Live musical accompaniment by the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra!

Victor Sjöström gained his greatest international fame as the star of Wild Strawberries, the 1957 classic by Swedish auteur Ingmar Bergman, where Sjöström played Dr. Isak Borg, an aging medical professor looking back on his professionally rich but personally loveless life. As a renowned actor almost eighty years old, Sjöström was perfect for the part. But another reason for Bergman's casting choice was his lifelong attachment to Sjöström's most highly acclaimed film: The Phantom Carriage, produced in 1921 and still regarded as Sjöström's most dazzling achievement. "My relationship with [it] is very special," Bergman said of the movie he watched every year for decades. "I was fifteen years old when I saw it for the first time" and it became "one of the major emotional and artistic experiences of my life." It certainly influenced some of Bergman's films, especially his 1957 masterpiece The Seventh Seal, in which Death carries off the living much as he does in Sjöström's earlier meditation on this mournful, universal subject.

- David Sterritt, TCM.com