Earlier prints of the film originate from a downsized, academy ratio colour internegative, in which non-original intertitles were inserted in 1988. A second safety negative in the collections, made from the same positive nitrate source, was studied more in detail in 2013. This second negative is in black-and-white, in the correct full frame aspect ratio, and has original intertitles (including an animated logo in the opening credit sequence). From this second negative, a Desmet print was struck in 2013 at the Svenska Filminstitutet Laboratory in Rotebro, using prints from the colour negative as indication for the tinting. Norrtullsligan depicts the life of four female office workers who share a flat and try to be self-sufficient, self-providing and self-confident in a man’s world. A delightful comedy, with some nice ironic touches, the film also shows how the women are worn-out at work and being maltreated by their male superiors (at one point they even go on strike for better working conditions). The main character, the ‘I’ of the story, is played with wonderfully subdued means and a wry sense of humour by legendary stage actress Tora Teje, who became the first major Swedish star when she also began acting in films in the 1920s. She only played in a handful of films, but her memorable performances contributed to the quality and lasting fame of most of them, including the trio of performances she made in her screen debut year: the woman torn between her family and the man she loves in Sjöström’s Klostret i Sendomir (1920), the abused farmer’s wife in Karin Ingmarsdotter (Sjöström, 1920), and the slightly bored, upper-class wife of in Stiller’s Erotikon (1920). Teje brought depth, understanding, intelligence and beauty to the screen, always hinting that there was more hidden within the characters than what appears at first. Norrtullsligan is a rather close adaptation of a famous novel by author and journalist Elin Wägner; the film’s wonderfully laconic inter-titles are direct quotations from the book. The filmmakers decided however to change the ending of the story, something Wägner herself criticized in a slightly bewildered review for a local newspaper. But despite the conventional and somewhat disappointing ending, Norrtullsligan is a remarkably modern film. It is a modern also in terms of the direction by Per Lindberg. Most striking is the famous shot where we see an endless line of workers by their typewriters in a gigantic office space, a shot similar to those found in more famous, but later films, such as King Vidor’s The Crowd (1928) and Billy Wilder’s The Apartment (1960). Lindberg was a solitary figure in Swedish cinema; after making two silent films he only returned to cinema, from his first love theatre, in the late 1930s, to make a series of innovative though not always successful films.

Jon Wengström