Scott Lord Silent Film: The Invaders (Ince, 1912)

Silent Film
Having directed "The Indian Massacre" and Across the Plains" the year before, Thomas Ince during 1012 directed the films "The Invaders" (three reels) starring its co-director Francis Ford and Ethel Grandin and "Custer's Last Fight" (three reels) for the New York Motion Picture Company and "Shadows of the Past" for the Vitagraph Company of America.

It is often acknowledged that Thomas Ince was the first director to use a shooting script. These were detailed shooting scripts, known to be meticulous in their planning, where plotline would emerge as having precedence over action and spectacle.

Author Kenneth MacGowan notes that Thomas Ince "strove for theatric effect", but only with scripts that were "direct and tight" and used intertitles to advance character action dramatically relating to events as a technique of exposition.

Silent Film D. W. Griffith

Scott Lord Silent Film: Sage Brush Tom (Tom Mix, 1915)

Tom Mix was credited as having written, directed and starred onscreen in the 1915 film "Sage Brush Tom", produced by Selig Polyscope. Apearing in the one reel film were actresses Goldie Colwell and Victoria Forde. Silent Westerns

Silent Film Revision page- please disregard and navigate onward

Not only were silent films remade in Hollywood, Anna Christie, Anna Karenina and Camille all films that had originally been silent before having been remade with Greta Garbo, but the "grammar of film" or syntax of film technique, how scenes are constructed through shot structure evolved, or was perhaps developed from earlier silent film.

Vitagraph during 1919 had advertised its onscreen images as being "As brimful  of Appeal, of Allurement, of Unexpectedness, of Radiance and Feminine Witchery as- Girls Themselves" as it brought actress Corinne Griffith to the screen in The Girl Problem,  under the direction of Kenneth Webb.

Greta Garbo in The Torrent (Monta Bell, 1926)

A suitable story for director Mauritz Stiller, famous Swedish director who just began work under M.G.M. contract is now being sought and will be announced at an early date. Greta Garbo, who has also just arrived in America will be assigned a suitable vehicle sometime this month." -Exhibitor's Trade Review, 1925

During the summer of 1925, Metro Goldwyn advertised Victor Seastrom's "Tower of Lies" with Norma Shearer and Lon Chaney as "Selma Lagerlof's world prize novel with the outstanding personalities of 'He Who Gets Slapped'". Using the front and inside covers of Moving Picture World Magazine, it also advertised "Bardleys the Magnificient", starring John Gilbert as a "colossal production in full technicolor", "Lights of Old Broadway", starring Marion Davies and directed by Monta Bell, and advertised two Cosmolitan Productions, The Temptress, "backed by intensive national publicity promotions of Cosmopolitan Productions, and "The Torrent"- "with Aileen Pringle in a cast of big names". To readers beginning with the recent biography by Robert Dance, Pringle was "displaced" by Greta Garbo

Author Lucy Fischer, in the paper Greta Garbo and Silent Cinema:The Actress as Art Deco Icon In no way establishes an Art Deco style of filmmaking as opposed to an art nouveau style of painting, although the elements of a modernity, including thematic elements, are certainly present. Fischer sees the film “The Torrent”, essentially a jazz age film and a precursor to the upcoming surprise of precode, as fluctuating between stylistic flourishes. These for Fischer are not inserted inadvertently, but at “heightened moments of the text” and the first “glamour shot” of Greta Garbo “inhabits a modernist space”. It is almost as if the author is implying that the screenwriter worked more closely with the wardrobe department than the scenario department while making her point. It would seem that Fischer is analyzing the shot structure of the film and its camera movement, the photoplay, by changes in what Greta Garbo is wearing rather than by evaluating how the spectator is drawn to the screen by a medium that after art nouveau, Dadaism and ante-bellum needed Art Deco to commercialize in a world apart from Sarah Bernhardt and the poster iconography of Alphonse Mucha. But Fischer brings a point of departure as the subculture of early surrealism lacked popularity in Hollywood- is Art Deco more than set and costume design and is there a corresponding style of acting, if not directing for the “lost generation”?
For a moment, let’s allow our look at Greta Garboin the film be a collection of shots of the new fashions within modernity and transfer theory written about one genre, the Silent Western to another- with the hope of providing a key to her volume on the iconography of Silent Western Film, the content of its mise en scene and typical motifs, author Nanna Verhoeff, in her volume “The West in Early Cinema, before quoting Jacques Derrida,claims to have coined the phrase “archival poetics” as compared and contrasted to other semiotics systems, to narrative poetics or to poetics of gender, much as a “landscape poetics” emerged in the reviews of the silent films of Mauritz Stiller and Victor Sjostrom The author highlights the content of Western Silent films by searchingly for their common physical elements, which presumably at times include Sjostrom’s masterpieces “The Wind” and at times, owing to its historical context, would not. The author writes, “I am to reflect on the connections between objects, discursive systems within which they can be understood and the cultural life in the present within which such ‘readability’ in terms of poetics’ etymological sense of making. The current interest in hypertextual discursive organization will serve as a heuretical metaphor that will help articulate an archival poetics useful for cultural analysis of early screen culture, in other words screening the past.” Needless to say this alone doesn’t place Greta Garboas an Art Deco figurehead and the volume written by Verhoeff consists of analysis of early silent film independent of the work of Greta Garbo but it places an archival value on the screen prescence of Greta Garbo contingent on the technology of the period and on audience reception that dates genres as having a chronological beginning when they are to emerge- Garbo’s insistence she did not belong to the Vamp iconography. If a dress worn by Garbo, then an article in a time capsule. To see the effect of costume design clearly, one might look at Elizabeth Taylor in the film Cleopatra, where it seems that every cut to a new scene includes Taylor wearing a different gown, adding a aesthetic value to the silence within each scene through numerous visual additions to mine en scene through numerous costume changes.

Greta Garbo arrives from Europe

When refilmed, her hollywood screentest would by filmed by Mauritz Stiller and purportedly spliced into the rushes of Torrent and was then, in turn, seen by Monta Bell, who insisted the script be given to Garbo. Greta Garbo's second screentest had been photographed by Henrik Sartov, who later explained that the earlier test had lacked proper lighting and that a lens he had devised had allowed him to articulate depth while filming her. Cameraman William Daniels had photographed the earlier test. Lillian Gish relates a conversation between her and Sartov where Gish asked him if he could photograph a screentest of Garbo, "Garbo's temperment reflected the rain and gloom of the long, dark Scandinavian winters."

     It skips any personal contact made between its author, Hedda Hopper, and actress Greta Garbo up untill a phone call from Ina Claire during her marriage to John Gilbert when Hopper had been visiting the set of His Glorious Night and, even then, when giving an account of Greta Garbo walking off the set when Arthur Brisbane had stepped on to it, it makes no claim that Hopper had ever spoken to the actress while at contract at M.G.M., but as an autobiography, From Under My Hat, the personal memoir of the events of Hedda Hopper's career in Hollywood, leaves us with a question. Why was Hedda Hopper compelled to include biography about Greta Garbo ? The account Hopper gives is standard and third person, much like the biography provided by John Bainbridge, it seeming to have its origin in the same fan magazines that were prevalent at the time and following their consensus. "In 1926 Lillian Gish," Hopper writes, "brought a Russian cameraman, whose name I've forgotten, to Hollywood from the East. Nobody had seen the work of the Russian. The studio saw some trick slides with which he was said to get effects...He was asked to make tests...So for three days Greta Garbo sat on a high stool while the unknown Russian made tests of her. A director was looking at water scenes to use in his picture 'The Torrent', when accidentally, the test using Garbo were cut in. His producer was sitting beside him. Apologizing nervously, he stopped the projection. 'No, go ahead,' said the director, 'I want to see something.' When they'd been run through once, he called for them to be run again, then jumped up and ran to the front office. 'I want that girl- the one in the tests. I want her for 'The Torrent.'" Hedda Hopper continues her autobiography with scenes from the romance between Garbo and Gilbert which she was also no part of and without personal memory, which is again odd in that the stories belong more properly to fan magazines, for example Photoplay Magazine, which offered a flurry of biography on Stiller and Gilbert between 1932 and 1935, for some reason the fact that Garbo wouldn't grant interviews making her the subject of biographies speculating why she had become a recluse. Hopper in fact calmy writes, "Garbo had no confidantes" at a point when the reader has begun to question when the two women had ever interacted. Under My Hat was published by Hopper during 1952, twenty years after the height of publicity of how the Swedish Sphinx had come to the United States to fall out of love with John Gilbert

