A century in the past on Sunday, Greta Garbo made her first look on display screen. Swedish silent epic The Saga of Gösta Berling, launched on 10 March 1924, was based mostly on Selma Lagerlöf’s bestselling novel and follows the misadventures of a disgraced ex-minister. Exiled to a wild property in central Sweden, the commoner Berling falls sufferer to a wedding plot meant to unseat the heiress obvious. Garbo – born Greta Gustafsson, renamed particularly for this look – performs the spouse of the brand new meant inheritor. Forged whereas nonetheless a hopeful scholar at a Stockholm performing faculty, and never but groomed into the rake-thin mannequin of a Hollywood main girl, she arguably steals the present. She is simply as compelling in inside scenes as she is when pulled from a burning mansion over a frozen lake, pursued by wolves (the movie continues to be revered for its set items).
When Gösta Berling reached MGM, the most important of Hollywood’s main studios, two new recruits had been made. One was the movie’s director Mauritz Stiller, whose American profession lasted solely 4 years. The opposite was Greta Garbo. She quickly turned the business’s brightest star, a byword for the unique and emotionally distanced: vamps, Soviets, loner ballerinas, ambiguously international spies, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (twice), Dumas’ ailing Woman of the Camellias. Within the midst of Hollywood’s mass-production age she made solely 28 movies – her final in 1941, on the age of 35. Then she lived out the remainder of her life in retirement till her demise in 1990.
Her final MGM function, in George Cukor’s mistaken-identity screwball Two-Confronted Girl, was destined to show bitter. The movie tried to capitalise on the success of Ernst Lubitsch’s Ninotchka, a deadpan Soviet caper and a comedy first for Garbo, however its screenplay captured none of its cosmopolitan allure. Even worse was the expectation that she study to bop for the movie. When MGM organized for personal classes at her house, she hid up a tree.
Thus Garbo disappeared without end. Or so it’s assumed. A latest biography by Robert Gottlieb reveals a packed social schedule. To previous MGM acquaintances she appeared distant, however there have been infinite engagements with movie star nutritionist Gayelord Hauser and famed photographer Cecil Beaton. She was usually noticed on lengthy walks by means of New York, the place she had purchased a lavish house. On the finish of the day she at all times returned house alone.
The literary habits of an exiled Garbo grow to be clear upon a look on the catalogue for her property public sale. She owned two copies of Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium Is the Therapeutic massage, an illustrated tract concerning the mass-media world she inadvertently helped to create. Jumbled along with her assortment of traditional novels is a past-life regression handbook and Ellen Frankfort’s Vaginal Politics. Shut mates declare that in her remaining years she had developed a style for MTV. Artwork supplier Sam Inexperienced remembers wanting underneath her furnishings to seek out collections of meticulously organized troll dolls.
Within the 60s and 70s Hollywood started to look again at its crumbling star system. Studios greenlit a sequence of camp tragedies – half-hagsploitation, half-hagiography – that will revive their biggest gamers. Bette Davis and Joan Crawford returned to the display screen as warring Miss Havishams in No matter Occurred to Child Jane? Mae West, who had additionally made a run for it within the early 40s, floated again into view as a supporting actor in Myra Breckinridge. Garbo would by no means knowingly star in one other movie (“I’ve made sufficient faces,” she instructed David Niven), however this interlude of nostalgia is solid in her shadow.
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In Robert Aldrich’s The Legend of Lylah Clare (1968), Kim Novak performs an ingenue who has been pushed into the starring function in a biopic of a mysteriously lifeless European actor. Context clues abound. The fictional Lylah Clare is proven in late-20s frills, consuming whisky in solitude – a pastiche of Garbo’s first sound movie, Anna Christie. Within the background, enjoying a lovelorn Mrs Danvers-type character, lurks Rossella Falk, the cult Italian actor recognized greatest for her work as a Fellini muse. (In actual life Falk turned a penpal of Garbo, who allegedly recommended they star in a joint-effort biopic of Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West.)
The obvious case of Garbosploitation is in Billy Wilder’s Fedora (1978). Wilder, who had labored early in his profession on the screenplay for Ninotchka, sends Garbo up for all her unavailability. The titular Garbo stand-in is stalked by a hopeful movie producer on a sunny island someplace within the Mediterranean. Her zany, mostly-German entourage (Hildegard Knef, Fassbinder common Gottfried John) brings to thoughts Garbo’s previous Hollywood minglings on the house of screenwriter Salka Viertel, the place she socialised with refugee-luminaries together with Thomas Mann and Bertolt Brecht. There are recurring references to Anna Karenina. One girl’s exile turns into shorthand for the misplaced extravagance of a whole business.
In the meantime, Garbo had, unbeknown to her, performed her remaining half. It was in Adam & Yves, a 1974 homosexual porn movie. A person fantasises concerning the time he noticed the star on a New York road. “Probably the most thrilling moments of my life,” he says. She is proven from far above, strolling on the velocity of sunshine. The digicam follows her round a number of blocks after which zooms out, as if to take her in.
The Gösta Berling function was comparatively small – by no means once more would she obtain second billing to a different girl – however the movie is outstanding in its foreshadowing of Garbo’s later profession. The Nordic desolation of Gösta Berling would comply with her without end. She belonged to it, simply as silent star Theda Bara was imagined to belong to historical Egypt. In Garbo’s most well-known American silent movie, Flesh and the Satan, her character is punished for promiscuity with a tumble by means of a frozen lake. Later, as Sweden’s reclusive Queen Christina, she stares stoically on to the Baltic sea, poised for exile. Garbo by no means actually left Hollywood within the first place – no single determine has ever symbolised its studio period to the identical extent – however on the identical time she was by no means absolutely there, at all times looking for one thing colder.
