TMS Muse of the Week: Greta Garbo
(Clarence Sinclair Bull)
“Still wonderful, isn’t it? And no dialogue. We didn’t need dialogue, we had faces. There just aren’t any faces like that anymore. Maybe one, Garbo…” This quote from Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950) sometimes runs through my mind when people talk about the qualifications for movie stardom. Occasionally, I’ll ponder if anyone in recent memory has the timelessness of a screen legend like Greta Garbo. Someone who can truly and completely sell a performance with just their face. The closest example I’ve ever been able to consider is French actress Marion Cotillard, who is already reaching the mid-point of her career. Like Garbo, Cotillard has striking features that we can’t look away from. It will be interesting to see if movie fans will reminisce about Cotillard 50-100 years from now the way they do with Garbo. The Swedish star was a contract player for MGM, the studio of the stars. “More stars than there are in the heavens,” as their slogan said in the 1930s. But while that was true a century ago, how many of those big names and famous faces does the general public even recognize these days save for Garbo, Clark Gable, Joan Crawford and Judy Garland? I would be surprised if there were many more.
More fascinating, it wasn’t Garbo or Crawford or Garland who were called the ‘Queen of MGM’ back in the day, but their peer Norma Shearer. Now, you say the name Norma Shearer and most people outside of the old Hollywood fandom just go, “Who?” But back in the day she was a huge star. Garbo was a huge star too. Both retired from film by the 1940s, yet one remained much more relevant over time. I recently learned my paternal grandmother was a fan of Garbo, and I’m not surprised. My grandmother had this timeless poise, similar to actresses like Garbo, Grace Kelly and Sophia Loren, so of course these were some of her favorite actresses. Garbo is a lot older than Kelly, Loren and my grandmother, and yet managed to keep her legacy alive a whole century. So let’s look at the beginning of her career, at age 20 when she met MGM studio head Louis B. Mayer on a ship traveling to Berlin in 1925. The exec offered her, as well as Mauritz Stiller, the director of Garbo’s Swedish film debut The Saga of Gösta Berling (1924), contracts at his studio in Hollywood, and voila. A star is born overnight.
(Ruth Harriet Louise)
Garbo’s rise was right on the cusp of the silent era ending and talkies breaking through. Naturally, the whole world was in love with her face, body, behavior and delivery in silents like Fred Niblo’s The Temptress (1926), Clarence Brown’s Flesh and the Devil (1926) and Jacques Feyder’s The Kiss (1929). The phrase ‘smokeshow’ comes to mind whenever a close-up of Garbo pops up on celluloid. We joke about the best pop songwriters coming from Sweden, but something is in the water when it comes to their actors too. Like her cinematic successors Ingrid Bergman and Norwegian thespian Liv Ullmann [whose legacy is rooted in Swedish cinema]; Garbo’s acting instincts are considered more natural and intuitive than the more theatrical preference of the golden era, making them a bit ahead of their times. Ingrid and Liv unsurprisingly got comparisons to Garbo, but never minded. She was one of a kind. No one can compete with The Face.
When the film industry embraced sound by 1930, many silent stars were worried. Take poor sap John Gilbert, Garbo’s male lead in seven features and real-life lover. A big star in the 1920s, who almost instantly lost popularity by the time talking pictures took over and was left at the altar by Garbo in 1932. A whole career could depend on whether the audience agreed if the sound of the voice matched the face. Would movie fans still love Garbo with her thick Swedish accent? Her first sound film, Brown’s Anna Christie (1930) was a double production in both English and German with the tagline simply reading, “Garbo talks!” Just like that, critics, viewers and AMPAS loved the screen star as much with dialogue as they did with cards. “Garbo laughs!” said the tagline for Ernst Lubitsch’s Ninotchka (1939), nearly a decade later when fans discovered she’s as good at comedy as she is with drama and romance. Rouben Mamoulian’s historical epic Queen Christina (1933), Brown’s adaptation of Anna Karenina (1935), George Cukor’s costume drama Camille (1936). The respected screen performer could do it all. Her most famous movie quote came from Edmund Goulding’s award friendly ensemble drama, Grand Hotel (1932). “I vant to be alone,” she uttered as a sad and lonely Russian ballerina. This line turned out to be prophetic, as only two years after Ninotchka, she starred in Cukor’s Two-Faced Woman (1941) before leaving Hollywood, moving to Manhattan and retiring as a celebrity at age 36. 28 movies from 1924 to 1941. 13 silent, 15 with sound. That’s all you get.
Unlike some of her contemporaries, Garbo never married or had children. There were reported flings and relationships, and she later called both Gilbert and Stiller the loves of her life. But with very few left in her bloodline keeping her legacy alive, it’s even more impressive she’s still remembered fondly today. You need the ‘it’ factor, that oomph, the je-ne-sais-quoi on top of beauty, talent and charisma to last into the future as an artist. And that’s all Greta Garbo.