I've spent my whole life studying film, informally, of course, but with some intensity. I read capsule reviews and Pauline Kael in The New Yorker when I was in eighth grade, devoured books on film history, and have continued to see movies, although mostly on TV and DVD, at the rate of two or three a week for forty years. Yet I must acknowledge that what I don't know about films could fill the proverbial book. An example is a little movie made in 1951 in Norway, something bearing the unpromising name of Krane's Confectionary (the Norwegian word is Konditori -- a term that is broader than "confectionary" and means something like bodega in modern East Coast usage: the joint in the film is a combination cafe, soda fountain and tavern that also features dancing to juke box music on the weekends and, further, is equipped with a "private room" for discrete encounters.) The movie was screened on TCM as part of the series Women Make Film and was directed by Astrid Hennings-Jensen. The cast of Norwegian actors are all excellent although wholly obscure to me. Not much information is available in English as to the film's director. In short, this is an estimable picture that punches well above its weight and one that very few people in the United States will have seen or even heard of.
The film is a satiric melodrama, an archetypal "women's picture" with a noble, if self-destructive, and long-suffering heroine. The film is certainly "adult" -- I think by American standards of the time the picture would have been regarded as scandalous. The movie is about relationships, and complex ones at that -- we observe the heroine interacting with her teenage children, an ex-husband and a former lover, as well as an enigmatic drifter, a sort of Nordic Boudou (saved from drowning) who appears to offer comfort to the besieged and suffering protagonist, Katinka Stordal. Set in a tiny fjord town in what is probably northern Norway (someone says that the place gets two months of summer), the movie plays out like a combination of Sinclair Lewis' Main Street and Ibsen's theater-works, particularly An Enemy of the People and A Doll's House. The village in which the action takes place seems unimposing and is chock-full of incestuous-seeming relationships -- everyone knows everyone else's history, there's no privacy, and everyone feels licensed to condemn the heroine. Yet, the townspeople, ostentatiously attending Church on Sunday (in a rainstorm so cold and bleak that you can feel the chill coming off your TV) are all hypocrites -- everyone condemns conduct in which they also have engaged.
The movie begins early on a Saturday morning, eight days before the celebration of the village's centennial -- it's called the "anniversary" in the film. The action continues sequentially, with one flashback (shot in over-exposed and gauzy tones) through to its ending. Katinka Stordahl is the town's seamstress and said to be "magically" gifted with needle and sewing machine. She is beset with dozens of orders for dresses and alterations demanded by the town's matrons who want to look their best at the centennial celebration. Her customers bully her mercilessly -- at one point, one of the women is fearful that Katinka will commit suicide and, then, "who will get the dresses ready for the celebration." She's chronically under-paid, months behind on rent and other costs (the bailiff threatens to repossess her sewing machine although his wife, who has alterations in progress, talks him out of this.) Katinka's children are useless brats and don't help theit mother whom we first meet slumped over her work, asleep after having labored all night long. Katinka's situation is complex: she was formerly married to Peder Stordal, but had an affair with Stordal's best friend, Justus Gjor; her daughter Borghild is the child of Gjor. Since her divorce from Stordal, she has been alone -- Gjor abandoned her. Peder Stordahl, a failed architect, is carrying on an affair with the town's sole blonde, a woman who is also sleeping with several other men in town, including the local seducer. This smarmy lothario seems to have had relations with all of the female characters and has his eyes set on the virginal, if nubile, Borghild. At the seamstress' shop, a claustrophobic room in Katinka's small apartment, the phone rings continuously and the local matrons are lined-up outdoors to demand their garments. Borghild pouts and has been sleeping-in on this Saturday morning. Pushed to an extreme of nervous exhaustion, Katinka walks off the job, wanders about in town, and seems to be contemplating suicide. She goes into Krane's and orders a glass of sherry -- it's about eleven a.m. The staff at Krane's eyes her censoriously and, everyone, judges that she should be back at work, pushing a needle through fabric -- "how is she going to get the dresses ready for the anniversary?" everyone demands. Then, an outsider, Stivhatten, appears in the confectionary -- he's a drifter, a sailor stranded in the village, and, apparently, a foreigner to boot (he is Swedish). Stivhatten seems to have a bad reputation -- he's said to be a ruffian and drunk. Stivhatten sees the lonely and distraught woman drinking alone and, so, he joins her, buys another bottle of booze and they spend the afternoon together. He takes her to his shack on the waterfront and serenades her, singing and playing his battered guitar. The town hoodlums taunt Katinka's children, Jorgen and Borghild, and there's a fight. Of course, the vicious hyenas in the town construe the relationship to be sexual although in fact, it may be innocent-- Katinka seeks solace in Stivhatten but, probably, doesn't have sex with him, although this is really beside the point. Katinka's ex-husband is outraged by her behavior. Her former lover Justus Gjor, appears and confronts her in the drifter's shack -- the weather has changed to chilly rainfall. After a long night, the townsfolk go to Church. Katinka is reconciled with her daughter who has narrowly escaped the town lothario's attentions and Katinka renounces her relationship with Stivhatten, whatever it was, and goes back voluntarily to her slavery. Stivhatten has suggested that the two of them run away, but both recognize that this is quixotic notion, an unrealistic dream. In the last shot, Stivhatten ambles across the wet town square in the drizzle, making his way back to Krane's Konditori.
Hennings-Jensen directs the film in an expressive style: there are flamboyant tracking shots, particularly when Katinka wanders either alone or with Stivhatten through the village. The camera seems to dolly through closed, rain-streaked windows and the Konditori is effectively visualized: the place has a dowdy white-washed-looking interior behind a pretentious spinning door and the little "private room" raised a bit above the rest of the cafeteria-style interior is theatrical, a small dimly-lit stage it seems poised over the improvised dance-floor. Hennings-Jensen is sparing with close-ups but uses them effectively; she rim-lights her actors and actresses so that their profiles glow in the austere northern light and stages some scenes with complex systems of shadows or mirrors. The technique is a bit like that deployed by Douglas Sirk in some of his fifties melodramas and, also, of course looks somewhat like some of Fassbinder's pictures. The three characters who form a chorus commenting on the action at the confectionary are exceptional -- one of them is a vile woman who accompanies every insult and denunciation with a spitting sneer, a hiss in her upper lip; a younger waitress embodies the town's hypocrisy -- she denounces Katinka for being promiscuous but seems to be involved in some clandestine relationship with the town's Don Juan; Mrs. Krane is a fretful romantic, desperately knitting as if to distract herself from the sordid goings-on taking place under eyes -- she gives Katinka the benefit of the doubt and, even, perhaps, admires her courage in opposing the toxic hypocrisy in town. All of the minor characters are indelibly portrayed -- there's a band of hoodlums who bullies Katinka's son, a town bailiff who fancies himself Napoleon and sits in an office under a big bust of the emperor, and the male leads are all movie-star beautiful in the style of the Barrymore's big, bulky men with leonine manes of hair; Stivhatten is a wiry-little tough-guy who threatens violence but never acts on his threats. The film becomes a bit too overwrought in its last fifteen minutes and the movie's resolution is a unsatisfying, if realistic -- the town bad guys don't get their comeuppance, Katinka doesn't find love or, even, much in the way of romance, and, although she seems to be reconciled with her daughter, it's pretty clear that the harmony between mother and daughter will not abide. In the film's penultimate scene she is about to turn back to her sewing machine as her daughter draws closed the curtains in her little shop.
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