The Swedish filmmaker Jan Troell (pronounced like Noël), who routinely directs, writes, photographs, and edits his films, is an exception to this dismal rule. The international success of his two-part epic film The Emigrants/The New Land (1972), about a Swedish family's migration to America in 1850 was noticed sufficiently by Warner Bros. that he was offered to direct a script based on the novel The Stranger: A Novel of the Big Sur by Lillian Bos Ross. Troell didn't like the script and turned it down, but on reading the novel, part of a Big Sur Trilogy, he was impressed enough by it that he found another writer, Marc Norman, to adapt it. Troell called the film Zandy's Bride (1974).
The "story" of the film is, despite the rewrite, unremarkable: Zandy Allan, a cattle rancher in Big Sur, needs help running things, but instead of looking to hire extra hands, he opts for a mail order bride from Minnesota. He finds an ad in a newspaper classified section:
RESPECTABLE spinster, American stock, wants life in the West. Wishes to marry. Reply P.O. Box 192, Minneapolis, Minnesota.
He puts on a clean, ill-fitting white shirt and rides all the way down to an incongruous outpost smack on the coast where the woman from Minnesota, Hannah Lund, has just arrived by stage. After sizing each other up, he chides her for lying (by 7 years) about her age, telling her she's "on the long side of child-bearing."
Immediately we are faced with incongruity. The leads are Liv Ullmann and Gene Hackman. Ullmann had shown up to act in the film, whereas Gene Hackman showed up to be Gene Hackman. In every film he's exactly the same, no matter how he's dressed or what he's saying. Ullmann is given so little to work with, but you can see her working with it, filling out her period costume like she's been dressed like that all her life, assured, responsive, engaged with her role and the "West" that Troell introduces to us. She makes us wonder what drove her to place that ad. Gene Hackman interests us only so far as his actions divulge, and his limitations are visited upon Zandy.
The two are married then and there, and after the long ride back up the mountain Zandy stables the horses and returns to the house to find Hannah passed out in bed in her traveling clothes. There follows a scene that makes it very hard for us to like Zandy much further. "I got the right!" he screams as he violently rapes her. The following morning he acts like what transpired either didn't happen or was unimportant. He spends the day with his cattle and returns to find some improvements to what Hannah calls his "pigsty." Gradually they wear each other down - she growing tougher, he growing gentler. The result is, of course, no surprise, but the progress to the film's anticlimax holds a few surprises. Some beautiful scenes unfold as Zandy becomes captivated by the beauty of Hannah, reminding me how, for about a decade, between Persona and The New Land, everyone seemed to be in love with Liv Ullmann. Jordan Cronenweth does capture some lovely images: of Zandy and Hannah at table, lit by the light coming off a basket of wildflowers on the table between them, or Zandy watching in admiration as Hannah brushes her long blonde hair by the firelight. Cronenweth certainly might have had some guidance from Troell, or indeed from George Oddner, who is listed in the end credits as "consultant to Jan Troell". Some things, however, don't work so well. Like the scene in which Zandy engages in hand to claw combat with a not very large black bear. The bear-mawling of Leo DiCaprio in The Revenant, albeit abetted by CGI, has set an impossibly high bar for any such scenes.
Troell was promised that he could also operate the camera, but the American cinematographers' union threatened to fine the appointed director of photography (Jordan Cronenweth) $500 every time Troell touched the camera. The result of depriving Troell of access to the camera, which introduced more cooks to the kitchen, is what really prevented Zandy's Bride from getting off the ground. “The biggest difference for me about working in America was the number of people around the camera. In the centre, it’s the same, the relationship between the director, the actors and the camera." (1) Troell started in film as a cinematographer, and he had operated the camera in his four feature films in Sweden. Forced to block only actors (deciding where they should stand in relation to the design that isn't his own), instead of his camera taking part in the blocking must have been crippling for Troell. The photography of his Swedish films is a marvelous voyage of discovery for the viewer.
Zandy's family - father, mother, and a brother - are introduced, only to give the viewer a good idea where Zandy learned about domestic violence. A Mexican woman, Maria Cordova (played by Susan Tyrrell, who was misidentified as "Maria Cordova" in The New York Times review of the film)(2), with whom Zandy has a history, gives the story - and Zandy - an excuse to go astray from Hannah's story, which is the reason the film exists. At least Tyrrell doesn't subject the viewer to her usual crazy lady schtick, for which she was nominated for an Oscar in John Huston's Fat City (1972).
Zandy's Bride gave me the feeling that what attracted Troell to the story's possibilities in direct human terms was precisely what turned critics away from it. You find yourself waiting for something to happen in the film and then you realize what happened went right on by without your noticing it: the gradual action of one force upon another, each resistant to the influence of the other, in which the trajectories of both are eventually altered. The notion that Zandy's Bride is somehow in the tradition of a Western is more than a little silly when you remember that Troell accomplished one of the greatest sequences on the theme of the West in The New Land, when Karl Oskar's brother Robert and his slow-witted friend Arvid trek all the way to California to strike gold, to encounter only death and disappointment. Troell's camera showed us no sweeping vistas, no Monument Valley horizons, no sense of immensities except what the face of Eddie Axberg, who plays Robert, discloses. It is all up close, through the mud and the dirt and the pain, with a bare minimum of dialogue and a handful of other actors. Yet it says so much more about the tragedy of the West than a thousand Westerns.
Zandy's Bride got some positive notices, but not enough with which to build a Hollywood career. Troell returned to Sweden none the worse for his experience. The most significant reason for Troell's failure in Hollywood was much more fundamental than his lack of control over the camera: a filmmaker's nationality is essential to his work. Remove him from his native soil and native language - his ethos - and he is more than simply uprooted. He has lost his frame of reference, his ability to navigate the strange new world around him. Troell returned to Sweden to make Bang! (1977), and finished Hurricane (1979), which Roman Polanski was hired to direct before his sexual predilections ended his own Hollywood career. While making Hurricane, Troell met the Swedish journalist, Agneta Ulfsater, who would become his wife. So Troell emerged the winner from his encounter with Hollywood.
(1) Troell to Michael Dwyer, "A Life Calling the Shots," The Irish Times, May 21, 2009.
(2) Howard Thompson, The New York Times, May 20, 1974.
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