The Doll

            I am slowly going through my bucket list of films I have always wanted to see, for one reason or another. And one high on the list was The Doll (1962), a Swedish film I saw ads in the newspaper for but it never played anywhere near where I lived. It never popped up in repertoire movie theaters or on television or VHS. The irony is I just got a notice that this is appearing in August on the Film Movement streaming site (www.filmmovementplus.com).

            The ad promised it was ”Banned in England,” which really intrigued me. And there was a picture of a man and a creepy-looking mannequin. Was it a horror movie? I never found mention of it Phil Hardy’s Horror Encyclopedia. Or even in Michael Weldon’s Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film.

            Now I was familiar with the Pygmalion legend of the sculptor’s statue come to life. And the eerie Twilight Zone episode, The After Hours with Anne Francis as a mannequin in a department store that is allowed to come alive among the humans for only one month. I had yet to endure the horrible Mannequin rom-coms or the quirky comedy Lars and the Real Girl, starring Ryan Gosling who would be turned into a doll himself on film in the future. Through the years, I’d seen disturbing uses of mannequins in horror films like Maniac and Tourist Trap, and there was that unforgettable episode of Tales from the Darkside starring Jerry Orbach called Everybody Needs a Little Love based on a great Robert Bloch (Psycho) short story.

            Swedish films also fascinated me when I was young. Sure, I’d seen some Ingmar Bergman films like The Seventh Seal and The Virgin Spring, but other Scandinavian adult movies were good for showing some startling bits of nudity on screen or at least a good vomit scene.

            But it wasn’t until a month ago that I hunted down a subtitled bootleg DVD of the film. I just couldn’t believe I was finally getting to see the damn thing.

            Now it isn’t really a horror film, but more of a character study of a tragically lonely night watchman named Lundgren (Per Oscarsson), living in a rowdy, run down rooming house filled with bratty children, pet cats that scratch, nosy neighbors, flagrant adulterers, and a landlady with scars covering half her face.

            One day at work Lundgren makes off with a female mannequin he finds in the basement, which he feels a deep connection to. He gets her home, places her on the bed with a covering and when he realizes he dropped one of her hands on the stairs he retrieves it and melts some wax to reattach the limb. That’s when he hears the doll exclaim, “ouch.”

            Lundren is overjoyed that his “doll” (Gio Petre) has come to life and tries to shower her with gifts, like bracelets and a ratty fur coat. At first the doll is grateful and exclaims that Lundgren makes her happy and that she doesn’t need anything else. But as days pass she changes. Her mood darkens. She forces him to stay home from work to keep her company. She is seized by jealousy because of another woman in the building. His mania and paranoia over the mannequin reaches a feverish pitch which alarms others that live in the rooming house. There is this sense that something awful might happen and it actually does.

            Per Oscarsson was a well-respected theater and film legend, who won best actor at the Cannes Film Festival for his performance in Hunger, a gritty Danish, neo-realist bummer of a movie. But he is incredible in The Doll– you watch in awe as he descends into madness. It’s a brilliant, shattering performance. 

            The Doll is artfully directed by Arne Mattson (One Summer of Happiness) and beautifully acted (by Oscarsson). The film is genuinely heartbreaking. I can’t even remember what I imagined The Doll to be when I was cutting out the ad from a newspaper and pasting it into my “movie wish book” back then. I probably fantasized a mannequin coming to life, running around stabbing people at night as they slept. How much better Lars and the Real Girl would have been if that life-sized sex doll had strangled the shit out of Ryan Gosling. Or if Kim Cattrall in Mannequin had magically come to life and then ran over Andrew McCarthy on a motorcycle. 

            But to be perfectly honest, these moments (tracking down movies you’ve always wanted to see) always remind me of that scene in A Fish Called Wanda where Kevin Kline finally cracks open the safe only to find it empty and then cries out: “Disappointed!”