The Man on the Roof — The Man on the Roof( Blu Ray)

‘The Man on the Roof,’ Swedish director Bo Widerberg’s Scandinavian Noir cinema milestone from 1975 is made available here as a hi-def restoration on Blu-ray from the Radiance label.   It's an adaptation of the seventh novel of the acclaimed Martin Beck series, and the film deserves its stellar reputation.

Screen adaptations of Scandinavian crime fiction have become increasingly popular in recent decades with the English-speaking viewing public with characters like Sarah Lund, Kurt Wallander and Lisbeth Salander becoming household names.  These police procedurals are informed by a special flavour that outsiders take to reflect Scandinavian national character(s), a mixture of doggedness, melancholia and wry humour.

This overnight success with Anglophone audiences was actually many years in the making.  The aforementioned characters are representatives of a second wave of Scandi Noir.  The genre can be traced back to the Inspector Martin Beck novels co written by the romantically involved couple Maj Sjowal and Per Wahloo between 1965 and 1994.  Their work was inspired by the more realistic crime traditions of Georges Simenon and the hardboiled American school, especially Raymond Chandler.

Prior to ‘The Man on the Roof’ there had been few adaptations of the Beck novels.  Bo Widerberg was an established figure in Swedish cinema but was suffering something of a career lull.  Choosing a subject like Beck with built in audience recognition was partly a practical decision but the movie is serious with an explicit agenda (Widerberg was a leftist like Beck’s creators, both avowed Marxists) and the director saw populist appeal as part of a coherent approach to both pursuing that agenda and creating a credible piece of cinema.

The film concerns the aftermath of the murder of Stig Nyman, an authoritarian and corrupt policeman.  After Nyman’s ineptitude results in his wife’s death and unable to find justice as the result of a subsequent cover-up, a traumatized police colleague, Ake Eriksson, murders the other policeman and then climbs onto a Stockholm roof and starts picking off random cops with a rifle.  The keynote to the movie’s approach has often been given as ‘realism’.  The overall aesthetics of the movie are more complicated and this complexity accounts for its success as distinctive cinema.

Widerberg’s approach to making a police thriller in ‘Man on the Roof’ represents the confluence of two separate traditions.  The first is the (mostly) European political thriller and its most famous examples, Gillo Pontecorvo’s ‘The Battle of Algiers’ (1966) and Costa-Gavras’ ‘Z’ (1969).  From these Widerberg takes his general approach of creating a sense of fly-on-the-wall verisimilitude.  When it comes to the action aspects the minutiae of Widerberg’s approach are rooted in the second tradition, that of the (then) recent American street thrillers such as Peter Yates’ ‘Bullitt’ (1968) and, crucially, William Friedkin’s ‘The French Connection’ (1971), movies that had their own aspects of gritty realism but also rejoiced in thrilling set pieces such as car chases dominated by unprecedented immediacy and danger. Before commencing work on ‘The Man on the Roof’ Widerberg screened ‘The French Connection’ several times for his cast and crew.  The latter tradition influences ‘Roof’’s climax where a police helicopter is brought down by Eriksson and crashes into a Stockholm street while Beck himself is almost assassinated.   Widerberg defended his use of crowd pleasing spectacle, stating he wanted to make audiences feel like ‘fifteen year olds’ and criticizing Stockholm’s established political theatre for its hidebound approach in only preaching to the converted and refusing to use techniques they consider vulgar to widen their audience.  The director likened his approach to ‘the Trojan Horse’. 

 ‘The Man on the Roof’ was a hugely popular and critical hit in Sweden on first release and on the disk extras it’s interesting to see a movie with an art house pedigree promoted with bas reliefs of the crashed helicopter on cinema hoardings in Stockholm.  This Blu-ray release confirms the movie as a success.  Widerberg has integrated his message about the lack of police accountability and its social toll flawlessly into the narrative while at the same time the complicated, sometimes ambivalent performances, involving storyline and, latterly, exciting spectacle make for a varied and successful cinematic experience.  Almost half a century later ‘The Man on the Roof’ is still perhaps the major Scandinavian police procedural movie and remains a key film, creating an approach to this material which still influences today and illustrates a viable, worthwhile way of negotiating a path between art and commerce.

This Radiance Blu-ray showcases an excellent hi-def restored version of ‘The Man on the Roof’ from 2004.  The movie can be played with a 3-minute introductory statement by Bo Widerberg contextualizing the opening scene’s extreme violence which accompanied the movie’s first broadcast on Swedish TV in 1977.  It includes an 81-minute documentary by Ronny Svensson and Marcus Stromqqvist, ‘With a View to Realism’ , also from 2004 which interviews surviving members of the shoot.  Giving primacy to ‘realism’ is reasonable enough but it does neglect details that go against the grain, like the surrealistic image of a disembodied eye in Nyman’s murder scene and a humorous ‘gag’ with a character fleeing back into a subway toilet to avoid the crashing ‘copter.

The other extras include a ‘Scene Specific Commentary by Peter Jilmstad’ where the genre expert breaks the movie into sections and discusses each aesthetically and thematically.  In ‘Bo Widerberg’, a 51-minute featurette from 1977, Karsten Wedel interviews the director to give an overview of his career to that date.  A 3-minute clip from a contemporary Swedish TV magazine, ‘Rapport’ features interviews with Widerberg and his Beck star, Carl-Gustaf Lindstedt.  There is also a picture gallery and a clean-looking contemporary Swedish trailer.

The selection and approach to extras on this disk make a real effort to contextualize the man and his films.  The picture that emerges of Bo Widerberg is of a creative dynamo who resembles his work.  Cerebral and meticulous on the surface but powered by great energy.