Two-Faced Woman (George Cukor, 1941)

Constance Bennett, Melvyn Douglas, Greta Garbo, and Robert Sterling in Two-Faced Woman

Cast: Greta Garbo, Melvyn Douglas, Constance Bennett, Roland Young, Ruth Gordon, Robert Sterling, Frances Carson. Screenplay: S.N. Behrman, Salka Viertel, George Oppenheimer, based on a play by Ludwig Fulda. Cinematography: Joseph Ruttenberg. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons, Daniel B. Cathcart. Film editing: George Boemler. Music: Bronislau Kaper. 

Two-Faced Woman is famous for only one thing: It was Greta Garbo's last film. Otherwise, it's a confused attempt at a screwball comedy, meant in part to revamp Garbo's image, which had largely been created in costume dramas like Queen Christina (Rouben Mamoulian, 1933), Anna Karenina (Clarence Brown, 1935), and her greatest triumph, Camille (George Cukor, 1936). Her most recent hit, Ernst Lubitsch's Ninotchka (1939), had been hyped with the tagline "Garbo Laughs," and MGM thought giving Garbo a looser, more contemporary image might be profitable. So in Two-Faced Woman, she not only laughs, she skis, swims, and even dances. She's also reunited with her Ninotchka co-star, Melvyn Douglas, who plays Larry Blake, a New York magazine editor-publisher who falls (quite literally, down a mountainside) for Garbo's outdoorsy ski instructor. They marry in haste, and you know what that means. Garbo's character, Karin, doesn't want to live in the city, but when Larry spends more and more time there, she gets fed up and pursues him. Eventually, through a variety of plot contrivances, she pretends to be her own twin sister, Katherine, a vamp who drinks and smokes and dances -- all things that Karin doesn't do. At some point, the censors intervened and made the script indicate that Larry sees through this imposture, so that when he falls for the vivacious Katherine instead of the virtuous Karin, we know that he's just pretending. It's a familiar trope in sitcoms and screwball comedy, but the screenplay botches it badly. There are some bright moments contributed by Constance Bennett as the "other woman" in Larry's life and Ruth Gordon as his secretary, but for the most part it's confused and unfunny -- even the usually reliably brilliant Roland Young feels off his game, and Cukor, who had often demonstrated such a sure hand with this kind of material, doesn't seem to have his heart in it. That it was a critical and box office flop is often cited as the reason Garbo never made another movie; she asked to be let out of her MGM contract after it was made, but there's plenty of evidence that she toyed with returning to the screen over the remaining almost 50 years of her life.  

Torrent (Monta Bell, 1926)

Greta Garbo and Ricardo Cortez in Torrent

Cast: Greta Garbo, Ricardo Cortez, Gertrude Olmstead, Edward Connelly, Lucien Littlefield, Martha Mattox, Lucy Beaumont, Tully Marshall, Mack Swain. Screenplay: Dorothy Farnum, based on a novel by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez; titles by Katherine Hilliker and H.H. Caldwell. Cinematography: William H. Daniels. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons, Merrill Pye. Film editing: Frank Sullivan.

Greta Garbo's first American film gives her the chance to play rich and poor: She's a Spanish peasant girl whose love for the wealthy, dashing Rafael (Ricardo Cortez) is thwarted by his scheming mother (Martha Mattox), so she goes to Paris where her singing voice earns her wealth and fame but not true love, as the on-again off-again relationship with Rafael takes its course over the years. Garbo and Cortez strike no sparks, but the film was a hit anyway, launching her fabulous career.

A Woman of Affairs (Clarence Brown, 1928)

A Woman of Affairs (Clarence Brown, 1928)

Cast: Greta Garbo, John Gilbert, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Johnny Mack Brown, Lewis Stone, Dorothy Sebastian, Hobart Bosworth. Screenplay: Bess Meredyth, Marian Ainslee (titles), Ruth Cummings (titles), based on a novel and play by Michael Arlen. Cinematography: William H. Daniels. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons. Film editing: Hugh Wynn. Costumes: Adrian.

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. 

