Carl Theodor Dreyer's Day of Wrath (1943)

With Day of Wrath Dreyer tackled head on for the first time his perennial preoccupation with witchcraft -- or rather, with woman as witch -- and came up, of course, with a verdict of not guilty to the black arts of superstition, but guilty to having power over the souls of other human beings.
Tom Milne, The Cinema of Carl Dreyer, (A.S. Barnes and Company, 1971).

Danish director Dreyer is little talked about today and I think that is, in part, due to the fact that many of us were exposed to his The Passion of Joan of Arc (1927) when we were students and it was promoted as the epitome of film as art (along with Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin, from 1925).  These rigorous but arcane films turned students away from film, especially silent film, as effectively as A Tale of Two Cities and The Mill on the Floss (the weakest novels of Dickens and Eliot) turned students away from literature.  Some of us who persevered with films as we grew up, however, eventually came to discover the intricate beauty and austerity of Dreyer's sound films, of which he made only five (compared to nine silent films).

Day of Wrath was made during the German occupation of Denmark, leading some critics to see it as a simplistic allegory, though it is much more.  It takes place in Denmark in 1623 and its black-and-white chiaroscuro is comparable to Rembrandt, who painted in the 17th century. It starts out with an accused witch tortured and burned alive and follows the struggle of a parson's young wife who falls love with the parson's son and who is accused of being a witch by her mother-in-law when the parson dies; the wife confesses that she did wish her husband dead.  The stuffy parsonage is contrasted with the freedom the son and wife feel when they are outside (where the parson and his mother never go), enjoying the rivers and the trees, an obvious influence of Griffith, who stressed the cinematic importance of "the wind in the trees."

Dreyer's austere and slow-moving style emphasizes the choices people have and how those choices are often suppressed by religion and society, often working together.  But Day of Wrath is not particularly didactic, demonstrating its intense sympathy for everyone's struggle to believe and to do the right thing.