Director: Clarence Brown
Cast: Greta Garbo, John Gilbert, Lars Hanson, Barbara Kent
Have I Seen it Before: Never.
Did I Like It: This is the first review I’m writing since the 2024 Presidential Election, so here’s hoping that I’ll be able to keep things on point as I go on.
I always tend to turn my nose up at people who poo-poo the prospect of silent cinema. Take the prospect of artificial dialogue out of the equation, and the whole thing can be reduced down to its most basic elements. On the other hand, watching a story play out from nearly 100 years ago with some missing context can leave one disconnected from the whole affair. I can see from where these people are coming.
But some silent movies—or at least occasional elements of those films—can transcend even the most skeptical among us. Chaplin and Keaton can make us laugh while simultaneously make us wonder if they have a death wish. F.W. Murnau can manipulate light and shadows to the point where we in the 21st might think they are out to get us. Even when D.W. Griffith shows us our inherent ugliness despite himself, he paints it on such a grand scale that our CGI-sodden age needs to take an extra moment to figure out how he did it, before we ever reckon with why.
So, what does this film offer? Why does it survive when so many other films of the era have evaporated with their nitrate stock? The answer is Garbo. Any number of the screen beauties before Garbo were photographed as if they were porcelain statues. Garbo comes on the screen—and for many people, this was the first time to see her—she is the first sex symbol of the screen. It has almost nothing to do with her looks necessarily, either. The subtlety of her face moves the leading lady from artwork in the background to an imaginary figure in our own fantasies. The movies as we understand them now may not have existed if Garbo hadn’t accidentally (and by all indications, against her better judgment) created it herself.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t talk about the multiple endings for the film. They’re roughly similar, if one had an additional beat. In the original ending favored by director Brown, von Harden (Gilbert) and von Eltz (Hanson) reconcile before blowing each other away in a duel, while Felicitas (Garbo) drowns in the ice just beyond. Credits. The “happy” ending favored by MGM extends the story an additional moment, where von Harden and Hertha (Barbara Kent) are reconciled. The theater showed both endings to us, leaving the entire affair in a quantum state of uncertainty with both endings. Both are sort of miserable though, with Garbo perishing in the ice. You can live with the possibility of a happy ending or a tragic ending, but the tragedy is still inevitable. So much for quantum uncertainty.
Look at that. I did end up making it about the election a little bit.
