The streets are paved with gold, or at least the brandy is cheaper than water. That’s what Lassefar tells his young son, Pelle, cradled in his arm, on an immigrant ship bound for a better life. How often have similar refrains been heard from the huddled masses on their way to America? But, here, the ship isn’t passing Lady Liberty on her way to New York instead the ship is bound, on a brief passage, from Sweden to Denmark loaded with Swedish immigrants.
Bille August of Twist and Shout fame has created a magnificent epic that captures human frailties in diffused colors and low light. The only sense of the passage of time is the changing seasons. Max von Sydow's portrayal of Lassefar, the father, is nothing short of brilliant. He starts off as a blustering, proud man—the viewer is never in any doubt, however, that this is an act of a habitually weak person—who’s certain of fame and fortune in this new land. The dream turns into a nightmare when he finds no taker of his offer of services on the dock, where in a scene, as savage as any you might expect in a movie about slavery, the Swedish immigrants are examined and dealt with as cattle.
Pelle and his father find indentured servitude at a local farm with other Swedes. They live in a cattle barn and their job is to care for the cows housed with them. The farm is owned by Kongstrup, an aging lothario with an inability to keep his trousers zippered, and his wife driven to drink and nightly bouts of eerie weeping. Young Pelle is first befriended by Rud, a Caliban like urchin, who runs wild and is rumored to be Kongstrup’s illegitimate child. The farm is run with an iron-fist by a foreman and his young assistant. Pelle runs afoul of the young assistant who publicly humiliates him and Lassefar consoles the weeping child with a promise to kill the assistant foreman. This promise is later, due to reasons of pragmatism, reduced to a good thrashing and when he finally does confront the foreman he feebly says: “I must remonstrate with you sir about your treatment of my child.” This is in sharp contrast to Erik, another Swedish worker, who had actually come to Pelle’s rescue by chasing of the bully. A bond grows between Erik and the child and they both dream of leaving the farm to immigrate to America and see the world out there.
The father, a widower, yearns for a woman to take care of them in his old age. He dreams of drinking coffee in bed on a Sunday. Ironically it’s through Pelle that he’s introduced to a sea widow, Mrs. Olson, who offers him the simple comforts of a cooked meal, mended clothes, and her bed. This relationship causes Pelle to be harassed and beaten at school by the other “native” children who have never accepted the young Swede. But poor old Lassefar is denied happiness with Mrs. Olson due to an unexpected twist of fate and turns to drink and self-pity. It’s now when the roles between father and son reverse. Pelle looks after and comforts his father and suddenly grows in stature. Pelle the Conqueror has few too many irrelevent threads running through it, but nevertheless this is a fine film that depicts the inhumanity of man towards man, and shows the genius of Bille August in capturing the darker side of our nature.