Greta Garbo

So I've been viewing the films of Greta Garbo, from the Swedish silents to the Hollywood silents to the talkies, and despairing to find a single truly great picture among them. Garbo, befitting her legend, is always captivating — an almost-too-clever remark, attributed to an English critic, goes, "What, when drunk, one sees in other women, one sees in Garbo sober" — but is seldom supported by first rate direction or writing. It would appear that her best collaborators were cinematographers; she is at all times exquisitely lit, even when the sets and locations are not.

One early highlight is The Saga of Gosta Berling (1924), both the crown jewel and capstone of Swedish silent cinema. This is romantic realism in service to period drama, shot stunningly on location in the Scandinavian Mts (sort of a bergfilm but without the ardent nationalism), and has several great setpieces including a colossal burning estate and a pack of real wolves pursuing a sleigh across a frozen lake. The latter is an unforgettable thrill. Garbo doesn't have much to do besides collapse from smoke inhalation or clutch her furs in brave resolution as she flees across the ice, but damn if she isn't bravely and beautifully resolute.

Her Hollywood silents are routine melodrama. Louis B Mayer brought her over and made her a star without making any good movies, which was (and is) a Hollywood producer's job. The talkies are only a little better. She's well remembered for Grand Hotel ("I want to be alone..."), a shoddy assembly of top stars without a purpose or script. Her 1935 Anna Karenina (my first exposure to the story) leads me to suspect the novel is a monumental bore. I did have high hopes for her collaboration with George Cukor on Camille, but that turned out to be just a warhorse melodrama lacking the mercy and quaint charm of silence. (I take from the experience that Cukor is nothing without the Algonquin school of 30s writers who penned for him Dinner at Eight and The Philadelphia Story.) Garbo's best role, then, turns out to be Queen Christina: the embodiment of her appeal as a robust and pityingly tender white exotic, tragically unreachable.

But then I saw Ninotchka. As it really turns out, the only director ever to do her justice was Ernst Lubitsch, the same maestro who gave us Pola Negri. Also, it was the only time Garbo was serviced by one of the great writers: Billy Wilder. They made for her an enduring comedy (Oh, Thirties comedy!) that works by playing against her famous gravitas. The movie is flush with verbal wit and persistent satire of a straw man prewar caricature of Soviet Russia (with stereotyping as bald as in a wartime Looney Tunes propaganda short), but the biggest laugh comes from a strategic pratfall. What a delight!