Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 09/28/18

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Friday, September 28, 2018

Mata Hari (George Fitzmaurice, 1931)

Ramon Novarro and Greta Garbo in Mata Hari

Mata Hari: Greta Garbo
Lt. Alexis Rosanoff: Ramon Novarro
Gen. Serge Shubin: Lionel Barrymore
Andriani: Lewis Stone
Dubois: C. Henry Gordon
Carlotta: Karen Morley
Caron: Alec B. Francis
Sister Angelica: Blanche Friderici
Warden: Edmund Breese
Sister Genevieve: Helen Jerome Eddy

Director: George Fitzmaurice
Screenplay: Benjamin Glazer, Leo Birinsky
Cinematography: William H. Daniels
Art direction: Cedric Gibbons
Film editing: Frank Sullivan
Costume design: Adrian
Music: William Axt

Garbo ... dances? Well, only if you call the posing, prancing, and strutting she does before a statue of Shiva in George Fitzmaurice's Mata Hari dancing. It unaccountably brings on a storm of applause, though that may be because in the version shown on Turner Classic Movies we don't see the finale of the dance that audiences saw in the original pre-Code version of Mata Hari: an apparently nude Garbo. The movie was such a big hit for Garbo that it was re-released after the Production Code went into effect three years later, at which time the censors swooped in with their scissors, cutting not only the nude scene -- which in any case featured Garbo's body double with only a suggestion of nudity -- but also some scenes showing Mata Hari and Lt. Rosanoff in bed together. The film is mostly proof that Garbo in her prime could sell almost anything, even this piece of MGM claptrap. Here she vamps a very pretty Ramon Novarro, playing a Russian aviator with a Mexican accent, and connives with the Russian general overplayed by Lionel Barrymore and the sinister spymaster played by the almost as hammy Lewis Stone. Swanning about in some preposterous outfits by Adrian, Garbo's Mata Hari is the typical wicked lady -- she even persuades Rosanoff to snuff the candle he has promised his mother to keep burning before the icon of Our Lady of Kazan -- redeemed by falling in love. Rosanoff atones for his weakness by being blinded in a plane crash, and Mata Hari conceals from him the fact that she's been sentenced to the firing squad and goes off bravely to face her doom. They don't make them like this anymore, and there's a reason: We have no Garbos to pull them off.