      At first Garbo was reluctant to accept a role in the film "The Torrent". Although it was a large role that had been considered for Norma Shearer, whom Bell had directed in the film After Midnight (1921). Mauritz Stiller advised, "It can lead to better parts later." to which Garbo replied, "How can I take direction from someone I don't know?". John Bainbridge writes that in the beginning Garbo spent most of her time with , quoting him as having said, "You will see that something will become of her." It would be ten weeks before the studio would show any marked interest in her, this mostly at the behest of Stiller and in light of his second series of screentests. "She was especially fond of Seastrom's children," Bainbridge writes, "and brought little present to them." Victor Sjostrom's daughter is the Swedish actress Guje Lagerwall. 

     Begnt Forlund notes that the filming of Anna Karenina had at first been thought for actress Lillian Gish, who in Sweden, Greta Garbo had seen the film White Sister. In her autobiography, Gish wrote, "I often saw young Garbo on the set. She was then the protege of the Swedish director Mauritz Stiller. Stiller often left her on my set. He would take her to lunch and then bring her back, and Garbo would sit there watching." John Bainbridge reiterates this while writing on The Torrent, "Stiller did not appear on the set, but every evening he rehearsed Garbo in the next day's scenes, coaching her in every movement and every expression...Stiller delivered Garbo to the studio every morning and called for her every night." He quotes a letter written to Sweden by Stiller, "Greta is starting work for a well-known director and I think she has got an excellant part." Richard Corliss adds, "Though out of her element and seperated from Mauritz Stiller, Garbo gives fine performance, full of feeling and technical precocity. her first Hollywood kiss is one to remember."

NOrman ZIerold, in his 1969 biography Garbo, write, "The Swedish colony, especially Stiller, thought the final version of 'The Torrent' terrible." Zierold quotes Greta Garbo as having said, "Wouldn't it be cheaper to make a good movie".

Swedish actor Lars Hanson attended the premiere of the film and reflected, "We all thought the picture was a flop and that Garbo was terrible...In our opinion it didn't mean anything." Bainbridge makes the observation that Mauritz Stiller and Victor Seastrom were also at the premiere. He writes, "The picture did perhaps contain a few imperfections, such as Garbo's costumes." As a biographer, Bainbridge is enjoyable to read in one sense, not only for his prose synopsis of the film, but that he plays a guessing game by quoting a Swedish actress who was then in Hollywood without disclosing her name, the reader to wonder if she was in fact Karen Molander, wife of Lars Hanson who journeyed to Hollywood with him. The accuracy of Hollywood reporting during the Twenties, or Jazz Age, on which Bainbridge seems to base his historical references was admittedly referred to by Picture Play magazine and journalist William H. McKegg in Three Sphinxes, which compared Jetta Goudal, Ronald Colman and Greta Garbo, who, as of 1929, were three people that "puzzle Hollywood" It opined, "Of course rumors have been spread bu those who "know". Some say that Garbo was a waitress in one of the open air cafés in the Swedish capital. They add that the poverty and sorrow she underwent made her fearful of life. Only those who have experienced poverty really know hoe cruel human beings can be to one another. some say she was a singer. Who cares?"The subtitle to one section of The Story of Greta Garbo as told to Ruth Biery, published in Photoplay during 1929 reads, "Tempermental of misunderstood". In it Greta Garbo relates the events that led up to her having left the studio for what would only be less than a week, "Then it was for months here before I was to work for Mr. Stiller. I'm r. When it couldn't be arranged, they put me in The Torrent, with Mr. Monta Bell directing. It was very hard work, but I didn't mind that. I was at the studio every morning at seven o'clock and untill six every evening." She goes further explaining that there was a language barrier that would later contribute to Mauritz Stiller being also taken off her next picture, "Mr. Stiller is an artist...he does not understand the American factories. He always made his own pictures in Europe, where he is the master. In our country it is always the small studio." Stiller had in fact written to Sweden to say, "There is nothing here of Europe's culture." Journalist Rilla Page Palmborg, author of The Private Life of Greta Garbo, during 1931 wrote of a language barrier that extended to both Greta Garbo and Mauritz Stiller, her giving an account of the actress not having learned enough English to be fluent while making "The Torrent" and while there was no dialouge in the film, the instructions from director Monta Bell were given to her through her interpreter, Sven Borg. Palmborg attributes Mauritz Stiller and his determination as an artist with encouragement that was crucial to Greta Garbo's succeeding in Hollywood. It is of note that in regard to Stiller's relationship to the studio, and Thalberg, Lars Hanson has been quoted as having said, "And Stiller, because he could speak hardly any English, wasn't able to explain what he was doing and how to satisfy them.": it was on the set of The Torrent that author Sven-Hugo Borg was introduced to Stiller, who in turn then informed Garbo that he was assigned translator under Monta Bell's direction. In "The Private Life of Greta Garbo By Her Most Intimate Friend" ("The Only True Story of the Private Life of Greta Garbo" Borg recounts that Bell had turned to him and had said of her, "What a voice! If we could only use it." Of the film he notes, "Of course she was constantly with Stiller, spending every possible moment with him; but thought that when the camera's eye was flashed upon her, (that)the picture would decide her fate began, (that) he would not be there terrified her." Borg continued as the interpreter for Greta Garbo untill 1929. The titles of the biographies of Greta Garbo by Rilla Palmborg and Sven Borg, written only two years apart in 1931 and 1933 ostensibly do sound similar. Sven Borg was primarily an actor, with many uncredited Hollywood endeavors. 