Grand Hotel (Edmund Goulding, 1932)

Greta Garbo and John Barrymore in Grand Hotel

Grusinskaya: Greta Garbo
Baron Felix von Geigern: John Barrymore
Flaemmchen: Joan Crawford
General Director Preysing: Wallace Beery
Otto Kringelein: Lionel Barrymore
Dr. Otternschlag: Lewis Stone
Senf: Jean Hersholt
Suzette: Rafaela Ottiano
Pimenov: Ferdinand Gottschalk
Meierheim: Robert McWade
Zinnowitz: Purnell Pratt

Director: Edmund Goulding
Screenplay: Béla Balász, William Absalom Drake, Edgar Allan Woolf
Based on a novel by Vicki Baum and a play by William Absalom Drake
Cinematography: William H. Daniels
Art direction: Cedric Gibbons
Film editing: Blanche Sewell
Costume design: Adrian
Music: Charles Maxwell

The criticism most often made of Grand Hotel is that its performances are hammy. Greta Garbo's face, even in medium shots, is never at rest, eyebrows arching, nostrils flaring, lips curling and pouting. John Barrymore poses shamelessly, always managing to find a way to lift his chin the better to display his celebrated profile. Joan Crawford, whose best feature was her eyes, manages to open them so wide you'd think she was playing opposite an optometrist instead of Wallace Beery and the Barrymore brothers. One conventional explanation for all of this preening and camera-hogging is that it's inherent to an all-star cast in which every star wants to shine brightest. Another is that all of the stars had been in silent films, where the absence of sound puts a premium on telegraphing emotions visually, and 1932 was still early enough that actors weren't fully accustomed to letting the dialogue do the work. But I think director Edmund Goulding deserves most of the blame. Compare, for example, the performance given by Garbo under the direction of George Cukor four years later in Camille: She has learned to let the dialogue and the camera do most of the work, so the tics and mannerisms have vanished. Cukor also directed the Barrymore brothers in Dinner at Eight just a year after Grand Hotel, and while their hamming is still a bit excessive, Cukor knows how to integrate it into another all-star ensemble. And no director got better performances out of Crawford than Cukor did in her sharply contrasting roles in The Women (1939) and A Woman's Face (1941). But I come not to praise Cukor or really to bury Goulding, except to note that for many years, Grand Hotel was the only best picture Oscar winner without a corresponding nomination for its director.* Still, it's a very entertaining movie, cramming a lot of characters into a small space and providing some real intrigue and even action -- it's the only film I can recall in which someone is beaten to death with a telephone. It looks good, too, for its age: Cedric Gibbons's art deco sets are spiffy and Adrian's gowns and negligees and frocks are sexy.

*Oscar trivia footnote: In fact, Grand Hotel remains the only best picture winner to receive no nominations in any other category. As for the picture-director correlation, Grand Hotel held on to that distinction until the 1989 Oscars, when Driving Miss Daisy was named best picture but Bruce Beresford went unnominated. And it didn't happen again until 2012 when Ben Affleck was passed over for directing Argo.

Ninotchka (Ernst Lubitsch, 1939)

Greta Garbo and Bela Lugosi in Ninotchka

Nina Ivanova Yakushova: Greta Garbo
Count Leon d'Algout: Melvyn Douglas
Grand Duchess Swana: Ina Claire
Iranoff: Sig Ruman
Buljanoff: Felix Bressart
Kopalski: Alexander Granach
Commissar Razinin: Bela Lugosi
Count Alexis Rakonin: Gregory Gaye
Hotel Manager: Rolfe Sedan
Mercier: Edwin Maxwell
Gaston: Richard Carle

Director: Ernst Lubitsch
Screenplay: Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder, Walter Reisch, Melchior Lengyel
Cinematography: William H. Daniels
Art direction: Cedric Gibbons, Randall Duell
Film editing: Gene Ruggiero
Costume design: Adrian
Music: Werner R. Heymann

I had forgotten how audacious Ninotchka is when viewed in the context of the volatile international politics of 1939, a year teetering on the brink of a world war that had already begun in Britain when the film was released in November. All of the jokes about Stalin's show trials ("There are going to be fewer but better Russians"), about the ineffectual economic planning ("I've been fascinated by your five-year plan for the past 15 years"), and about the deprivations suffered by the Soviet people feel edgy, even a little sour, when we remember that almost everyone was just about to embrace the Soviets as a valued ally against the Third Reich. It's a film that shows a bit less of the "Lubitsch touch" than of the cynicism of Billy Wilder, who co-wrote the screenplay. That it transcends its era and still feels vital and funny today has mostly to do with Greta Garbo, whose shift from the Party-line drone to the vital and glamorous convert to capitalism, along with the delicate way she retains elements of the latter on her return to Moscow, is beautifully delineated. That it was her penultimate film is regrettable, but except for her definitive Camille I think it's her greatest performance.

