The events are situated in a Polish harbor called Gdynia, with a boat that is supposed to take coal to Sweden. With a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany at hand and a sudden order to leave to Sevilla loaded with arms for Franco, we are in the middle of 1938. The approach is naturalistic: a view of ordinary working lives (meaning lower classes depicted in all their proletarian squalor, with the expectation that inner nobility will be revealed).

Yet the film feels like a view of an imaginary Europe in an imaginary time – an abstraction. Pretty much everything is there almost dutifully: a solidarity theme associated with Potemkin, echoes of the Spanish war and the horrors of Nazi regime, the Soviet cinema’s favorite theme of emerging consciousness and responsibility. The elements are quite a mix: a crass working class and “miserabilism”, melodrama, revolutionary romanticism – all this in the service of the theme of class struggle. The film is a collection of elements rather than an organic work: at worst a mess, at best a beautiful anticipation of what it means to be a real European in a time of crisis.

It is one of those unlocatable Swedish films (during the war there were films where the dramatic situations of Norway or Austria or Finland were masked by invented Countries), reflecting perhaps the angst of having remained neutral and – psychologically – played it safe when others suffered and bled.

The script by Herbert Grevenius, writer of several early Bergman films, is based on a play called Unknown Swedish soldier; it was produced by Rune Waldecrantz, later a noted film historian. It was a hot enough subject to have been excluded from Cannes in 1949 (as “communist propaganda”), and remains – whatever critical remarks I have made here – an impressive film with some mystical touches in spite of the many expected and obvious elements. Just experience the final “Internationale” sung in several languages… Hampe Faustman (1919-1961) directed some 20 films during a relatively short time, from 1943 till 1955. Most of them bore the stamp of his socialist convictions, and he remains the best known of the Country’s “engaged” directors, the forefather of later talents like Bo Widerberg or Stefan Jarl or Lukas Moodysson.

Peter von Bagh