     Author Richard Corliss remarked upon the performance in the film by Greta Garbo "Though out of her element and separated from Mauritz Stiller, Garbo gives a fine performance. Her first Hollywood kiss is one to remember...There are to be sure moments early in the film when Garbo works too hard with her eyes; overstating emotions rather than expressing them, dropping nuances like anvils, registering filial devotion...but she grows in the role...by the final scenes..she is utterly convincing as an actress and a star." Corliss continues stating that there are flashes of the later Garbo as though she were many-talented and in retrospect it was present but would later develop more fully, "By the end of The Torrent he face seems more severely contoured, her eyes more glacially clear, her head lifted upward by the chinstrap of spiritual pride. The phenomena is that of a star creating her own myth within the time-space of a single film." Photoplay magazine quoted Greta Garbo, "Greta Garbo was having her pictures taken by Ruth Harriet Louise. During one of the close up shots her eyes blinked, 'Oh, I'm so sorry, Miss Louise,' Greta apologized, 'But I twinkled.'" The production stills of Greta Garbo during the filming of The Torrent were photographed by Ruth Harriet Louise. Ruth Harriet Louise had also published an early full photograph of Greta Garbo in Motion Picture Classic Magazine during May of 1926. Before photographing Greta Garbo Louise had created her "first published Hollywood image", that of Vilma Banky from the film Dark Angel in the September 1925 issue of Photoplay and during 1926 she contributed a particularly romantic blue-titnted portrait of Pauline Stark and Antonio Moreno to Photoplay from the film Love's Blindness. During 1928 Louise contributed to Screenland Magazine a portrait of Lars Hansen and Lillian Gish, "the lovers in the forthcoming special production The Wind", directed by Victor Sjostrom under the name Victor Seastrom. For those susceptible to the fantasy of Hollywood, it might feel like one of those rare fleeting siI'm at ghtings of Harriet Brown but it in fact that Robert Dance and Bruce Robertson introduce the photographer in their volume Ruth Harriet Louise and Hollywood Glamour Photography. The authors include a photograph of Greta Garbo taken by Ruth Harriet Louise, who had invited her back to her studios for another photo shoot after the filming of The Torrent had come to its completion, late December of 1925. Harriet Brown, now in fact Harriet Brown and company, the owner of the photograph is none other than "senior management and market executive" Scott Reisfield whom, and I quote, "Developed museum exhibit of photographs with the Santa Barbra Museum of Art. The exhibit subsequently was toured to four additional venues. Developed a book published by Rizzoli in conjunction with the museum exhibit." in all honesty, I have not as of yet corresponded with Mr. Reisfield about Greta Garbo, Sven Gustaffson or Guge Lagerwall. 

     The picture of Greta Garbo in a chair seated next to a lion, Garbo photographed outdoors on what at first appears to be a bench and the lion posing with his feet elevated on a log, as it was first published in Motion Picture Magazine during 1926 must have been a publicity test, by a publicity department that may have named her The Swedish Sphinx during the silent era, as it left her not only silent but unidentified, without printing her name; the caption reads, "$10.00 for the best title of this picture."

 

 

     There are twenty three photographs of Greta Garbo taken by the photographer Arnold Genthe in the United States either on July 25, or July 27. Often unseen by the public and for the most part belonging to public domain, the were part of his estate and are presently housed at the library of congress.

Biographer Norman Zeirold, who used a photograph of Greta Garbo taken by Genthe for the cover of his wonderful volume has written that, "Garbo's plasticity made it possible for her to reflect the fantasies of her screen audiences, in the sense she functioned as a receptacle for the emotions of others." An attempt on the present author to include the subject of Greta Garbo while corresponding with Norman Zierold, now a professor, was mostly unsuccessful. In keeping with the Greata Garbo that was nearly unknown to movies audiences for her personal life off-screen despite its being highly remarked upon by extra-diegetic text, the Garbo that had lurked in the shadows of museum-art-house screenings as a recluse after her retirement, the Garbo that had blindfolded her firing squad as she smoked a cigarrette as though at any time she could be sitting right beside any us us during any of her films while as spectators we made identifications with each interpellated nuance, I added, "These emotional structures are created within each particular film, often by subject and spectator positioning that exploits the combination of tragic seductress, the viewer, and the film's other characters often in relation to her pre-talkie, before sound, body in an objectification of sexual mystery, as when her body within the frame creates space between two other characters in front of the camera, isolating them near a specific visual motif, or when Greta Garbo briefly moves into the emotion of a particular solitude." But then clearly, the relationship between character and landscape and its interaction with subject positioning and or spectatorial positioning can also differ widely from one director to another, almost to the point where it includes stylization, as when comparing the film's of Victor Sjostrom and Carl Th. Dreyer- the relation of character to landscape during the appearances of Greta Garbo is a relation, or inverse relation, to modernity within the object arrangements of mise-en-scene and female sexuality. Louise Lagterstrom of the Swedish Film Institute adorned her writing on the arrival of Greta Garbo in Hollywood, "Mot Hollywood", with a photograph taken in 1924 by Arnold Grenthe, almost reiterating Garbo was photographed extensively, often posing as a photo-model for publicity stills before her deciding to live in self-imposed exile.

It it clearly for emotion that Garbo posed for the soft-focus series of portraits, almost in as much as the close up in film is used to depict the significant detail of the shot. During December 1925, a photograph of greta Garbo by Arnold Genthe was published in Picture Play magazine with the caption From the Land of the Vikings, it announcing that she was the "latest arrival" from Scandinavia, a "statuesque blond, very reserved in manner." Picture Play Magazine during 1927 used a full page photograph taken by Arnold Genthe to figurehead the article Rebellion Sweeps Hollywood, written by Aieleen St. John Brennon, following it within pages by a portrait of Lars Hanson by Ruth Harriet Louise, it's caption noting that he had "amassed a large following since his forceful performance in The Scarlett Letter and now has the title role in Captain Salvation.  

     Picture Play magazine, in a section titled A Confidential Guide to Current Releases, reviewed Ibanez's "Torrent" with "Interesting film introducing the magnetic Swedish actress Greta Garbo to American audiences. Richard Cortez plays the young lover whose mother's influence kills his romance and ruins two lives."

     The entire review of The Torrent in Photoplay runs as follows: "Monta Bell stands well in the foreground of those directors who can take a simple story and fill it with true touches that the characters emerge real human beings and the resulting film becomes a small masterpiece. Such work has he created in The Torrent and for fans who are slightly grown up, this picture will be a visual delight. Greta Garbo, the new Swedish importation is very lovely." To provide a timeline, it appears on the same page as a review of The Devil's Circus (Benjamin Christensen). Tucked away in a later Photoplay issue was a more candid reviewer, "Greta Garbo exerts an evil fascination- on the screen. True, her debut was not auspiciously placed in The Torrent, which is in reality a babbling brook that runs on forever, now-she-loves-him-now-she don't until the end of the film and beyond." The reviewer then complements her as being attractive, surveying her eyes, lips and nostrils in, perhaps, a "gender-specific" paragraph. And yet Eugene V. Brewster began the watching of Greta Garbo on the part of Motion Picture Classic magazine with his own secular view, "At Metro Goldwyn Studios they showed me a few reels of Greta Garbo's unfinished picture. This striking young Swedish actress will doubtless appeal to many but somehow I couldn't see the great coming star in her the company expects." Frederick James Smith continued for Motion Picture Classic with Greta Garbo Arrives, "The newcomer is a slumber-eyed Norsewoman, one Greta Garbo, who seems to have more possiblities than anyone since Pola Negri of Passion...She isn't afraid to act. That she was able to stand out of an infererior story, poorly directed, is more than her credit...The Ibanez story is full of claptrap, including the dam that bursts without having anything to do with the story. Monta Bell tossed it in the film form without any apparent interest." It quickly followed with the article, "The Northern Star, The Screen's Newest Meteor is a Moody daughter of Sweden", written by Alice L. Tildelsey, who decidedly felt more at liberty to Greta Garbo than interviewers that came later. She relates that the actress had said, "I love the sea, yes. It understands me, I think...it is not happy, it is always yearning for something that it cannot have." Garbo purportedly referred to herself as "poor little Sweden girl" during the interview. "Now for my new picture I must learn to dance the tango and to ride the horse." Tidesley refers to Garbo as "a moody young thing, Greta Garbo, with the temperment of the true artist." The article imparts how Greta Garbo was introduced to Mauritz Stiller, who had seen her performing Ibsen and had had her called in to his office. The photograph of Garbo was taken by Ruth Harriet Louise. 