Camille (George Cukor, 1936)

Henry Daniell and Greta Garbo in Camille

Marguerite Gautier: Greta Garbo
Armand Duval: Robert Taylor
Baron de Varville: Henry Daniell
M. Duval: Lionel Barrymore
Prudence Duvernoy: Laura Hope Crews
Nanine: Jessie Ralph
Olympe: Lenore Ulric
Gaston: Rex O'Malley
Nichette: Elizabeth Allan

Director: George Cukor
Screenplay: Zoe Akins, Frances Marion, James Hilton
Based on a novel and play by Alexandre Dumas fils
Cinematography: William H. Daniels, Karl Freund
Art direction: Cedric Gibbons, Fredric Hope, Edwin B. Willis
Music: Herbert Stothart
Costume design: Adrian

MGM was notoriously a producers' studio, a factory system in which the director was rarely allowed to stand out as the guiding influence on a movie. But somehow out of MGM's producer-driven concentration on high style in sets and costumes, and above all on the production of "more stars than there are in the heavens," George Cukor managed to emerge as one of the great directors. He did it in part by his ability to elicit definitive performances from actresses like Katharine Hepburn and Joan Crawford -- and later Judy Holliday and Judy Garland -- but most especially from Greta Garbo in Camille. Garbo's Marguerite Gautier is of course one of the great creations by an actress in the movies, but the remarkable thing about Camille is that Cukor is able to keep her performance from swamping the film. He remembers that there is an ensemble to work with that includes not only such formidable scene-stealers as Lionel Barrymore and Laura Hope Crews, but also a raw, untrained leading man, Robert Taylor. It's to Cukor's credit that Taylor holds up as well as he does against a luminous presence like Garbo, though it's perhaps to Garbo's credit that she makes us believe Marguerite is so profoundly infatuated with a man who has nothing but good looks to work with. Though Camille was always destined to be The Greta Garbo Show, Cukor makes her part of a very entertaining whole. He manages to modulate Lionel Barrymore's usual camera-hogging and turn him into a credible concerned paterfamilias -- in fact, Cukor directed two of the few Barrymore performances I really find myself enjoying, the other being Mr. Peggotty in David Copperfield (1935). He tames another performance that could have got out of hand in Henry Daniell's arrogant Baron de Varville, though he might have reined in Daniell's attempt to turn the French baron into an English upperclass ass: Daniell lays on the r-tapping (e.g., "veddy" for "very") a little heavily, and when he's asked if he wants to dine replies, "Ai'm not hungreh." Which brings us back to Garbo, who is glorious from her febrile first moment, clutching the camellias as if they were life itself slipping away, to her last, a death scene that has never been equaled. Garbo knew that the best performances are the most "actressy," the ones that transcend realism, that throw down a challenge to other actresses: Top this if you can. It's a knowledge demonstrated by many others, from Bette Davis and Joan Crawford to Jessica Lange and Meryl Streep. (Jennifer Lawrence shows signs of learning it, too.) Call it camp if you will, label them divas if you want, but the movies would be poorer without it.

Watched on Turner Classic Movies

Anna Karenina (Clarence Brown, 1935)

Basil Rathbone and Greta Garbo in Anna Karenina

Anna Karenina: Greta Garbo
Count Vronsky: Fredric March
Sergei: Freddie Bartholomew
Kitty: Maureen O'Sullivan
Countess Vronsky: May Robson
Alexei Karenin: Basil Rathbone
Stiva: Reginald Owen
Konstantin Levin: Gyles Isham

Director: Clarence Brown
Screenplay: Clemence Dane, Salka Viertel, S.N. Behrman
Based on a novel by Leo Tolstoy
Cinematography: William H. Daniels
Costume design: Adrian

