CARL TH. DREYER
Day of Wrath
A defunct podcast about trading films with friends. Each month I chose a film for a friend to watch and they chose one for me. Then we discussed. There were two episodes a month, first my choice and then theirs. My guest for this month was Neven Mrgan, and he joined me to discuss the film I chose for him, the 1943 romantic drama film Day of Wrath.
Show notes:
- The director of this film, Carl Theodore Dreyer, had an extremely unhappy childhood, which seems relevant
- The story was based on a Norwegian play called Anne Pedersdotter), about an actual witch trial
- A previous Dreyer film The Passion of Joan of Arc, was super controversial when it was initially released in France
- My favorite Dreyer film thus far is Vampyr, which has the eerie quality of dreams
- I also enjoyed Master of the House, which had a lot more in common with this film stylistically
- This could be seen as a cautionary tale on the dangers of electing Donald Trump
- It's hard to believe this film could have been made in the US, at least not under the Hays Code of the time
- Apparently the correct term for Absalon and his other church official buddies is pastor
- That one evil church dude does really look an awful lot like Vladimir Putin
- It's not hard to see all the influences this must have had on Arthur Miller's play The Crucible
- The Fassbinder film that we watched instead of this was Mutter Küsters' Fahrt zum Himmel
- Dreyer was a huge, and obvious, influence, on Danish director Lars von Trier
- Sidney Lumet's Making Movies is a good book, but I'm not sure he named the actress he slapped as Meryl Streep
- If I Did It is an actual book, nominally by OJ Simpson, about how he would have committed the murders. Yep
- During the time this film was made, Denmark was occupied by the Nazis
- It's important to note that Facism typically comes after Totalitarianism
- Neither the actress who played Anne, nor the one who played Herlof's Marte, are known for much other work