     National Board of Review magazine, although literate, may have remained true to form as it typified the film with, "The story preserves a European atmosphere in which parents still have the least say about their children's marriages." Biographer Richard Corliss fairly accurately assesses Greta Garbo's first of several silent films, "Not only does it prefigure many of the morals and motifs of her later pictures, but it avoids many of those films pirouettes into the ludicrous. All things considered (the times. the material, the studio, The Torrent is a suprisingly adult piece of work." While reading Corliss the reviewer as essayist, there is a slight temptation to see him presenting the synopsis of each story and the characters as being antiquated, that it is a reevaluation of our film and its incidents but, written while it was a given that Garbo was leading a solitary life, it is kept within Garbo being a mystery, that if the stories were outdated, they could be looked at with curiousity and inquiry, as the fantasies they were meant to be, and in that way the reviews of Richard Corliss only contain a hint of being outdated in their being questioning without necessity. To compare and contrast, if Corliss is writing about the versatility of Greta Garbo, John Bainbridge reverberates the sentiment, "What was to become known as the Garbo manner was but faintly discernable in The Torrent, but there were intimations." Bainbridge seems to keep his secret that much of the material for his biography was derived from fan magazines, albeit he conducted interviews. Biographies on Greta Garbo the sensation began to appear, almost in droves, as soon as the actress had spoken in sound film, many explaining how she reached the screen in Hollywood in the first place while adding spoonfuls of data about Mauritz Stiller. This was to nearly culminate in 1938 with Modern Screen's 15 pages of biography, The True Life Story of Greta Garbo, written by William Stewart. It summarized, "The picture was The Torrent, originally slated for Aileen Pringle but given to Garbo as a test of her ablility...It pleased her, but for final praise she awaited Stiller's word. "It is good.', he said, and those three encouraging words were sufficient." In that being bilingual played a part on Stiller's dismissal from M.G.M, there is an interesting quote from John Bainbridge's biography, "Her inability to speak English prevented her, even if she had wished, from mixing easily with the other people on the set. In spare moments at the studio she was being tutored in English by an interpreter who had been assigned to translate her. She also practiced English with her chief cameraman, William Daniels, with whom she struck up a pleasant and lasting acquaintance, 'I didn't teach Garbo to speak English,' Daniels has remarked, 'but we used to talk a lot and I would correct her on certain things. We understood each other, and talked about things we both knew- movie talk."

     Motion Picture News during 1926 gave the title to the film as "Ibanez' Torrent" The Exploitation Angles were given as "Feature Ricardo Cortez and Greta Garbo. Tell patrons about the letter's European success. Bill as strong emotional drama. Stress flood episode." The Production Highlights given for the film included the talent of actress Greta Garbo and "Spectacular Flood scene and unusual climax".
Rilla Page Palmborg, author of the biography The Private Life of Greta Garbo, described the premiere of "The Torrent" in California, "No one noticed Garbo as she and Mr. Stiller quietly slipped into seats at the rear of the dimly lighted house. No one saw them steal out of before the picture was finished. At the first picture Greta Garbo made in Hollywood she set the precedent of never appearing publicly at any of her pictures."

It would seem that the "prophesy" of Modern Screen Magazine was ten years premature when as early as 1931, in a Modern Screen Film Gossip section, it ran a story titled Will Greta Garbo Quit the Screen For The Stage, which held a prediction which claimed that theater director Max Reinhardt had seen a print of "The Torrent" and after having rewatched it six times had already begun negotions to direct Greta Garbo on the stage. The article, referring to her in 1931 as a "mystery woman", mentions a second offer from a "Swedish movie company", which in fact seems a more well kept, or bigger, secret.

Silent Film Greta Garbo in The Temptress Greta Garbo Greta Garbo Greta Garbo Victor Sjostrom

 Photoplay magazine reviewed Love, "Anna Karenina? Not so's you could notice it. But John Gilbert and Greta Garbo melt the Russian snow with their love scenes. Will it be popular? Don't be silly." The present author understably has every need to In part John Bainbridge's quoting of Bengt Idestam Almquist in its near entirety, "Greta Garbo has never been better. In her first American pictures she was something different than this: a sensual body, thin and wriggling like an exotic liana, plus a couple of heavy eyelids that hinted all kins of picturesque lusts. But gradually Miss Garbo has worked her way towards becoming a real actress with depth and sincerity." Kenneth Macpherson of Close-Up magazine reviewed the performance of Greta Garbo in the film, "As this is the rottenest possible film, it is clear that its success is due to the beauty of Greta Garbo, who has a Belle Bennett part of mother love. In twenty years they will be trying vainly to give her those parts for which her youth and beauty now make her suited. As I say, the film is just tripe and Greta's clothes are an abomination...but for the fact of Greta's lovliness and her utter inabilbity to look like anything but an overgrown adolescent dressing up for the school play." That year, for the same magazine, H. D. begged to differ, writing, "Let's put Miss Garbo out of it entirely and say that Greta Garbo, under Pabst, was a Nordic ice-flower. Under preceeding and succeeding directors she was an over-grown hoyden or a buffet Guiness-please-miss. The performance of Greta Garbo in that subtle masterpiece Anna Karenina (Love) was inexplicably vulgar and incredibly dull. It was only by the greatest effort of will that one could visulaize in that lifeless and dough-like visage a trace of the glamour, the chizselled purity, the dazzling, almost unearthly beauty...Greta Garbo in The Joyless Street...remained an aristocrat. Greta Garbo as the wife of a Russian Court official and mistress of a man of the world, diademed and in sweeping robes in the palace of Karenin, waa a house-maide at a carnival."

     The magazine The Film Spectator in 1928 highlighted the films editing, "There is one cleaver feature in Love, the close up debauch in which Metro presents Jack Gilbert and Greta Garbo. In the way it places the closing title to one sequence serves as an introductory tile to the sequence that succeeds it. There is a fade out after the title, 'Then I will see you at the grand Duke's ball;' and a fade in on the ball without any further explanatory title." During June of 1927, Motion Picture magazine reported, "Greta Garbo's week of sulking and refusing to appear at the Metro studios has availed her nothing. The immigration authorities decided that Greta would have to go to work or be deported...She will begin work on Anna Karenina, the story that story that caused her final tempermental guesture and her desertion of the studios is to be directed by Dimitri Buchowetski and Richard Cortez was signed after his recent break with Paramount, to play the male lead." Cortez at the time was married to Alma Rubens. Motion Picture News during 1927 announced that Greta Garbo had signed a five year contract with M.G.M., "Her first story is from the pen of Count Tolstoy. The star is not yet twenty one years of age, but has won considerable popularity both in this country and abraod." It claimed that Garbo was to be given the starring role in Anna Karenina, which was to be directed by Dimitri Buchowetzki, "also under contract at M.G.M." Author and curator Jan-Christopher Horak gives a fairly uncontested account of the replacement of directors on the film, "Buchowetzki went to M.G.M. where he directed Valentia (1927) with Mae Murray, all of them costume films. In February 1927 he was assigned to direct Greta Garbo and Victor Varconi in Love (1927), the film that proved to be his Waterloo. Given the fact that he was Russian and had directed several other films set in Imperial Russia, Buchowetszki was the logical first choice. While Garbo supposedly held out for more money and a different co-star (Richard Cortez eventually replaced Varconi), Buchowetski began production in April, shooting a substantial amount of footage with Cortez. In the first week of May Garbo called in sick and stayed that way at John Gilbert's house untill the studio gave in...the director's original had been scrapped in its entirety." If this is accurate, for all intensive purposes, although only one film starring Greta Garbo, The Divine Woman (Victor Seastrom, 1928), is presently lost, the fragment of Greta Garbo in Love that were earlier filmed rushes, can be added to that. Film Daily, during April of 1927 had printed Buckowets,I Starts Love, which slated Richard Cortez and Greta Garbo in the principal characters, "The cast includes Lionel Barrymore, Helen Chadwick, Zazu Pitts....Doeothy Sebastian. Lorna Moon adapted the screenplay." During May of 1927 it ran the announcement Goulding Directing Love, "Dimitri Buchowetski has been replaced by Edmound Goulding as the director of Anna Karenina, in which Greta Garbo will poetry the title role" John Bainbridge merely writes that Dimitri Buchowetsky was dismissed as director of the film because of an inability to remain compatible, or amicable, with his actors before having had been being replaced by Edmund Goulding, but the biographer then quotes a nameless source that had been present as part of the filming, "'(John Gilbert) wanted to show Garbo how clever he was. Every scene meant his interference with Goulding. He insisted on trying to direct the picture. Garbo insisted that sHe could not act if anyone watched her.'..Whatever the state of their private relations, Miss Garbo habitually deferred to Jack Gilbert on all professional matters. Whenever a question arose, her customary remark was, 'I ask Jack.'" Motion Picture News quietly reported during July of 1927, "Production of Love will be resumed shortly with Greta Garbo and John Gilbert in the leads. The Picture was halted because of Miss Garbo's illness.
That year Photoplay Magazine had included a Photoplay caption beneath a portrait of Greta Garbo That read, "Latest War Bulletin from the Firing Line: Greta starts peacefully to work on Anna Karenina. Some changes to the title Love, Greta goes home pleading illness. She says she's not temperamental." the next photo caption read, Greta Garbo does not think she bill go home. Greta positively enjoys her work in Love now that John Gilbert is definitely cast as her leading man. here is the first photograph of Greta Garbo as Anna Karenina and John as Vronsky." 

