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|Biographer Norman Zierold has written that Garbo's plasticity made it possible for her to relect the fantasies of her screen audiences; in this sense she functioned as a recepticle for the emotions of others." In keeping with the Greta Garbo that was nearly unknown to movie audiences for her personal life offscreen and had lurked in the shadows of movie theaters as a recluse after her retirement as though she could at anytime be sitting right beside any of us during without anyone knowing during a movie house screening of one 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, the viewer and the film's other characters in relation to the body of the actress, as when her body within the frame creates space between two characters in front of the camera, isolating them near a specific visual motif, or when Garbo briefly moves into the emotion of solitude." It began, "By contrast, the value of the silent film that Greta Garbo made in Hollywood is sentimental. The were melodramas made after Greta Garbo was discovered in Europe," and, after giving a brief filmography of the films with the description of The Kiss (Kyssen, Feyeder, seven reels, 1929) being "one of her most beautiful films in that it is one of her most melodramatic" it added that "each film can bee seen only for the being reminded of having first seen each of the films and the darkened room where the decades from the long past can flicker into intrigues and adventures." My Silent Swedish Film webpage, which covered from the turn of century to the advent of sound, was a Geocities webpage. It was also, while in part a filmography of silent film of the Swedish directors of Svenska Bio and Svenska Filmindustri,Mauritz Stiller, Victor Sjostrom, John Brunius and Georg af Klerker, my biography of the actress Greta Garbo. On a sheet of revision tonight I added that "whether one person is watching an old Greta Garbo movie on television while the other is reading, waiting for the other to retire for the evening, with each film, and with each screening, Garbo, like Anna-Lena Hemstrom, who portrays an actress who gradually, surrendering to fantasy believes herself to be each of the characters Greta Garbo played on screen in The Perfect Murder (Det Perfekte Mord, (Eva Isaksen) reintroduces herself to us and in each different characterization is foremost a fashion model before us; Greta Garbo is in a close-up". And yet there is now something more mystical to the ghost of Garbo for any, and maybe every reviewer of of Eva Isaksen's suspense film knowing that in Stockholm, near the Calle Flygare theater, there perhaps may be a young actress named Ottiliana Rolandsson who has left a screening of the film Queen Christina with the words "I am Greta Garbo" slowly forming silently on her lips, and in her hands a copy of a play. I still have a love for silent film, which skyrocketed after having looked at The Last Tycoon and The Garden of Eden; Photoplay magazine of 1927 mentions Fitzgerald being in the process of writing an original screenplay for Constance Talmadge, it later reviewing his adapted work, "Fitzgerald's novel, with its unscrupulous hero, violates some pet screen traditions." The silent film is in fact a deepening of the novel as an art form. Harvard Film has a free series of screenings open to the public at the University; if you rebegin arbitrarily at present, in the here and now, the screenings of silent film are still ongoing and continuing; it has in the past has included The Joyless Street (Die Freudlosse Gasse (G.W. Pabst 1925); my copy of the film I no longer have (my former mentor had a yardsale or something or other). Previous screenings have included Danish film star, Asta Nielsen Tragedy of the Street (Dirnetragodre, Bruno Rahn, 1927). Evidently, The Great Train Robbery (Porter,1903) was still being shown in theaters as late as 1926, added to the feature then playing, whereas it wasn't untill Hamlet (Gade, 1920) that sex symbol Asta Nielsen was introduced to mainstream audiences in the United States. Is it possible that when Greta Garbo visited the home of Basil Rathbone in the masquerade costume of Hamlet, it was a tribute, or nod, to Danish Silent Film star Asta Nielsen? The 1922 film The Beautiful and the Damned directed by William A. Sieter/SydneyFranklin and starring Marie Prevost, if a film accurately reported as being unavailbable for screening, or or the 1926 film The Great Gatsby directed by Herbert Brenon and starring Lois Wilson- within the world of Lost Films, Found Magazines, there are no existant copies of either film, our knowledge of them and curiousity is left for stills taken during the time period; there are no vaults that exist. Both Anna Karenina (J. Gordon Edwards, 1915, five reels), starring Betty Nansen, Mabel Allen and Stella Hammerstein, and The Scarlet Letter (Carl Harbaugh, 1917) starring Mary Martin, are lost, both filmed by Fox Film. When compared to the Fox films starring Theda Bara, Anna Karenina was not particularly a widely publicized, or exploited, film at the