Hollywood's Nordic Men

Scandinavian Review, Summer 2004 by Dewey, Donald

Aside from serving as a respite from his conflict over The Wind, Sjöström's return home was triggered by the depressing fate of Mauritz Stiller, a director friend with whom he had been customarily paired as the brightest beacons of Swedish cinema through the teens and early twenties. Born in Helsinki of RussianPolish parents, Stiller found his way to Sweden with the help of a false passport a few minutes before the occupying Tsarist armies in Finland drafted him into their ranks. After two separate creative phases as the director of light comedies and then of epic dramas, he became Garbo's Svengali for Gosta Berling's Sagahis passport to Hollywood. But once in California, it was Svengali who became Trilby under punishing humiliations from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer head Louis B. Mayer, who decided the actress needed only one mentor and it wouldn't be somebody from Helsinki. With both MGM and Paramount, Stiller got into creative squabbles that ended with his firing. An ailing, broken man, he returned to Europe in 1927, directed a stage musical in Stockholm, then died at the age of 45. Stiller's bleak experiences became the mold for any number of Hollywood movies over the years dealing with "star is born" relationships.

While in Hollywood, Sjöström's favorite collaborator was fellow Swede Lars Hanson, Gish's tall, blond co-star in both The Scarlet Letter and The Wind and Garbo's romantic interest in The Divine Woman (1928). Like many other Europeans, Hanson returned home with the advent of sound because of the wisdom that audiences in Omaha wouldn't be able to deal with his vowels and consonants. An exception was Nils Asther, a Swedish leading man who made his mark in the U.S. at the end of the silent era and then turned his accent to coin by playing supporting roles in such major productions as Frank Capra's The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1933).

ASTHER'S SINGULARITY IN THE 1930S owed a great deal to the American film industry's emphasis on light comedies as a relief from Depression-era realities and its prejudice that Europeans not named Maurice Chevalier were unsuited for the genre. The only other Scandinavian male of any renown in the period was the Dane Carl Brisson. A jack-of-all-trades who started out as a boxer in his homeland, Brisson turned song-and-dance man in Sweden, then went on to England where he appeared both on the stage and in Alfred Hitchcock's earliest films. He moved to Hollywood in 1934 for Murder at the Vanities and two minor melodramas, then transferred his talents to the Broadway stage for good. His son Frederick Brisson married Rosalind Russell and was a prominent theatrical producer after World War II.

The forties and fifties were no richer. While every other Hollywood production seemed to feature a Signe Hasso, Viveca Lindfors or Marta Toren, Scandinavian actors remained thin on the ground to the point of invisibility. The loudest exception was Danish Wagnerian tenor (arguably the greatest heldentenor of all time) Lauritz Melchior, who appeared late in his career in a number of negligible musical comedies along the lines of Luxury Liner (1948) and The Stars Are Singing (1953). Melchior was also responsible for his son Ib, a screenwriter and director associated with such low-budget howlers as When Hell Broke Loose (1958), Live Fast Die Young (1958) and The Angry Red Planet (1960). Briefly more conspicuous was the Swede Alf Kjellin, chosen by director Vincente Minnelli to star in the 1949 production of Madame Bovary with Jennifer Jones and James Mason. But Kjellin was also forced to change his name to Christopher Kent for the occasion-one of several reasons he fled back to Europe as soon as shooting was completed. Eventually, he returned to Hollywood, and under his own name not only played supporting roles in major features (Ship of Fools in 1965 and Ice Station Zebra in 1968, among them), but also directed theatrical films and weekly television series.