     Sven-Hugo Borg writes about his having observed John Gilbert and Greta Garbo, "They were cast as lovers in "Love" ("Anna Karenina") and out of that picture came not only another screen triumph for Garbo, but the flowering of what I believe to have been the only real love of her life," He continues, "I believe with all my heart that John Gilbert is the only man who ever touched the deep wells of passionate emotion which lie buried in the breasts of Garbo." Borg alludes to Garbo not having to have wanted to marry Gilbert and of her keeping the details of the romance from Mauritz Stiller. "She was in the arms of Jack Gilbert when I first saw her. The air was surcharged. The atmosphere glowed." Picture Play during 1928 had published its "face to face" account, Once Seen, Never Forgotten, of one of its writers, Malcom H. Oettinger, having met Greta Garbo, "Gilbert, resplendent in his uniform he wore as Vronsky, in Love, was good enough to introduce me to Greta. Even with this auspicious start she was difficult to coax into conversation...For the first minute or two after Gilbert had withdrawn I found my time taken up solely by her beauty." The accompanying photograph of Greta Garbo was taken by Ruth Harriet Louise and was a cut-out outline of the actress, as though silhouette shaped. 

     Rilla Page Palmborg, who published The Private Life of Greta Garbo in 1931 gave an account of the filming of "Love". "The few persons allowed on the set declared that the Garbo-Gilbert romance was on again in full swing and that the Stars were again living their love scenes and not acting them. Calloused property men, scene shifters and electricians stood spellbound when Jack took Greta in his arms. They declared with pardonable exaggeration, that the air around the set was charged with passion." Before continuing on to an account of the filming of "The Divine Woman" costarring Lars Hanson rather than John Gilbert, Palmborg reported that it was while making "Love" that Greta Garbo had begun to decline interviews. " 'Interviews,' she said. 'how I hate them! When I get to be a big star, I will never give another.' " Rilla Page Palmborg cautiously noted that it was also at this time that Mauritz Stiller had decided to return to Sweden. Palmborg explains that exotic qowns were required to be worn for the Tolstoy adaptation and that Greta Garbo a stand in named Gerladine de Vorak, who had made sure that the gowns were fitted to Garbo. "Occaisionally, in long shots, when her face could not be seen, she was used in the picture."

Motion Picture News Booking Guide during 1929 provided a brief synopsis of the film Love, directed by Edmund Goulding, "Theme: Tragic love drama adapted from Tolstoi's classic novel Anna Karenina. Forfeiting the right to her child, whom she adores, wife of Russian nobleman falls madly in love with a young officer. Finally realizing fate such love brings, girl because of her lover's lost prestige in his regiment and her deprivation from her child, hurls herself beneath the wheels of an oncoming train."

National Board of Review magazine saw "Love" as being an incomplete adaptation of the novel Anna Karenina, that it had abridged the description of Russian society in order to indulge the development of character for a return at the box-office, "The picture deals exclusively with the central love intrigue and resolves itself in aI'm at series of love scenes, scenes and scenes of self sacrifice. It is a fine solo performance for Greta Garbo, seconded by Mr. John Gilbert." American critics had made the same objected that Selma Lagerloff had, that films were not entirely faithful adaptations due to constraints of the art form and demands of the audience.

. Back to John Gilbert and Greta Garbo Greta Garbo

Greta Garbo in Wild Orchids (Sidney Franklin, 1929)

Motion Picture News during 1929 quietly reported, "Clarence Brown will direct Greta Garbo in Heat for M. G.M.", later that month it adding, "Greta Garbo...has just completed The Divine Woman and will soon begin working on a new starring vehicle tentatively titled Heat adapted from an original story by John Colton. Richard Corliss has written, "Wild Orchids is a gorgeous excersize, with soft-focus sunstars glistening off the the actors' silhouettes, and countless tracking shots that give the impression of being an elegant if impotent nose-thumb in the face of the more earthbound talkies...and Wild Orchids is full of the frolicsome play of shadows. As Garbo stands indecisively outside Asther's bedroom door, light suddenly spills over her as the door is opened and his shadow crawls up her body; when he reaches her- and reaches for her, the shadow of his cupped hand falling over her breast- she retreats." Picture Play Magazine reviewed the film with, "Greta Garbo in her best role. Rather slow, but impelled by adult emotions." It later intimated that Greta Garbo was being watched, from no matter how far. In "You'd Never Know Them", A.L. Woodbridge claimed, "Greta Garbo is one of the few stars who looks so different in person, she needs no 'prop' disguise." Photoplay Magazine published, "Wild Orchids will do much for Nils Asther. Here is the role that will push the young Swedish actor up closer to stardom." It described the film with, "a story that proves tropical heat melts all conventions. The scene is java- the details are superb and the picture is a riot for audiences." Film Daily began following the film with the entry Asther Being Groomed, which read, "It looks as if Metro-Goldwyn Mayer are grooming Nils Asther to fill the vacancy that might be created by the departure of John Gilbert from the payroll of that organization. Rumor has it that Gilbert will go to United Artists..,Asther has been assigned the lead opposite Greta Garbo in her next picture Heat." A later entry followed reporting Garbo Title Change Again, "Wild Orchids and not Kiss of The East will be final title for Greta Garbo's new picture." It is not entirely marginal that there are accounts that Nils Asther had met Greta Garbo in 1924, at the Dramatiska Teatern and that he had proposed marriage to her, which she apparently declined- the autobiography of Nils Asther, Narrens jag (Fool's Way/The Way of the Jester was published in Swedish posthumously. If, in 1928, Ruth Bieiry was writing about Nils Asther in Photoplay magazine merely to obtain information about the secretive Greta Garbo, she does in fact show him in a favorable light and was genuinely interested in the actor, "Nils Asther, like Greta Garbo, was trained in the small studios of Sweden. He was accustomed to accept acting as an art rather than a short cut to wealth, fortune or position." 