time, but it sported a photoplay scripted by Clara S. Beranger. Movie Pictorial Magazine in 1915 in fact compared and contrasted the two actresses in the same article, much like journalists would later do with Garbo and Dietrich, the title reading, "Betty Nansen Theda Bara-The Dsitinguished Scandinavian Actress and the Chic Paraisienne Secured for Feature Films in America" . Moving Picture World reported in 1915 Betty Nansen in Montreal- Famous Danish Actress Visits City to Get Snow Scenes for Anna Karenina Film, the accompanying text to include, "According to the script, a ski meet is held in which the hero competes with a Swedish champion. As there are many followers of the sport locally, and champions to boot, Mr Edwards secured some interesting film." The entire Moving Picture World review from the Spring of 1915 is as follows, "The premier of the first Fox offering with Betty Nansen, the great Danish actress was given on March 30. The picture, Tolstoi's Anna Karenina proved worthy of this audience's closest attention, although by remarks behind this reviewer, it was plain some were losing the quality of Nansen's restrained and remarkably powerful acting. There was some laughter, strange to say, except that perhaps the picture's meaning was over the heads of a few. There were two weak places in the cast, but this did not affect the result of it as a whole. It is a story of passion, but clean and powerful, a picture eminently fit for contemplation of grown human minds." "The film was adverised as, "The story of a woman who dared. A Photoplay that stirs and thrills. Holds a grip that never relaxes." J. Gordon Edwards cast Betty Nansen i a second adaptation of the novels of Tolstoy that year with the film A Woman's Resurrection, which Nordisk Film also filmed that year under the title Opstandelese. To return to Greta Garbo and Asta Nielsen, as many as 19 films have been listed as lost and as having directed by Urban Gad, the husband of the earliest of the stars of the silver screen, including Die falsche Asta Nielsen, in which Nielsen plays both her double, Bollette, and then herself.
| Just as lost films have left behind their accompanying movie posters, as well as full page magazine advertisements that serve very much like movie posters when deciding not if we should see the film but what the film was like when first seen, each hardcover copy of an film adaptation into novel included a dustjacket, art that gives information about missing films: within there being Lost Films, Found Magazines. It is imperative that the word film study be surplanted by the word film appreciation: it was in 1946 that author Iris Barry cautioned the readers of Hollywood Quarterly through the article "Why wait for Posterity" as to films quickly becoming lost and the need to preserve the "romantic" Greta Garbo film The Saga of Gosta Berling (Stiller, 1925) by saving the prints from deterioration. After explaining that the original two-color technicolor copies of the Black Pirate that had belonged to Douglas Fairbanks and Harvard University, respectively, were in a vault "at the point of final deterioration", and could only be duplicated in black-and-white form, she qualifies that the criteria for screening film need, as with "the early Seastrom films", only be pleasure. "What, really is the point of dragging old films back to light? First, I believe that it benefits the general esteem and standing of the motion picture industry as a whole; for if the great films of the past are not worth taking seriously and are not worth re-examination, then presumably neither are the great films of today. It would be unthinkable if the only books available to literary men and women should be no more than those published in the past year or so." To echo her by my now finding this during the centennial of the two reeler in the United States and of Victor Sjostrom and Mauritz Stiller having become contemporaries at Svenska Bio , the biography of actress Greta Garbo penned by the present author on Geocities webpage encompassed the long waiting period before what was to be the last film to be made by Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman, which happenned to be during the centennial of the one reel narrative film, "Of the utmost importance is an appreciation of film, film as a visual literature. film as the narrative image, and while any appreciation of film would be incomplete without the films of Ingmar Bergman, every appreciation of film can begin with the films of the silent period, with the watching of the films themselves, their once belonging to a valiant new form of literautre. Silent film directors in both Sweden and the United States quickly developed film technique, including the making of films of greater length during the advent of the feature film, to where viewer interest was increased by the varying shot lengths within a scene structure, films that more than still meet the criterion of having storylines, often adventurous, often melodramatic, that bring that interest to the character when taken scene by scene by the audience."
