The Scarlet Letter

014195 / 16 / US / 1926 / Sjöström, Victor / drama

Scarlet Letter, The / Tulipunainen kirjain / Punainen kirjain. PC: MGM. P: Irving Thalberg. D: Victor Sjöström. SC: Frances Marion - from the novel by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1850). CAST: Lillian Gish (Hester Prynne), Lars Hanson (Arthur Dimmesdale), Henry B. Walthall (Roger Prynne). 2508 m /24 fps/ 91’. Silent, b&w. Unfocused piano accompaniment by Peter Reynolds. Pretty complete safety print from Cinemateket / Svenska Filminstitutet, from a partly decomposed original. Viewed at SEA, Cinema Orion, Tuesday, 23 September 1997. **** Great direction of a great screenplay of a great story of ”bigotry uncurbed”. The film is somewhat marred by melodramatic excess like bulging eyeballs. On the other hand, the grim story is leavened with humour. The atmosphere of the Puritanical Boston of the 1650s is effectively detailed and humanly gripping. As a drama about civil courage it belongs in the same canon as the plays of Henrik Ibsen and Arthur Miller. In the cinema, Hitchcock’s The Manxman, influenced by Sjöström, is thematically close; Anny Ondra was his Hester Prynne. (Print status: no better print is available, but a restoration is under way in 1997 at the UCLA Film and Television Archive.)