   Rilla Page Palborg, in a biography titled "The Private Life of Greta Garbo" gave an account of meeting Greta Garbo on the set of "Wild Orchids". It soon become apparent that Greta Garbo would only film on a closed set, beyond anyone questioning whose voice distinctive voiceaccompanied the images. "A few days before she was to leave for Stockholm I talked to Greta Garbo. Our appointment on the set of 'Wild Orchids', then in process of production. She was acting a scene with Lewis Stone, who in the picture was her husband...Stealthily, she slipped out of bed, wrapped in a robe about her slender body, and stole from the room. The scene was taken over and over. Finally she came out and sat down beside me on an old couch that was standing on the edge of the set. 'I guess we can have a few minutes before I continue my struggle on that bed', she said wearily. 'It's almost impossible for me to keep my mind on all this. I did not want to make this picture before I went to Sweden. There is not enough enough time. My mind is running about the shops buying clothes and presents for this one and that one. But the studio made me do it.' " Greta Garbo continued the interview after decling anything for warmth, her denying that the she was cold in the M.G.M studio. "Now that I am really going home I can hardly wait to get there. I will be home for Christmas." Garbo apparently made her first reference to filming in sound in the United States, asking the journalist Palmborg if her accent was acceptable with a hopeful enthusiasm. Palmborg noted earlier that several actors had returned to Europe for just that reason, a heavy accent no matter how bilingual. Plamborg continued, "We talked about Lars Hanson and his wife, who had returned to Sweden. Her face saddened when I mentioned I mentioned her sister, who had died a year after Greta's arrival inHollywood. 'It has been hard to believe that she is really gone. When I go home I will find that it's is true."

     Clarence Sinclair Bull photographed the portrait of Nils Asther that appeared in Motion Picture Magazine. After their review of Wild Orchids there was included a page entitled Home is Where the Arts Is. It read, "It is Nils Asther's conviction that inspiration for his work is not so much to be got from constant mingling with other people as from a communion with himself." 

     Film Daily subtitled its review to the film, "Sexy Garbo Film with Strong Feminine Appeal. Finely Done. should Get Dough." It described the film's actors, " Greta Garbo; alluring and capable; Lewis Stone gives a fine performance and Nils Asther's a handsome Shiek. The three practically carry all the action." It went on to the scenario, Exploitation of Garbo's sex appeal." while crediting John Colton as author and Marion Ainslee and Rith Cummings as having written the titles. Photplay also announced, "This is Greta Garbo's last picture before she departed for Sweden" It claimed that the story created by writer John Colton as enacted by Garbo in Wild Orchids had previously been considered for Lillian Gish. motion Picture Magazpine listed the film as Synchronized (Sound) upon its release while lending it. Recommendation, "Lewis Stone gives his always distinguished performance. And Nils is an actor, and- but see Wild Orchids. To end 1928, Film Daily reported, Garbo Re-Signed, claiming that she had signed a new contract with M.G.M, one that would allow her to go on. vacation before going into effect and speculated with a fair amount of certainty that her first picture on her return would be an adaptation of a novel written by Elinor Glyn. John Bainbridge writes,"When she finished her current film, though, she was coming home for Christmas. Stiller, excited by this piece of news..." He provides an account of Garbo recieving a telegram from Victor Sjostrom, who had been with Mauritz Stiller the previous evening, announcing Stiller having passed away, an unnamed source describing that while on the set, her composure registered and became quiet for a brief moment and that she then continued the scene. "Lars Hanson, who spent untold hours with them in Sweden and in Hollywood, is of the opinion that there existed between them a bond of mutual affection, respect and dependency, but never the normal ties of love."
     Among the several advertisements published by M.G.M Studios which advertised the studio and included the film was on placed in Motion Picture News that reintroduced Greta Garbo. "The most talked about star in pictures! 'Woman in Affairs' built her fame bigger than ever. Next 'Wild Orchids' and it's a throbbing gold-getter." Typical of the studio advertising itself, John Gilbert, Lon Chaney, Norma Shearer and Roman Novorro were included in the multi-page ads, "John Gilbert follows with 'Desert Night'. What a star! They all wanted him! The Big Ones stay with M.G.M."
Well into 1932, as was typical with the fan magazines of the early sound period, Movie Classic provided one of the many published retrospectives, biographies or timelines of the career of Greta Garbo and her silent film, building up the glamour aspect of her having been the enigmatic Swedish Sphinx, which included a look at The Mysterious Lady, "still another leading man, Conrad Nagel. Being married, he is safe from Greta Garbo." The magazine overlooked the marriage of Lars Hanosn to Karin Molander paragraphs earlier, "(Garbo) hailed in the title role of The Divine Woman with Lars Hanson as leading man. Romance with Lars Hanson rumored." If actress Greta Garbo remained eternally silent on the rumor of an affair with Hanson, it would not have seemed out of place, as by the time it had gone to print, Lars Hanson and Victor Sjostrom had both returned to their native country Sweden with their wives. Journalist Harriet Parsons of Modern Screen Magazine looked at the availability of Greta Garbo during 1931. "After her split with Gilbert, Garbo used to see Nils occasionally. They were countrymen and shared in common a moodiness and a love of solitude...There was never more than a casual friendship between them...Nils has since married the woman he loves." While describing the personal life between Greta Garbo and Niks Asther, Parson introduced Sorenson, a blond young Swede that was dating Garbo while in the United States, and "was in love with Garbo. But Garbo wasn't in love with him." She "liked him immensely. Liked not loved." Sorenson returned to Sweden when his pass port had expired.

     As Film Daily scurried for the latest information on the three tone technicolor process and the wiring of movie theaters for sound, Movie Makers making reviewed the cinematography of "Wild Orchids", "The picture opens with a skillful cinematic representation of the confusion and excitement at the departure of a steamer...scenes of the dock and boat dissolve into each other and a moving camera follows the leads...the emphasis on neutral colors helps convey...although there are very few shots with definite photographic contrasts."

It would appear that during 1929 Greta Garbo was included into what could be considered either the hard cover or the textbooks of that year, but only due to an author writing in a flurry; Hands of Hollywood was printed by Mary Eunice McCarthy and the Photoplay Research Bureau with the subtitle Copyright Applied For as the world waited for Greta Garbo and Lon Chaney to speak. After a brief chapter on The Talers, it discussed The Future of Pictures by paraphrasing the view of Irving  Thalberg, "He also announces that Greta Garbo and Nils Asther, both possessing decided foreign accents, have been resigned by his company under long term contracts. he says that a producer is foolish to release great public favorites in which he has invested millions of dollars for advertising and exploitation and to replace them with comparatively unknown stage players merely because of their trained voice...Greta Garbo's latest picture, "Wild Orchids" (silent) is making a tremendous amount of money and has played Broadway for two splendid weeks." Earlier in the volume, in a section that covered Continuity Writers the author had mentioned the film in regard to the qualifications and duties of writers of adaptations and the knowledge of censorship and their translating to the screen novels or plays that otherwise would be censored, A Woman of Affairs having been milder than its counterpart The Green Hat.

M.G.M placed advertisements in magazines for theater owners assuring them that projecting the film would be profitable, describing it as a "throbbing gold-getter".

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back to top- Greta Garbo in Wild Orchids

Greta Garbo in Flesh and the Devil (Clarence Brown, 1926)

After listing "Tower of Lies as a reunion of Victor Sjostrom, Norma Shearer and Lon Chaney from the film "He Who Gets Slapped", and that Lon Chaney would "appear in another stunning vehicle..Title and details to be announced soon", a magazine advertisement paid for by M.G.M announcing its 52 quality films of 1925-1926 listed the film "Flesh and the Devil" as "The Victor Seastrom-John Gilbert special. Sjostrom as director, Gilbert as star make a marvelous money-winning combrination. It is the sucessor to 'He Who Gets Slapped'.