Is The Mystery of Room 643 (1914) a lost film?
|These two actresses were found with Swedish Silent Film actor Lars Hanson- Sofia Larssen's webpage on "Sweden's leading matinee idol of the silent era", was also a Geocities webpage before it closed. We we invited to "Also take a moment to drool over the many pictures in the gallery." From a guestbook entry on from a similar geocities page she was evidently then living in Sweden. Of particular interest was the Lars Hanson webpage written by Laurel Howard, also a geocities webpage. She writes that The Saga of Gosta Berling/The Atonement of Gosta Berling was meant to be a four hour film, "Because of the editing there are a lot gaps in the plot. It really is an epic film and needs length to show the full character and plot development...I think this film needs to be on the list for some major restoration." She later writes about "Ketta" in "the horzontal love scenes" that brought The Flesh and the Devil to renown and created a continuing fame, or unique stardom, for Greta Garbo. Webpages like these were a catalyst for my page on Greta Garbo in that it part of a series of five pages on Svenska Filmhistoria, which began chronicling the history of Swedish Silent Film from the turn of the century and I was honored to include a screening of one of the most profound and powerful films directed by Victor Sjostrom before his coming to the United States. Of particular mention is Louise Lageterstrom of the Swedish Film Institute's writing on Greta Garbo are more than worth a revisit.
swedish silent film 1909-1917
Swedish Silent Film Barry Paris chronicles that it was Kerstin Bernadette that brought Garbo to meet then vetern Swedish Film director Ingmar Bergman, his having requested it in order to have her return to the screen in his film The Silence. In 1965, Raymond Durgnat wrote, "Greta Garbo made her last film in 1941, but nearly twenty five years later there are still rumors of possible new films, and her name can still fill a cinema. Pages later, to his account of her nearly consenting to eloped with John Gilbert and it having happenned that "finally, she hid herself in a ladies lavatory", he added, "Years after his death, Garbo still spoke of him in the present tense: 'Maurice thinks...'.
|To those either fascinated by her, or, bluntly, merely eroticlly stimulated by her body, one possible reason for this was alighted upon by the biographer Durgnat, "The obverse of Garbo's divinity was her shyness. There were few close ups of her during Gosta Berling's Saga because of her nervous blink." (He adds that it had continued into her filming with G. W Pabst, who speeded up the camera to adjust for it.) Garbo went to Rasunda to the Svenska Filmindustri studio to meet Stiller for a screen test to be filmed by Julius Jaenzon, whom she happened to meet on a train, a presage to her meeting Ragnar Ring years later. While waiting for the director to arrive, Swedish cinematographer Julius Jaenzon had told Garbo, "You're the loveliest girl I've ever seen walk into the place." She and Mona Martenson were to film The Saga of Gosta Berling (1924, ten reels). Louise Lagterstrom of the Swedish Film Institute introduced the film, and Greta Garbo, in her writing with the title En Fortarande eld, Gosta Berling. During its filming, Greta Garbo and Mona Martenson had stayed in the same hotel room together. The beauty of Mona Martensson is miraculous, a deep beauty that can only be seen as wonderous. In the Story of Greta Garbo, a 1928 interview with Ruth Biery published in Photoplay, Garbo relates of Mortenson's being in Hollywood and of her planning to later return to Sweden. Photoplay, while advertising that the article would appear in their next installment, viewed Garbo as tempermental. In the article, she talks about The Saga of Gosta Berling and of Stiller having given her 'the very best part for my very first picture.' If the reader of 1928 had found where in Photoplay it was continued, "This Star's Interesting Narrative was to include Greta Garbo having said, "I owe everything to Mr. Stiller" The actress related that, for one thing, they both spoke Swedish, as much as she thought that being in the United States and that it was where she could make films. Stiller had imparted to her, 'You must remember two crucial things when you play