REVIEWED BY WALTER ALBERT:         


THE PHANTOM CHARIOT. Svensk Filmindustri, Sweden, 1921. Also known as The Phantom Carriage. Swedish title: Körkarlen. Victor Sjöström, Hilda Borgström, Astrid Holm, Tore Svennberg. Director: Victor Sjöström. Shown at Cinefest 18, Liverpool NY, March 1998.

   Victor Sjöström is not only a pioneering and notable Swedish film director and actor, but the acknowledged mentor of Ingmar Bergman, and for about four years, from 1924, [as Victor Seastrom] a successful Hollywood director of Lon Chaney in He Who Gets Slapped, Lillian Gish in The Scarlet Letter and The Wind, and Greta Garbo in The Divine Woman.

   The Phantom Chariot is his best-known Swedish film and a classic of the horror film. According to legend, a person who dies at midnight on New Year’s Eve is condemned to drive Death’s chariot for a year, gathering in souls.

   In part a moralistic drama (a drunken, abusive husband is redeemed by his vision of Death’s chariot), it is the recurrent visions of the chariot that linger in the memory, a fantasy haunting an austere, realistically filmed narrative.