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.  

A Tale of Two Cities (Jack Conway, 1935)

Cast: Ronald Colman, Elizabeth Allan, Edna May Oliver, Reginald Owen, Basil Rathbone, Blanche Yurka, Henry B. Walthall, Donald Woods, Walter Catlett, Fritz Leiber, H.B. Warner, Mitchell Lewis, Claude Gillingwater, Billy Bevan, Isabel Jewell, Lucille La Verne. Screenplay: W.P. Lipscomb, S.N. Behrman, based on a novel by Charles Dickens. Cinematography: Oliver T. Marsh. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons, Fredric Hope, Edwin B. Willis. Film editing: Conrad A. Nervig. Music: Herbert Stothart.

It was the best of movies, it was the worst of movies. The best part is that Ronald Colman is a handsome Sydney Carton, who delivers the familiar closing line at the guillotine -- "It is a far, far better thing I do...." -- with the necessary nobility, and that the cast includes such ever-watchable character actors as Edna May Oliver, Basil Rathbone, Blanche Yurka (an implacable Mme. De Farge), and Lucille La Verne (as The Vengeance, literally but not figuratively toothless). The worst part is that the screenplay leans heavily on the sentimental parts of the novel and Elizabeth Allan is, like most Dickens heroines, a pallid and forgettable Lucie Manette. David O. Selznick produced, but it's not as successful a foray into Dickens as his superb David Copperfield, made the same year and with a better director, George Cukor. 

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.