The Emigrants (1972)

Touches You

Stylish but barely mediocre overall

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

One of the few foreign language films to be nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards (it didn't win, of course), The Emigrants tells the story of the hardships a family faces in a rural county of Sweden, causing them to look to America as a refuge. What's interesting about The Emigrants is that the film is Swedish- you wouldn't necessarily expect the Swedes to make a film about how awful Sweden is and how great the United States is. But, using a realistic and not melodramatic approach, the film lets us know what the family is struggling with and allows us to understand them.The characters, played by Ingmar Bergman regulars Max von Sydow, Liv Ullmann and Allan Edwall, face poor harvests, starvation, poverty, religious persecution and even false rumours of bestiality. They look to the US as a place where a farmer can become rich, with even American slavery looking better than their previous situation. Getting to North America, however, will take a rough voyage in which our heroes will face disease, lice and death, and come into psychological conflict with each other. This makes for a strong drama.Surely one of the best foreign films of the 1970s and a great addition to the strong cinematic year 1971, The Emigrants is an understated but still compelling film, and I look forward to The Criterion Collection's restoration.

Jan Troell, has truly captured the feeling of what inspires people to emigrate and the subsequent hardships that await in the land of hope. True masters of the craft, Sydow and Ullmann, are superb in their performances. They truly pull you into the time, the frame of mind and thus make you feel like you are sharing their voyage. A great film that is everything a film should be - moving. It is a mystery why this film did not win an Oscar for best foreign picture, best actress and best actor - though with all fairness, with both Caberet and The Godfather in the running, it would have required a miracle. If you should have the luck of stumbling onto this film at a rental shop, thank Fellini's ghost - grasp it and head for the check out.

Even without 40 minutes of its original running time (trimmed by the idiots at Warner Brothers, who couldn't see American audiences sitting through a 3-hour film), "The Emigrants" is one of the greatest films ever made in Sweden - and probably the finest so far about the immigrant experience.Troell's film was also the most expensive production to date (1971) in Sweden, which outraged many Swedes and made them attack the film quite unfairly. Box Office receipts worldwide, however, persuaded Hollywood that Troell was "bankable" and gave him a few shots at at fame and fortune ("Zandy's Bride" and "The Hurricane" - the latter to have been directed by Roman Polanski just prior to his banishment from America). Luckily, Troell failed in Hollywood and went back to Sweden.

The Emigrants is a Swedish film based on the novels of Swedish author Wilhelm Moberg. It is about the emigrants who sailed from Sweden in the 1850s to come to the United States. Max von Sydow is patriarch Karl Oskar. Liv Ullmann is his faithful wife, Kristina. The film shows the unbearable conditions which existed in Sweden, the agony of the ocean voyage and the promise of a better life in Minnesota. Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus of ABBA turned the novels into a musical in the 1990s. The music is Swedish folk music. They are trying to get an English version to Broadway. The Emigrants and its 1972 sequel, The New Land, provide a wonderful learning experience.