I saw this movie before reading any reviews, and I thought it was very funny. I was very surprised to see the overwhelmingly negative reviews this film received from critics.

Go in cold, and you're likely to emerge with your blood boiling. This has to be seen to be believed.

This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

One of the best movies of the year! Incredible from the beginning to the end.

One of the few foreign language films to be nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards (it didn't win, of course), The Emigrants tells the story of the hardships a family faces in a rural county of Sweden, causing them to look to America as a refuge. What's interesting about The Emigrants is that the film is Swedish- you wouldn't necessarily expect the Swedes to make a film about how awful Sweden is and how great the United States is. But, using a realistic and not melodramatic approach, the film lets us know what the family is struggling with and allows us to understand them.The characters, played by Ingmar Bergman regulars Max von Sydow, Liv Ullmann and Allan Edwall, face poor harvests, starvation, poverty, religious persecution and even false rumours of bestiality. They look to the US as a place where a farmer can become rich, with even American slavery looking better than their previous situation. Getting to North America, however, will take a rough voyage in which our heroes will face disease, lice and death, and come into psychological conflict with each other. This makes for a strong drama.Surely one of the best foreign films of the 1970s and a great addition to the strong cinematic year 1971, The Emigrants is an understated but still compelling film, and I look forward to The Criterion Collection's restoration.

For a variety of reasons-economic, social and religious force residents of a Swedish area to leave and come to America.Liv Ullmann received a best actress nomination for the Oscar and I really don't know why. Yes, she had some good emotional outbursts at times, but she was often difficult to understand. Perhaps, she could have used some tips from Loretta Young, who gave us an authentic Swedish accent in 1947's "The Farmer's Daughter," and got an Oscar for it.Ullmann is married to Max Von Sydow who really uses her as a baby making service. She is constantly pregnant throughout the film.The real top acting honors in the film go to the harlot and deacon, both forced out for their religious views.Other than lice, death and general malaise, the scenes on board never are riveting.

I just want to thank my grandmother (my mother's mother) for buying these four novels some time during her long lifetime and letting me inherit them after her death three years ago. Even though I haven't read all way through them since 2000, I still appreciate having them in my collection, and Grandma even saved me some bucks by letting me inherit her copies. I might also add, that these books were among the few ones, that her husband (my grandfather and my mother's father) ever even looked into, according to Mum. Vilhelm Moberg sure is one of our greatest writers over here in Sweden of all time. If we move over to the movie, it's really good at following the books. I hate it when film-makers do unnecessary changes in the story, when they turn novels into movies. But fortunately, Troell actually followed the books really well. And I really understand, that Vilhelm Moberg wanted him and no one else to make these novels into movies.The first movie, "Utvandrarna" (The emigrants), is thus a really great movie adaption of the two novels "Utvandrarna" ("The emigrants") and "Invandrarna" ("The immigrants"). It's about how some people from Småland in Sweden decide to emigrate to America in the year 1850. We have Karl Oskar Nilsson, who decides to move to America with his wife Kristina and their children and his younger brother Robert. Even though Kristina was reluctant to leave Sweden, Karl Oskar convinces her to emigrate after their oldest daughter dies, so that the rest of the children can have better lives. Robert is forever marked by how he was treated by his master, when he was a farmhand, and wants to leave for the free country in the west, where servants can't be treated badly. Robert's friend Arvid is accused of having sex with a cow and wants to get away from that nasty rumor and follow Robert to the golden land in the west. Kristina's uncle Danjel and his wife Inga-Lena has to flee Sweden because of religious reasons. The former prostitute Ulrika and her illegitimate daughter Elin don't have anything to lose either. Jonas Petter, a neighbor of Karl Oskar and Kristina, just wants to get away from his unhappy marriage. After a hard journey over the Atlantic, these people come to Minnesota, where there already are a lot of Swedish people.The story is continued in the movie "Nybyggarna" (The new land).

When Jan Troell's "The Emigrants" was released in the U.S. in 1972, it opened to excellent reviews and received the honor of being one of the few foreign-language films to receive a Best Picture nomination. It didn't win anything, though, and seems to have been forgotten over the years. Perhaps this is because the public has since found other Swedish films to be more noteworthy, in particular the works of Bille August and the later works of Ingmar Bergman.Sad to say, because "The Emigrants" is a film that closely examines two very different cultures in an effective and insightful way. A diverse group of Swedish peasants (among them a married couple, a priest, a prostitute, and a young upstart) endure back-breaking labor in their homeland to little profit. They decide to move to the states after being influenced by the exaggerated stories spread abroad (everyone has more than enough food, everyone is filthy rich, etc.). The audience sympathizes with them not just because they endure so much in Sweden, but also because they believe the stories they hear about frontier life in America. Yes, they will obviously have to strive and struggle to survive in their new home, but they are all the more admirable because of their adherence to the American dream."The Emigrants" is harsh and often unrelenting in the straightforward way it depicts the realities encountered by the Swedish settlers. The scenes where they travel across the ocean in a small, cramped, and diseased ship are appropriately claustrophobic and terrifying. Later, the family at the center of the story threatens to break up when Liv Ullmann's character, a fragile young mother, loses track of her daughter while hurrying to board a steamboat.Although most of the characters were better developed in the sequel to this film, "The New Land," Troell's story is very moving in its sincere depiction of how outsiders came to this country to pursue their hopes and dreams.