One of the problems with adapting Tolstoy's novel to another medium is that while everyone knows the story of the title character, who throws herself under a train at the end, at least half of the book is not about her. It's about Konstantin Dmitrievich Levin, the burly intellectual who is preoccupied with the problems of a changing Russia. Though Levin's is also a love story -- he falls for Anna's sister-in-law, Kitty, who initially spurns him because she's in love with Count Vronsky, the man for whom Anna leaves her husband -- he's Tolstoy's surrogate in the novel, just as Pierre Bezukhov is in War and Peace. Downplaying Levin's role in any adaptation of Anna Karenina is as gross a distortion of the novel as omitting Pierre from an adaptation of War and Peace. But it has been done, and often, given that the melodrama of a doomed love is far easier to sell to an audience than the problems of a reformist landowner. In this MGM version of Anna Karenina, Levin virtually disappears: He's played by a tall, bland English actor named Gyles Isham, whose film career was brief and undistinguished. Kitty is at least played by a star, Maureen O'Sullivan, although her presence in the film is largely designed to introduce the character of Vronsky and to suffer disappointment when he throws her over for Anna. This was Greta Garbo's second turn at playing Anna: She had filmed a silent version, titled Love (Edmund Goulding, 1927), with John Gilbert as Vronsky. (The earlier version omitted not only Levin but also Kitty, and was filmed with two endings: In the one aimed at the American market, Anna doesn't commit suicide but is reunited with Vronsky after Karenin's death.) Garbo is the best reason for seeing the 1935 version, although MGM, with David O. Selznick producing, gave it a lavish setting, with cinematography by Garbo's favorite photographer, William H. Daniels. It opens with a spectacularly filmed sequence in which Vronsky and his fellow officers attend a banquet, with the camera performing a long tracking shot down a seemingly endless table laden with food. Unfortunately, Fredric March is miscast as Vronsky, turning the dashing young officer into a rather somber middle-aged man; he and Garbo are sorely lacking in chemistry together. The screenplay by Clemence Dane, Salka Viertel, and S.N. Behrman does what it can to pull together the pieces carved out of Tolstoy, but the ending, even Anna's suicide, feels flat and perfunctory. In the novel, Anna's disintegration, aided by isolation from society, by illnesses both mental and physical, and by her addiction to opiates, is dealt with at some harrowing length, but trimming much of that background means that she appears to be driven to her ghastly end solely by losing her young son, Sergei, and by the cruelty of Karenin. Tolstoy, of course, gives us deep background on Karenin that, while it doesn't absolve him completely makes him far more credible than a mere Rathbone villain.

Queen Christina (Rouben Mamoulian, 1933)

Greta Garbo and John Gilbert in Queen Christina

Christina: Greta Garbo
Antonio: John Gilbert
Magnus: Ian Keith
Oxenstierna: Lewis Stone
Ebba: Elizabeth Young
Aage: C. Aubrey Smith
Charles: Reginald Owen
French Ambassador: Georges Renavent
Archbishop: David Torrence
General: Gustav von Seyffertitz
Innkeeper: Ferdinand Meunier

Director: Rouben Mamoulian
Screenplay: H.M. Harwood, Salka Viertel, Margaret P. Levino, S.N. Behrman
Cinematography: William H. Daniels
Production design: Edgar G. Ulmer
Film editing: Blanche Sewell
Costume design: Adrian
Music: Herbert Stothart

A year later, with the Production Code in full enforcement, this would have been a very different movie, though probably not a better one. It certainly wouldn't have shown Christina and Antonio sharing a room, not to mention a bed, in an inn. It probably wouldn't have suggested so strongly that before Antonio became her lover, Christina had a thing going with Countess Ebba, and almost certainly wouldn't have had Christina kiss Ebba on the mouth. Unfortunately, those little touches of mild naughtiness are pretty much all Queen Christina has going for it, especially if you're looking for some faint resemblance to historical fact. But maybe Garbo is enough. She certainly gives this pseudo-historical melodrama more commitment than it deserves. It was her fourth film with Gilbert, their only talkie, and their last. At least it dispels the myth that Gilbert failed to make the move into sound films because of his voice, which is perfectly fine -- the real reason was alcoholism, which made him unemployable and destroyed his health. The number of uncredited hands that worked on the screenplay, including Ben Hecht, Ernest Vajda, Claudine West, and director Rouben Mamoulian, suggests that it became a problem no one ever quite solved. Today, it is mostly remembered for the final shot of Garbo alone at the prow of a ship that is taking her away from Sweden. The story has it that Mamoulian directed her to empty her mind and think of nothing during the long closeup, to allow audiences to project their own emotions on her character.