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Unforgettable goddess
Garbo still smolders at the Brattle
BY STEVE VINEBERG
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Brattle Theater's official Web site

It’s possible to argue that Greta Garbo had the greatest camera instincts of any actress who’s ever appeared on the screen. She didn’t perform on stage; she retired from public life a decade before she might have been courted by TV — in 1941, at 36, after making the disastrous farce Two-Faced Woman for George Cukor at her home studio, MGM. (Her life wasn’t even half over: she died in 1990, at the age of 85.) But the camera released her fierce sensuality and even fiercer intelligence, those layers of torment and longing, world-weariness and resignation. You can’t imagine how they could have uncoiled in a medium less intimate or more constrained. Actors come to movies now with far better training than they did in the ’20s and ’30s, when Garbo was a star; the level of performance is higher. What we’ve lost, though, is the ability to judge actors — and especially actresses — who are complete camera animals. When one comes along, like Joan Chen, neither critics nor audiences know what to do with her. But Garbo is still thrilling to look at, as the new series at the Brattle confirms. You have the sense, watching her, that film was invented to track the strange currents of feeling that run like veins through her brow, that draw back that regal head like an invisible iron band and line those long, balletic arms, held in gestures of imploring and defeat in draped, oversized sleeves. And though she began in silents — first in her native Sweden and in Germany, then in Hollywood — she was even greater in talkies, where the microphone could catch the voice that was like an eternal sigh, the laughter that contained traces of agony (except in her one comic triumph, Ninotchka, which she did for Ernst Lubitsch in 1939), the Scandinavian lilt that sang of emotion kept back, too immense for words to frame.

The two silent movies in the collection, The Temptress and Flesh and the Devil (double-billed on October 17 and 18), are from the end of that era — 1926 and 1927, respectively — but they arrived on the brink of her breakthrough performances in Love and A Woman of Affairs. They’re fascinating documents of the period when she played, over and over again, the voracious siren on whose rocks men wreck themselves. Both movies are sumptuous examples, too, of the late-silent MGM style, with its magnificent production values and complicated, impressive staging. In Flesh and the Devil — by far the better of the two, the work of Garbo’s favorite director, Clarence Brown — she’s the devil who tempts the flesh of the two best friends, played by the charming John Gilbert, a devastatingly handsome matinee idol who could also act, and Garbo’s fellow Swede Lars Hanson. Hanson was also marvelous, and he’d acted with Garbo in Sweden, but opposite the far more naturalistic Gilbert he seems a little melodramatic. Still, the picture, with its duels (the first one shot, brilliantly, in a style influenced by the German Expressionists) and other romantic-melodramatic gestures, is something to watch, and so is Garbo.

The Brattle has included her first talkie, Anna Christie (October 3 and 4), from 1930. Adapted from Eugene O’Neill’s drama about a whore who reforms for the love of a sailor, and directed by Brown, it’s not much of a movie, but then it was never much of a play. Garbo’s ability to suggest the exhaustion and self-disgust of a streetwalker determined to give up the game and, simultaneously, the dignity of the natural aristocrat underneath gives it the only appeal it has. For the only time in her career, though, her accent is something of an issue — not only because her dialogue is so laden with American idioms but also because George F. Marion, as her barge-captain papa, a refugee from the old country, is a hopelessly fraudulent vaudeville-house Swede.

Truth to tell, pitifully few of the vehicles MGM built around Garbo were worthy of her talents, but she props them up — noblesse oblige. Queen Christina (1933, October 19), a laborious Rouben Mamoulian costume picture that recycles the theme of neoclassical tragedy — the tension between royal duty and private passion — offers the classic scene, beautifully acted by Garbo, where Christina discovers the liberation of romance in the arms of a Spanish envoy (Gilbert) who doesn’t know her identity, during three snowbound days at a country inn. The movie is famous for the cross-dressing premise of their meeting (she wears men’s clothes; he thinks she’s a boy and insists they share a bed in the booked-up inn), which is rather arch, and for the final close-up of her on the prow of the ship after she’s abdicated her kingdom for him and then finds him dying, finished in a duel by a jealous rival. And it’s infamous for ending Gilbert’s career, reportedly because his voice didn’t match his looks. Actually he’s delightful, as always; it’s not his voice but his hairstyle and the silly curl under his lip that undercut his performance.

Anna Karenina (October 10), which Brown directed in 1935, is material Garbo had already done in a more memorable modern-dress version, Love, eight years earlier. Still, she has some wonderful moments in it, like the scene where, as an unhappily married matron who thinks her romantic life is over, she recalls the fervency of first love to a young friend (Maureen O’Sullivan) who has just begun to experience it. And 1932’s As You Desire Me (October 5), though it’s a failure, is a one-of-a-kind picture in which Garbo, for the only time, gets to play Pirandello. And with her affinity for expressing, in almost every close-up and every gesture, the conflicts that feel fated to tear her apart from inside, she’s the embodiment of Pirandello’s vision. Long overlooked in the Garbo oeuvre, it’s a performance that demands to be seen.

The other three films in the Brattle series are Garbo classics about which much has been written: Grand Hotel, Ninotchka (double-billed October 11 and 12), and Camille (October 3 and 4). They’re to be cherished. In 1932’s Grand Hotel, a deliriously enjoyable multiplotted melodrama, she plays the nerve-shattered ballerina Grusinskaya, who begins a doomed affair with John Barrymore’s bankrupt baron, who has sunk to the level of jewel thief. Not surprisingly, Barrymore is an inspired leading man for Garbo, probably her greatest. In Ninotchka she plays a Soviet emissary in Paris, where her mission is to recover royal jewels that an émigré grand duchess (Ina Claire) took with her on her flight from the revolution; Ninotchka forfeits the jewels but gets romance, in the form of Melvyn Douglas (her costar from As You Desire Me). It’s a superlative performance in a lovely film, and you get to see Garbo and Broadway star Claire face off in a clash of styles and temperaments that brings out the best in both actresses.

Camille, an adaptation of the play by Alexandre Dumas fils that inspired La Traviata, is Garbo’s finest hour. George Cukor’s direction guides her portrayal of Marguerite, the courtesan whose devotion to an impetuous but heart-whole young swain (Robert Taylor) — which drives her to sacrifice herself — is a paean to the quality that her life as a Parisian demimondaine has sought to conceal: her sincerity. As Garbo plays her, Marguerite is never anything but sincere. Listen to the way she tells her lover, during a country idyll, that she fears such overwhelming happiness because it might make God angry. The line reading and the performance resonate through the history of movie acting.


Issue Date: September 30 - October 6, 2005
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