It is difficult to find notice that Victor Sjostrom had been originally slated to direct Greta Garbo and yet it is unlikely that Marcus Loew would have been in error. It is only by flash forwarding to Greta Garbo's fourth film and by claiming that her first three were already in the planning stage without her that we can see the phenomenon of Greta Garbo as having arisen from a combined phenomenon of Greta Garbo/John Gilbert, which it inevitably did. Moving Picture World of 1925 published the predictions of the then President of Metro-Goldwyn. " 'The Flesh and the Devil' is a Victor Seastrom-John Gilbert Special. It is by Herman Suderman. It will be directed by Seastrom, the man who made 'He Who Gets Slapped' and I don't know what better recommendation there is than that. There will be one other John Gilbert production, title and details of which we will announce later." The question is did Loew publish this before director Monte Bell had seen the screen test of Greta Garbo spliced into the rushes of "The Temptress", which would entail his holding The Flesh and The Devil for her during the completion of two film in production- it is quite possibly in that Loew at the same time had announced " 'The Torrent' by Ibanez will have Aileen Pringle in the leading role and this also will be a Cosmopolitan Picture made at our studio. It will be big in every way."

During 1927, the paid magazine advertisements M.G.M. published for "Flesh and the Devil" had resorted to "Hot damn! What a great picture."

For those interested in how the Greta Garbo John Gilbert pairing did come about from 1925 onward, Loew happenned to add, "There will be one Fred Niblo production on our schedule. Details on this picture have not been completed as yet and will be announced later." There literally seemed to be more excitement about the film "The Mysterious Island" containing Technicolor sequences than anyone named Greta Garbo speaking on the screen with John Barrymore.

Garbo photographer William Daniels in 1926, in addition to lighting Garbo and Gilbert was also cinematographer to the films Altars of Desire (seven reels)) under Christy Cabanne and Bardley the Magnificient under the direction of King Vidor; that is not to say that that is the limit of his contribution to film history; Daniel's had trained on several of Von Strohiem's important films, beginning with Blind Husbands in 1919 and continued in Hollywood after the making of the 1939 film Ninotchka, until 1970. Daniels has been deemed an "inventor of detail" for his ingenuity by American Cinematographer magazine and it was noted that during the silent era he would light the scene with a stand-in and use a bicycle horn when finished and ready to replace the figure with the film's star.  Although Daniels seems uncredited for his photography on Von Strohiem's "The Merry Widow", starring John Gilbert and Mae Murray, he is noted for work on the 1925 film "Woman and Gold" (James  P. Hogan) for Gotham Productions,  film which starred actress Sylvia Breamer.  Film historian Leo Braudy has written, "The lighting that William Daniels created for Garbo's early silent film rendered her more erotic than any spoken dialogue."

     Hollywood magazine during 1935 printed the article,"Garbo's cameraman Talks At Last", in which William Daniels primarily, for whatever reason, dispelled some of the more than prevalent publicity about Greta Garbo having been " gloomy, aloof, frightened or imperious" It claimed that he had originally become Garbo's cameraman when the studio ace that had been assigned to the film "The Torrent" had on the third day encountered an accident and needed a crushed finger amputated and with the studio busy, only young William Daniels was available to film Garbo. In light of what Daniels said during the filming of Anna Karenina, it would stand to reason that where Greta Garbo was foreign, the studio might reassign the same film crew in her pictures that were to follow. Daniels is quoted as having said, "She's changed. Developed. Matured. Ten years ago, she was a young girl undergoing the bewildering experience of finding herself suddenly famous in a land whose language she couldn't understand. She kept her head then, as she has ever since. Don't imagine she has had an easy time. For instance, look at the way she has perfected her English. I don't think she has learned so much by study as actually making herself use the language...And Miss Garbo is fond of America. She loves the Californian sunlight, basking in it, walking in it, incessantly."

      There is an account of Rowland V. Lee having met Greta Garbo when she had first been introduced to the United States in 1925, "Jack Gilbert was all she wanted to talk about."

     Greta Garbo and John Gilbert were to attend the premiere of Bardley the Magnificient (Vidor/Daniels,1926) together. Motion Picture magazine printed, "Hollywood is still talking. The newspaper wires still buzz everytime ther telephones the other. Yet in spite of this, Greta Garbo and John Gilbert dare appear at openings and other Hollywood functions."  During this screen writer Dorothy Farnum ran magazine advertisements announcing her having written the screenplay to the film Bardley the Magnificient and the portrait from the film of John Gilbert printed in Motion Picture magazine had been taken by Ruth Harriet Louise. 1926 was also the year that Greta Garbo, John Gilbert and Lars Hanson would film an adaptation of the novel The Undying Past, bringing its plotline to the screen untill its emotional concluding scene at the Isle of Friendship during Flesh and the Devil Picture Play magazine during 1927 published what seems to be a seldom seem photograph of Greta Garbo and Jack Gilbert, their staring at each other across a table. In When Hollywood Discovered Bridge, the caption below the four playing cards read, "The Flesh and the Devil quartet- Greta Garbo, Lars Hanson, Jack Gilbert and Director Clarence Brown- more than once took time off during the production to play a hurried rubber. as may be seen, though, Greta and Jack, who are usually partners didn't give their full attention to the game." As posed, they are looking at each other with a sense of either impending doom, or a mutual consent that would soon decide to spring into action, as though the photograph were staged.

     Clarence Sinclair Bull published a portrait of Lars Hanson in Picture Play magazine during 1927. it's caption read, "That slow intent gaze which was so powerful a factor in making Hanson's Reverend Dimmesdale in 'The Scarlet Letter' a convincing portrayal is here pictured with equally telling effect. Hanson will next be seen in 'The Flesh and the Devil'.

Biographer John Bainbridge quotes Clarence Brown as though Brown had contributed to the mythical quality of any romance between Greta Garbo and John Gilbert, adding celluloid, or perhaps, tinsel rather, to the publicity it had already acquired, " 'I am working with raw material,' Brown said rather breathlessly. 'They are working in that blissful state of love that is so like a rosy cloud that they imagine themselves hidden behind it, as well as lost in it.'"

      For Photoplay Agnes Smith in 1927 wrote the intrigue between John Gilbert and Greta Garbo, "He worked with her in a picture called Flesh and the Devil. He proclaimed his intention of marrying her. As for Greta she seemed to enjoy the rush. And then, when everyone was all set for another Hollywood wedding, Greta walked out...John Gilbert sticks to his story...She is a wonderful woman. A delightful woman And the most fascinating woman in pictures. 'She is,' says Mr. Gilbert, 'a mountian of a girl. She is a statue. There is something eternal about her. Not only did she baffle me, but she baffled everyone at the studio.'"

Of her off-screen Clarence Brown romance with John Gilbert, Clarence Brown has been quoted as having said, "After i finsihed a scene with them, I felt like an intruder. I'd walk away to let them finish what they were doing." Brown has also been quoted as having said, "Those two were in a world of their own." Bainbridge quotes the director with, "Clarence Brown introduced them on the set of Flesh and the Devil, 'It was love at first sight,'and it lasted through many years.'" As a biographer, Bainbridge estimates the facets involved in the relationship, "her response to Gilbert's gaily insistent attention was quick, though it was not her nature that it should have been precipitous...Because of their work, Garbo and Gilbert spent all of their days together, and Gilbert took advantage of every oppurtunity to press his cause...Off the set, Gilbert and Garbo were also getting better acquainted. They often dined together, and the young actress became a rather frequent visitor a Gilbert's Tower Road mansion." This estimation reveals Gilbert's advance, "When 'Flesh and the Devil' was finished, Gilbert asked Garbo to marry him- a proposal that he was to make more than once again." The account in Photoplay written by Agnes Smith is very much like John Bainbridge's, "A great many stories have been broadcast concerning the romance of Greta Garbo and John Gilbert. The scenario, according to Hollywood's most reliable gossips runs something like this. John met the beautiful Scandinavian and immediately started an impetuous courtship. He made no secret of his devotion to the lovely Greta. He accompanied her to all the parties. He lunched with her and dined with her." When "Flesh and the Devil" was reviewed by Photoplay Magazine, it was seen as "a picture filmed when the romance of Jack Gilbert and Greta Garbo (see Jack's story in this issue) was at its height." It saw the performance of Greta Garbo as "flashing" whereas that of John Gilbert was delivered by one who "does overshadow his scenes".
Picture Play Magazine in the beginning of 1927 playfully alluded to the meteoric notoriety of Greta Garbo by reintroducing her to magazine audiences as the mystery new to stardom, but elusive by virtue of her celebrity with a portrait taken by Ruth Harriet Louise; its caption read, "That sad, sad look on Greta Garbo's face is deceiving. She's really very happy over here in America and they say that she loved working with John Gilbert in 'Flesh and the Devil'."

