I'd been pretty oblivious to the phenomenon of Greta Garbo, assumed she was just a bygone star, the unaccountable taste of anothe era, until I programmed Camille for a series at the Clark of film adaptations of 19th-century French novels. The acting I had expected to be flamboyant and stylized turned out to be startlingly natural and riveting to watch. I would have set out immediately to watch the rest of her films, but almost nothing was available on DVD. From the old Either/Or collection at the Milne Public Library in Williamstown, I had tapes of Anna Karenina and Ninotchka. I re-watched the former and determined that it was about as good as could be done, adapting an 800-page novel into a 90-minute movie -- not Tolstoy, but an estimable film. The latter, however, did not live up to the reputation of the “Lubitsch touch” -- it seems quite dated now, though Garbo proved she could do contemporary comedy as well as period tragedy.
Last month, however, the indispensible cable station Turner Classic Movies ran a Garbo festival, so now I have a half-dozen of her films on my TiVo “Now Playing” list. First I watched Flesh and the Devil (at TiVo doubletime, which works as well for silent films as it sometimes does for baseball games, century-old pastimes that can seem too slow to the 21st-century, overstimulated eye.) This soaper opposite John Gilbert was one of the foundations of her immense popularity in the Twenties, and let me tell you, the public is not always wrong. Popular art can be as artistic as any.
Director Clarence Brown also guided her into the sound era, with Anna Christie, most famous for its publicity campaign, “Garbo Talks!” But golly, she acts too. It’s fun to read the contemporaneous New York Times review, and see how startled audiences were by her deep, husky voice, uttering that first immortal line in a seaside bar, “Gimme a viskey, ginger ale on the side ... and don’t be stingy, baby.” Now her fans could be swept away by listening to her voice as well as watching her face. The sound technology is primitive, as you would expect, and also shackles the camera to its demands, but Garbo assures that this film is not any creaky antique. The camera may be stationery but it is manned by William Daniels, a magician of light who was almost her personal cinematographer. The words are better than you would expect, from a play by Eugene O’Neill, and so are the supporting players, especially Charles Bickford as the seaman whose love for Anna surmounts the revelation that she had been a prostitute, and Marie Dressler as the drunken slattern whom Anna sees as herself in forty years. Not a great film, but not a dead letter either. And Garbo is all that. A film goddess and a real person, despite the would-be gutter poetry. Anna Christie. (1930, TCM/T, n.) *7*
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