) and the young boy.
Th situation becomes so tense and unpleasant that, when Arel is awarded a Nobel prize (the Nobels had been established in 1900), he is unable to take any pleasure in the fact. This mirror an earlier situation where Violet has been awarded a medal by the Red Cross, which she angrily throws across the room when she learns she is permanently paralysed.
A former lover who has been searching for her, manages to trace Olga but meets Violet at the house who learns from him that Arel and Olga were in fact living as man and wife and understands also that the boy is Arel's son. Olga decides to go off with her ex-lover, telling him (falsely) that the boy is his (indicating of course that that too was no platonic relationship). Violet however has decided to take her own life.
When Violet is found dead and Olga gone, the doctor assumes that Olga has murdered her and fled (not so unreasonable because he has earlier already had to prevent her from administering a lethal does of cocaine. By the time Olga and her man - identified only as a Jew - are arrested, Arel has found the suicide-note and knows that she is innocent. The other man, realising Olga has lied to him about the child, goes off and Arel can now resume his life with her and the child.
What is really remarkable about the film is the complete lack of sentimentality (compare any US film you like that concerns the aftermath of the war) and the cool acceptance that realities over-ride morality. At no time (not even at the end) is Olga apologetic about her hostility towards the crippled Violet, strongly maintaining her right as an able-bodied person and a mother and dismissing any other view as hypocritical and unrealistic. More interesting still, this view is supported by Violet's parents who are sympathetic towards Olga and urge Arel to adopt a similar realism.
This staggeringly realistic approach would certainly not have been possible in the US but on this subject and at this time might have been difficult in most combatant countries. It is disturbing because it would seem also to relate to the strong eugenic movement in Sweden which would lead to programmes encouraging sterilization of the mentally or physically disabled (and, as in Nazi Germany and the US. even forced sterilisation in the case of criminals), programmes that would continues in Sweden until the 1970s. The fact that the mildly unpleasant ex-boyfriend of Olga is also identified rather unnecessarily as a Jew is also somewhat disturbing.
But if their was an intellectual predisposition to believe that the able-bodied had rights over and above the disabled (the view essentially propounded forcefully by Olga in the film and accepted even by Violet;'s parent), this does not at all mean that the character of the disabled woman (played by Mary Johnson at her most meltingly lovely) is treated unsympathetically. Quite the opposite. The entire film centres on Violet and the viewer's sympathies cannot help but be with her. Olga, by contrast, is a distinctly unpleasant character. So a very interesting tension is created between the two viewpoints, the one sentimental (and in a sense ultimately rejected eevn by the "victim" herself) and the other realistic (but really rather repulsive).
So there are no easy answers and no simple moral attitudes as there might be (indeed, definitely would be) in any equivalent US film. In its complex adult approach to morality it has more than a little in common with the work of Victor Sjöström whose Berg-Ejvind appeared in the same year.
It poses what must have been a common postwar dilemma even if less so in neutral Sweden than elsewhere, a fact that perhaps in part explains the cool, unsentimental regard with which the subject is treated. A doctor and his nurse/fiancée Violet are working for the Red Cross at a hospital-camp during the war when an air-raid very seriously injures her (mortally, it is thought) and a later cavalry raid leads to him being made a prisoner of war. In between the two raids he, in fact a brilliant young surgeon, has been able to perform an operation on Violet although he is not very hopeful of the result.
While a prisoner, he works on parole amongst war-refugees and in this way meets and has a relationship with a certain Olga, by whom he has a son. Whether the two are ever actually married remains unclear; the implication is that such formalities had little meaning in wartime, which was no doubt often realistically the case. Only at the end of the war does Dr. Arel learn that Violet has, thanks to his efforts, survived, but that she is a cripple, confined permanently to a wheelchair.
Unwilling to hurt either party, Arel returns home with Olga and son but passes the off simply as refugees he has met and taken under his wing. This leads to a curious ménage à trois, where Olga acts as companion to the crippled "wife" (again whether a marriage takes place is left unclear) and becomes understandably resentful of the situation as well as quite violently jealous of a relationship formed between Violet (unable to ever have children herself) and the young boy.
Th situation becomes so tense and unpleasant that, when Arel is awarded a Nobel prize (the Nobels had been established in 1900), he is unable to take any pleasure in the fact. This mirror an earlier situation where Violet has been awarded a medal by the Red Cross, which she angrily throws across the room when she learns she is permanently paralysed.
A former lover who has been searching for her, manages to trace Olga but meets Violet at the house who learns from him that Arel and Olga were in fact living as man and wife and understands also that the boy is Arel's son. Olga decides to go off with her ex-lover, telling him (falsely) that the boy is his (indicating of course that that too was no platonic relationship). Violet however has decided to take her own life.
When Violet is found dead and Olga gone, the doctor assumes that Olga has murdered her and fled (not so unreasonable because he has earlier already had to prevent her from administering a lethal does of cocaine. By the time Olga and her man - identified only as a Jew - are arrested, Arel has found the suicide-note and knows that she is innocent. The other man, realising Olga has lied to him about the child, goes off and Arel can now resume his life with her and the child.
What is really remarkable about the film is the complete lack of sentimentality (compare any US film you like that concerns the aftermath of the war) and the cool acceptance that realities over-ride morality. At no time (not even at the end) is Olga apologetic about her hostility towards the crippled Violet, strongly maintaining her right as an able-bodied person and a mother and dismissing any other view as hypocritical and unrealistic. More interesting still, this view is supported by Violet's parents who are sympathetic towards Olga and urge Arel to adopt a similar realism.
This staggeringly realistic approach would certainly not have been possible in the US but on this subject and at this time might have been difficult in most combatant countries. It is disturbing because it would seem also to relate to the strong eugenic movement in Sweden which would lead to programmes encouraging sterilization of the mentally or physically disabled (and, as in Nazi Germany and the US. even forced sterilisation in the case of criminals), programmes that would continues in Sweden until the 1970s. The fact that the mildly unpleasant ex-boyfriend of Olga is also identified rather unnecessarily as a Jew is also somewhat disturbing.
But if their was an intellectual predisposition to believe that the able-bodied had rights over and above the disabled (the view essentially propounded forcefully by Olga in the film and accepted even by Violet;'s parent), this does not at all mean that the character of the disabled woman (played by Mary Johnson at her most meltingly lovely) is treated unsympathetically. Quite the opposite. The entire film centres on Violet and the viewer's sympathies cannot help but be with her. Olga, by contrast, is a distinctly unpleasant character. So a very interesting tension is created between the two viewpoints, the one sentimental (and in a sense ultimately rejected eevn by the "victim" herself) and the other realistic (but really rather repulsive).
So there are no easy answers and no simple moral attitudes as there might be (indeed, definitely would be) in any equivalent US film. In its complex adult approach to morality it has more than a little in common with the work of Victor Sjöström whose Berg-Ejvind appeared in the same year.
