Day of Wrath, Carl Theodor Dreyer's second sound feature, was based on real events that took place in Bergen, Norway in the sixteenth century and became the basis for a play by Hans Wiers-Jenssens - Anne Pedersdotter - written in 1908. It had been eleven years since Dreyer's last feature, Vampyr (1932), which was poorly received in his own country and forced him to seek film opportunities elsewhere. Unfortunately, projects initiated in France, England and even Somalia, all fell through and Dreyer eventually returned to his former profession of journalism, until his interest in making a movie of Anne Pedersdotter spurred him to return to filmmaking.
From the beginning, Dreyer had very specific qualities he was looking for in his actors. In the key role of Marthe, he cast Lisbeth Movin, a relatively unknown stage and screen actress at the time, because he "fell in love with her eyes." Her remarkable portrayal, comparable in its intensity to Falconetti's performance in his earlier The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), is a complex one, mingling innocence with a suggestion of the sinister. Part of the credit is due to Dreyer who used "moving key lights, scrims, barn doors, and even objects in the path of the key lights to throw an ever-changing pattern of shifting brightness and shadow on her eyes and face." (from Raymond Carney's essay in MaGills Survey of Cinema).
Equally memorable is Anna Svierkier as Marte Herlof, the elderly peasant woman who is accused of witchcraft and burned at the stake in the film's harrowing opening. Nearly eighty years old at the time, the actress was put through quite an arduous physical ordeal for her part by Dreyer whose perfectionism often bordered on the sadistic. For one scene, the director recalled (in My Own Great Passion: The Life and Films of Carl Th. Dreyer by Jean Drum and Dale D. Drum), "...she was so seized with the part I couldn't get her to move slowly. Then I remembered she had said she had bought a pair of tight new shoes. So I asked her to put them on and then ran a number of rehearsals. Her feet became more and more sore, and after some time she could only move slowly and the scene was quite successful. She said to me, 'How could you do it?' Afterwards, when she saw the scene, she thanked me." Another difficult shoot was Marte's death scene when Svierkier was tied to a ladder and forced to wait until the sun emerged before the cameras could roll. A fellow crewmember said, "It was terrible for her, and she cried a little because her back ached terribly. When Dreyer saw this he exclaimed, 'Oh that is just wonderful, wonderful. Keep that when we are going to shoot."
Dreyer's obsession with the smallest detail in his films is well documented, from the setting to the props. In one instance, he searched half a year for the right soap dish for a scene in Day of Wrath. In striving to capture the period look and appropriate atmosphere for the film, he shot exteriors at the Frilands Museum, which is located on the outskirts of Copenhagen and features an open air village composed of 17th and 18th century Danish houses. All of the interiors for Day of Wrath were shot in the Palladium Studios in Hellerup.
Despite Dreyer's meticulous care in crafting Day of Wrath, the film received an even worse reception from the Danish critics than his previous film, Vampyr. Not only was it attacked for its stark, austere style but some critics accused the film of being a thinly disguised allegory of the Nazis' persecution of the Jews. It was also released at the height of World War II in Europe when theatrical distribution for films was extremely limited at best. It also didn't help matters that Dreyer was approached by the Germans with an offer to make movies for them. Instead, he fled the country with his wife, relocating to Sweden and not returning to Copenhagen until after the war.
Today, Day of Wrath is seen as one of Dreyer's undisputed masterworks and a powerful critique of religious intolerance, superstition and basic human nature. The film also possesses an intriguing ambiguity in which Marthe behaves at times as if she might indeed be guilty of certain accusations. Peter Cowie in Eighty Years of Cinema best summed up the film's greatness when he wrote, "Like The Passion of Joan of Arc, Day of Wrath is a protest against the bigotry which spread like a shadow across the lives of ordinary people in the middle ages...Practically every composition has the clean, measured proportions of a Flemish painting. The white ruffs contrast sharply with the dark robes of the characters and some of the faces could have been chosen by Rembrandt. The scenes in the presbytery are claustrophobic. Every movement is furtive, and the soundtrack is so discreetly composed that when someone does cry out in terror or anguish, the sound strikes like a dagger. The ponderous narrative is faithful to a state of mind and a way of life at a certain point in history. In Day of Wrath slowness becomes a terrible inevitability."
Producer: Carl Theodor Dreyer, Tage Nielsen
Director: Carl Theodor Dreyer
Screenplay: Carl Theodor Dreyer, Poul Knudsen, Paul La Cour, Mogens Skot-Hansen
Cinematography: Karl Andersson
Film Editing: Anne Marie Petersen, Edith Schlussel
Art Direction: Erik Aaes
Music: Poul Schierbeck
Cast: Thorkild Roose (Rev. Absalom Pedersson), Lisbeth Movin (Anne Pedersdotter), Sigrid Neiiendam (Meret), Preben Lerdorff Rye (Martin), Anna Svierkier (Herlofs Marte), Albert Hoeberg (The Bishop).
BW-110m.
by Jeff Stafford
