Technically speaking, this is a well-made film--especially for 1919. Yet despite this, I found myself curiously unengaged in the film. I think a lot of this is the plot, as it has two problems. First, it's unrelentingly depressing and the characters are hard to care for one way or the other. Second, the main bad guy and the woman he subsequently falls in love with are both ill-defined characters and both behave very inconsistently.

The film starts in Sweden centuries ago. Large numbers of Scottish mercenaries had come there to work in the service of the king. However, some sort of falling out occurs. While most of these men flee the country, three Scots are locked up together. They eventually kill their jailers and escape. Considering it's winter and a harsh one at that, the fact that the three manage to survive to the border is amazing.

Hungry and dehumanized, the trio learn of a rich man named Sir Arne who has a huge treasure chest. They take him and his family prisoner--eventually killing all of them (or so they think). One, a young lady, hides and manages to avoid death. Despite this traumatic incident, the lady oddly cannot readily identify the three murderous thieves--so when she meets and falls in love with one of them only days or weeks later, it makes little sense. Also what makes little sense is that almost all of this powerful action isn't shown! Perhaps it originally did and was simply lost over time--a common occurrence with silent films. But, without these scenes the movie just seems a bit lacking.

Eventually, when the lady does learn that her depression and agony was caused by the man she now loves, she responds in an odd way. She STILL loves him! And, odder still, this supposedly transformed man who has turned over a new leaf quickly betrays this woman AGAIN--using her as a human shield to make his escape when the authorities come to arrest him for murder! Eventually, he manages to make it to a waiting boat but it is stuck in the ice--the intervention, apparently, by God who wants the three men caught and punished for their wickedness.

What has the film going for it? Well, for a print over 90 years old, it sure is in excellent shape. It's obvious that the folks who restored the print did a great job. Plus, some of the cinematography was very nice. I was particularly impressed by the fine winter scenes--it must have been really tough filming in such inclement weather. But, on the negative side, the story often makes little sense as the characters behave strangely. And, often, the action is muted by the style in which the film was made. Finally, being unrelentingly depressing, this film is NOT one to show to anyone clinically depressed--it might just send them over the edge!

In Sweden in the 16th Century, three Scottish mercenaries -- Eric Stocklassa, Bror Berger and Richard Lund -- escape from a prison and make their way to the coast. It's the dead of winter, and the sea-road to Scotland is frozen over. Maddened, they invade the home of Sir Arne, burn the place down, steal his treasure and kill everyone except Mary Johnson, who hides, and goes to live at the home of Axel Nilsson, a poor dealer in preserved fish.

Sir Arne's treasure carries a curse, however. It was stolen from a monastery when the Swedes dissolved them, and the death of Sir Arne and his wife was foredoomed. The Scottish mercenaries, however, are now likewise doomed. The seas are still frozen over, so they must wait. While they do so, they hear about Miss Johnson. They go to hear her story and Mr. Lund and she fall in love.

It's a tale of madness and horror. However, while the German movies in that still-undefined genre were psychological and used an expressionist camera, this Swedish movie by Mauritz Stiller uses an objective one, showing a more terrifying, frozen hellscape than anything Caligari's sick mind ever envisioned. This terror is not made by man or devil. It is G*d who seeks His vengeance.

Stiller and Gustaf Molander adapted a novel by Selma Lagerlöf to make this movie. Molander would direct the sound remake after the Second World War.

Watching 'Master Arne's Treasure' is, at times, like watching a moving gallery of pictures by Hammershoi, Kroyer or Spilliaert. The film's greatest set-piece has the anti-hero Sir Archie walking at night in a vast snow-scape. The frozen snow seems to be moving like a river away from him; in any case, its stark luminosity in the dark gives it an eerie unstable appearance; against this backdrop, Archie seems unnatural, as if his physical presence doesn't fit properly in his surroundings, like his image has been cut out and pasted ineptly onto a back projection. This prepares us for the ghostly emanation of his conscience, the young girl he brutally murdered for money.

'Treasure' is one of the most shocking films of the silent era. This is partly because we are set up to identify with characters who then commit an unspeakable crime. Three Scottish aristocrat mercenaries in Sweden (reversing the Viking pillage in Britain?) are put in a military prison for conspiring against the King. Remarkably, they take this is good spirit, and spend their days in homoerotic bouts of leap-frog. This immediately endears them to the audience - a willingness to play in the most oppressive conditions. Such flippancy certainly antagonises the prison warder, who snarls and pokes his spear in at them: they manage to hold him, steal his keys and escape.

'Treasure' begins as Renoir's later masterpiece 'La Grande Illusion' ends - soldiers escape from a foreign prison, tramping through the heavy snow before finding refuge in a wood-cabin. By this time, however, our heroes are starving, and play is replaced by violence as they eat and drink for the first time in months, to the horror of the wife of the house. When her husband comes home, the men are unconscious with wine, and he throws them out.

Like the films of colleague Victor Sjostrom, Stiller frames his films in a natural context. But here, nature is more than simply nature, it is an embodiment of a moral order. The film begins with a snow that freezes and paralyses an entire society, and ends with a thawing that cannot take place until the crimes of the malefactors are revealed. They hope to escape to Scotland in a ship surreally stranded in sea-less ice; even when the rest of the ice breaks, it remains stubbornly immovable until the criminals are apprehended.

The crime isn't shown, and we are first alerted to it by a vision of Arne's wife, who sees men sharpening their knives. This is a film full of visions (when the crime is eventually shown, it's in a vision),some of them emanations of conscience, others 'Hamlet'-like messages from the grave, revealing the murders. Christian morality plays some part in conjuring up these visions, with Arne's wife's vision a token of guilt, and Arne's treasure, said to have been stolen from monastaries throughout the country, has a negative fetishistic power.

The difference between this supernatural realm and the vivid, material evocation of provincial life (dinners, dances, taverns, craftsmen, dogs etc.) is expressed in the strange, haunting imagery. In fact, the two frequently combine, especially at the end, when the death of the orphan produces a funeral cortege, a black worm of mourners slithering on the vast snow, that is both ritualistically 'timeless', strange, yet rooted in local traditions. The film's melodrama - the great suffering of its heroine, the arbitrary intrusion of brutal events, the cynical self-servingly remorseful anti-hero, the almost Kafkaesque proliferation of the military - thus becomes a kind of chilling horror story.