Fantastic use of double exposure and multiple flashbacks right from the gate in this exceptional Silent. The director himself plays the role of the wastrel David Holm, who recounts in flashback his friend Georges telling him of how the last person to die on New Year's Eve is compelled to take their place as driver of the phantom carriage and carry on Death's work of collecting souls.
Not one to heed his own lesson, David gets into a drunken graveyard brawl immediately before the strike of midnight and finds that the driver who has come to collect him is Georges himself! What follows is a morality play with clear influences on Bergman in it's at times blackly comic tone, moral irony and mysterious imagery.
One sequence in particular has the phantom carriage passing among the churning waves and debris of the seaside only to stop at the wreck of a boat. The driver then descends to find what at first appears to be a man sleeping peaceably on the ocean floor.
There is also a flashback of a TB-ridden Holm brazenly coughing in the face of his sleeping infant as his wife looks on in dread. This is followed spectacularly by an axe sequence that Kubrick must have seen. Apparently, Sjostrom's early childhood was spent in turn of the century Brooklyn up until the death of his mother.
The Dickensian moralistic elements of the story dominate the final chapter, predictably. Georges dutifully binds his old friend's discorporate soul with invisible chains and shows him the aftermath of his ways. But the technique and storytelling themselves are so powerful that this is not to be missed.
Not one to heed his own lesson, David gets into a drunken graveyard brawl immediately before the strike of midnight and finds that the driver who has come to collect him is Georges himself! What follows is a morality play with clear influences on Bergman in it's at times blackly comic tone, moral irony and mysterious imagery.
One sequence in particular has the phantom carriage passing among the churning waves and debris of the seaside only to stop at the wreck of a boat. The driver then descends to find what at first appears to be a man sleeping peaceably on the ocean floor.
There is also a flashback of a TB-ridden Holm brazenly coughing in the face of his sleeping infant as his wife looks on in dread. This is followed spectacularly by an axe sequence that Kubrick must have seen. Apparently, Sjostrom's early childhood was spent in turn of the century Brooklyn up until the death of his mother.
The Dickensian moralistic elements of the story dominate the final chapter, predictably. Georges dutifully binds his old friend's discorporate soul with invisible chains and shows him the aftermath of his ways. But the technique and storytelling themselves are so powerful that this is not to be missed.
