Cinema Gadfly – Episode 15 – Day of Wrath

My guest for this month is Neven Mrgan, and he’s joined me to discuss the film I chose for him, the 1943 romantic drama film Day of Wrath. You can follow the show on Twitter @cinemagadfly.

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

Buy the film from Amazon
Watch the film on Hulu