I had long avoided this film because I didn't want to see it in an inferior print such as that described by other reviewers. Happily, the new Criterion DVD (as I write only available in a Dreyer box set, but I expect that will change) is absolutely gorgeous. The print is just short of flawless-- a few speckles here and there-- but most importantly the tonal range is true to the superb cinematography, one of the best-looking B&W DVDs available.
LOTS OF SPOILERS BELOW-- DON'T READ UNTIL YOU SEE!
Having said the above, I thought I'd add something about what I think the film means. Which necessarily means spoiling the ending (not that you're likely to be in too much doubt as you watch a movie entitled Day of Wrath). At first, expecting something like The Crucible, with a clear message against religious intolerance-- which is certainly where the first part of the movie seems to be going, with obvious application toward other forms of intolerance prevalent in 1943-- I was a bit puzzled by the ending, in which Anna is not so much a victim as self-victimizing. Having seen her throughout as something of a tragic heroine, and the movie as advocating a more liberal, tolerant Christianity (which, on the basis of other Dreyer films, I assumed was his outlook), I was unsatisfied by her willful self-destruction.
It was only after I did some reading (starting with Jonathan Rosenbaum's notes, where I learned that some think Dreyer was an atheist, or a rebel against his adoptive parents' atheism, or both) that I realized that the great genius of the film is its very ambiguity, the tragic ambiguity, that goes so far beyond a play like The Crucible, which assumes that everything will be all right if we stop being fundamentalists and become liberal and tolerant Christians. (Not that it wouldn't help!) Day of Wrath, it seems to me, is a depiction of how religious dogma destroys different people in different ways. The pastor-- and in the end, his son also-- is an object lesson in how a seemingly decent man can do evil if he's blinded to it by a rigid faith. That seems a clear enough message for 1943.
But Anna is in an entirely different movie in some ways-- a feminist tale of sorts, in which she awakens to the reality of a female subculture of witchcraft in quiet rebellion to the male-dominated religious culture, and comes to believe that she has the powers it promises (what she really has is nothing supernatural, but an awakened sexuality as well). Her tragedy, though, is that she cannot escape her childhood belief in conventional Christianity, and at the moment when she could be free, it makes her condemn herself to death. Far from demonstrating Dreyer's actual belief in either Christianity or witchcraft (as Georges Sadoul, for one, claims), this seems to me to be as clear a statement of non-belief as anything in Bunuel.
LOTS OF SPOILERS BELOW-- DON'T READ UNTIL YOU SEE!
Having said the above, I thought I'd add something about what I think the film means. Which necessarily means spoiling the ending (not that you're likely to be in too much doubt as you watch a movie entitled Day of Wrath). At first, expecting something like The Crucible, with a clear message against religious intolerance-- which is certainly where the first part of the movie seems to be going, with obvious application toward other forms of intolerance prevalent in 1943-- I was a bit puzzled by the ending, in which Anna is not so much a victim as self-victimizing. Having seen her throughout as something of a tragic heroine, and the movie as advocating a more liberal, tolerant Christianity (which, on the basis of other Dreyer films, I assumed was his outlook), I was unsatisfied by her willful self-destruction.
It was only after I did some reading (starting with Jonathan Rosenbaum's notes, where I learned that some think Dreyer was an atheist, or a rebel against his adoptive parents' atheism, or both) that I realized that the great genius of the film is its very ambiguity, the tragic ambiguity, that goes so far beyond a play like The Crucible, which assumes that everything will be all right if we stop being fundamentalists and become liberal and tolerant Christians. (Not that it wouldn't help!) Day of Wrath, it seems to me, is a depiction of how religious dogma destroys different people in different ways. The pastor-- and in the end, his son also-- is an object lesson in how a seemingly decent man can do evil if he's blinded to it by a rigid faith. That seems a clear enough message for 1943.
But Anna is in an entirely different movie in some ways-- a feminist tale of sorts, in which she awakens to the reality of a female subculture of witchcraft in quiet rebellion to the male-dominated religious culture, and comes to believe that she has the powers it promises (what she really has is nothing supernatural, but an awakened sexuality as well). Her tragedy, though, is that she cannot escape her childhood belief in conventional Christianity, and at the moment when she could be free, it makes her condemn herself to death. Far from demonstrating Dreyer's actual belief in either Christianity or witchcraft (as Georges Sadoul, for one, claims), this seems to me to be as clear a statement of non-belief as anything in Bunuel.