Journalist I.W Irving, during 1926, expalined the film and the act of audience reception in the periodical Hollywood Topics, "As for John Gilbert, well...its one of the best things her ever did. The flapper will simply rave ober him. His love scenes with Greta Garbo will go in motion picture history as a momentous inspiration. And Greta Garbo...she's simply bewitching. The male element will undoubtedly rave over her. So will the female element, for they themselves will learn a few things in the art of love making...But it is Gilbert and Garbo in their great scenes that put the picture over as a directorial triumph."

During the middle of 1927 Photoplay featured the two pictured together in the News and Gossip of the Studios section, "All bets are off on the Garbo-Gilbert wedding. For at least five days Hollywood was in a flurry of excitement. Jack and Greta, fairest of Fjordland, were rumored to have trekked to a neighboring hamlet and murmurred, "I do." A search of marriage license permits revealed nothing. There is bleak silence from the two." Bainbridge adds, "'Gilbert pleaded and begged that they should marry, but Garbo just did not want to,' the director Clarence Brown said recently." Picture Picture magazine during 1927 queries Is the Gilbert-Garbo Match Really Off? Prompted by journalist Dorothy Herzog. The accompanying portrait of Jack Gilbert was photographed by Ruth Harriet Louise with the caption, "There can be no doubt that Jack Gilbert is saddened by the unhappy turn taken by what promised to be his great romance". She began, "She is a thousand years old. She came into the world with all it's knowledge. She knows everything, and instinctively remembers everything.' 'and you love Greta Garbo?', we interrupted. Jack Gilbert's shadowed eyes swept our face swiftly, then looked away. 'She is. Wonderful girl. We were merely good pals,' he evaded, alertly on the defensive. 'is it true you were engaged to her?' 'We were never engaged.' ------ Back to Greta Garbo John Gilbert M.G.M.advertised Greta Garbo in 1927, it often taking full page magazine pages that mentioned several actors and actresses that were currently at the studio at any given time. Garbo had become, "The most sensational find in years, she clicked immediately in The Torrent, then in The Temptress and now Flesh and the Devil" Later it advertised, "Greta Garbo's amazing hold on the public cannot be duplicated anywhere in this industry. Flesh and the Devil is just a foretaste of the money she means for the theaters. " --------- Collen Moore must have read about or in fact contacted the Greta Garbo apparition; during 1928 she compared herself to Greta Garbo by coming to her aid in Motion Picture Classic Magazine, "most of the greatly beloved women of history- they have been possessed of the childish appeal, every one of them. Perhaps not so much childish as wistful, whimsical. Seems a funny thing to say, but Greta Garbo has it too. Really, she romps and plays it less than that worn-out term, vamp, than anyone I know. In its way, it gets across." In an interview during which she outlines her having met John Gilbert, Greta Garboas quoted by Ruth Biery in The Story of Greta Garbo, said, "When I finisihed The Temptress, they gave me the script for The Flesh and the Devil to read. I did not like the story. I did not want to be a silly temptress. I cannot see any sense in getting dressed up and doing nothing but tempting men in pictures." This is oddly echoed by National Board of Review Magazine, in which the conclusion was drawn that, "the leading contributor to the success of Flesh and the Devil is Greta Garbo" It provided a synopsis of the film that also lent a background to its addressing the desire of Greta Garbo to leave her earlier " ladies of vampire repute" characters and to be seen as a more serious dramatic, or perhaps romantic dramatic, actress. it primarily sees her as having been a then more believable character, " Miss Garbo in her later day personal ion shows a frail physique and a fragile ethereal air. She is infinitely more civilized and all the more suitable for not being so deliberate."

Scott Reisfeld, the great nephew of Greta Garbo, reiterates the sentiment that Greta Garbo was dissatified with her assignments and needed to play more demanding characters in her reluctance to star in the film "Women Love Diamonds" but he also questions the part played by Louis B. Mayer in generating the conception of Garbo being a recluse, to which she may have merely acquiesced, "But Mayer was persistent in his attempts to compel Garbo into submission. He intiated a smear campaign in the media to depict Garbo as a megalomaniac. A negative media campaign supported threats to deport her."

The portrait of Greta Garbo that year had been photographed by Ruth Harriet Louise, the caption reading, "We are feverishingly waiting her performance opposite John Gilbert in Flesh and the Devil." By then, it was increasingly unnecessary to introduce her as a rising star. The photograph of Greta Garbo Ruth Harriet Louise published in Photoplay carried a caption referring to her as "the object of John Gilbert's fervant wooing". In regard to the direction of Clarence Brown, Motion Picture new reviwed the film during 1927 with, "And Clarence Brown, who has advanced so rapidly the past year, has brought out every point to build a story which fascinates in its paly of caprice and feeling. It is touched with sex- but sex never becomes rampant. It always remains a film of visual excellence...Early scenes project the development of the affair. What follows are the dramatic complications which culminate in a happy ending- the only flaw in the picture." Under the magazine's section on Explotation Angles, it advised: "Play up Gilbert and Garbo. Use stills. Cash in on title. Play up director. Go the limit." When the film was reviewed by Motion Picture Magazine the film was praised with, "Here is one of the best pictures reflected upon the screen in many a moon, the perfection of which is only marred by the ending, which appears tacked on, as an afterthought...Greta is a beautiful nymphomaniac...You never feel the chaos she causes exaggerated. she's attractive enough to wreak has ok in a man's world." Paul Rotha reviewed a what he deemed to be "a film of more than passing cleverness" directed by Clarence Brown, "Flesh and the Devil had some pretensions to be called a good film. The theme was sheer, undiluted sex,and Brown used a series of close ups to get this across with considerable effect. Notable also was his use of Ngles, different indeed from customary German and American method and the happiness with which he settled his characters in their environment." Back to Greta Garbo John Gilbert Greta Garbo and Jack Gilbert in Love< Film Daily during 1926 sported two interesting entries. During September it wrote, "Marcel de Sarno, director, and Raymond Doyle, scenarist, returned to M.G.M. studios after a trip for research data for Ordeal, which de Sarno will direct with Greta Garbo and Lon Chaney. In November, Film Daily reported, "Clarence Brown, who has just completed the direction of John Gilbert and Greta Garbo in Flesh and the Devil is preparing to direct Lillian Gish's next production, The Wind, screen adaptation by Frances Marion of Dorothy Scarborough's story. It seems either misprint or misquote that Exhibitor's Trade Review had earlier, during 1925, published, "Miss Alice Scully, a young scenario writer wrote the script for Stella Maris...since the first of the year has also written scripts for Parisian Love and The Undying Past for Victor Seastrom." Greta Garbo<Greta Garbo Greta Garbo