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The online film magazine Combustible Celluloid offers new movie reviews, DVD reviews, film reviews, actor interviews, actress interviews, director interviews, film books and all things cinema related for the thoughtful and passionate. Online for ten years! Over 3000 reviews!

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Victor Sjöström (1981)

Rating: 3 Stars (out of 4)

Swede Dreams

By Jeffrey M. Anderson

Buy The Outlaw And His Wife/Victor Sjostrom on DVD

Kino has released this 1981 documentary by Gösta Werner as well as three early Victor Sjöström features on two DVDs. Both the documentary and the films emphasize Sjöström's skillful, poetic use of natural landscapes and elements to heighten his films. Both trace his early career making the routine melodramas of the period, his later career in Hollywood, and then his final phase as an actor back in Sweden (culminating in his masterful performance in Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries). Unfortunately, the documentary skims over the Hollywood period in less than a minute, saying that Sjöström was "never really happy there." Meanwhile, Sjöström's two most interesting, most popular features, The Phantom Carriage (1921) and The Wind (1928) are still not available on DVD. A case can be made for The Outlaw and His Wife (1918), packaged with the documentary, as an early triumph, but Ingeborg Holm (1913) and A Man There Was (1917) -- packaged together on the second DVD -- are of more historical than aesthetic interest.

Starring: Victor Sjöström, Ingmar Bergman, Erland Josephson, Hilda Borgström, Edith Erastoff, Ingrid Bergman
Written by: Victor Sjöström, Sam Ask, Gustaf Molander
Directed by: Victor Sjöström, Gösta Werner
MPAA Rating: Unrated
Running Time: 260 minutes
Date: June 30, 2008