Carl Theodor Dreyer (1889-1968) had a career that spanned a near six decades though his work never caught the public imagination in the same sense that Ingmar Bergman did, though it was indubitably of worth. Dreyer's finest hours would start ticking with Vredens Dag (Day of Wrath,1943), a bleak and haunting study of a man's inhumanity to man in the fact of witchcraft.
Danes suffering under the Nazi occupation would see more in this film than was obvious to the more casual viewer. Ordet (The Word,1955) was a riveting remake of Gustav Molander's 1943 based on Kaj Munk's existential play. Dreyer's version is infinitely less naturalistic than Molanders' and ends on a mystical note with the awakening from the dead of the young wife Inger, rising up from her coffin in the ghastly light of a bare white room at the farm which she dwells.