the role or for that matter any role. First, you must be aware of the period in which the character is living. Second, you must be aware of your self as an actress. If you play the role and forget about your self nothing will come of it.' Appearing separate to the hardcover Garbo biography written by John Bainbridge was his work published in magazine form, which read, "Garbo's Haunted Path To Stardom, A hypnotic Director made over Her very Soul." In it he gives an account of Stiller's first session with Garbo at Rasunda, where he had asked her to act in front of the camera, quoting Stiller as having said, "Have you no feelings? Don you know nothing of sadness and misery? Act, miss, act!" Stiller having instructed that there be closeups shot of Garbo, he is attributed as having afterward imparted, "She is shy." and having added, "She has no technique, so she can't show what she is feeling." During her Photoplay interview, Greta Garbo continued on the film remarking that,' Lars Hanson played my leading man...but there were no love scenes, not even a kiss.' Author Forsythe Hardy writes about Hanson's performance in The Saga of Gosta Berling in his volume Scandinavian Film, published in 1952, "Lars Hanson made a dramatic figure of the clergyman whose rebellious temperment is one of the motivating forces of the story." About Lars Hanson, after having seen The Saga of Gosta Berling, Lillian Gish wrote, 'When I saw it I thought that he would be the ideal Dimmesdale.' There is a similar earlier account written before her autobiography where she is quoted as having said that she had been told to go into the projection room to watch The Saga of Gosta Berling specificly to decide whether Lars Hanson would be aquired by the studio to play against her in an adaptation of Hawthorne's novel, "The moment Lars Hanson appeared on the screen, I knew he was the man we wanted." Interestingly, actor Lars Hanson had been briefly mentioned in the United States in Pantomine magazine during March of 1922, in Out of the Make Up Box, On to the Screen, written by Helen Hancock. "Lars Hanson, who is one of the most versatile actors on the screen, and one of the most versatile artistic breakers of the hearts of the Swedish flapper, is an adept in the art of make-up." An appreciation of the film made by Hanson in Sweden was dijjjsplayed by photos of Hanson not only as himself, but in greasepaint as men much older than himsself, it including stills from Bluebeard's Eighth Wife, Andre the Red and The Lodge Man. Helen Hancock had only months earlier in Pantomine praised Swedish Silent Film star Lars Hanson in the article How About those Viking Ancestors, A little Talk about Swedish Matinee Idols. The photo caption read, "He looks mild- but dare him to do something" It reads, "A star of the legitimate stage, where for a number of years he has has been one of the principal attractions at the Intima Theatre, Stockholm, this virile specimen of manhood is best known for his psychological characterizations." The author then praised Hanson for his doing his own stunts, acting on screen without a stuntman. To highlight this, the magazine The Film Daily later reviewed the performance of Lars Hanson opposite Lillian Gish, "Hanson may lack looks, but is a splendid dramatic actor." During 1929, Photoplay Magazine reviewed the release of The Legend of Gosta Berling, "the only European film appearance of Greta Garbo before she was sold down the river to Hollywood..It need only be said that Hollywood has made The Glamorous One...You won't die in vain even if you miss this one." Greta Garbo was interviewed in Sweden during the filming of Gosta Berling's Saga by for the magazine Filmjournalen (FiUlmjournal) by Inga Gaate, who had interviewed Mauritz Stiller in 1924, Garbo in the article having praised Stiller for his direction and having referred to him as Moje. Greta Garbo appears on the cover of Filmjournalen 8, bareshouldered, in 1925. Stiller, incidently, had invited Sten Selander, a poet rather than actor, to Rasunda before his having decided upon Lars Hanson for the film. Jenny Hasselquist also appears in the film- Hasselquist was much like modern Swedish actress Marie Liljedahl in that she was a ballerina, her having been introduced to readers in the United States in 1922 through Picture-Play Magazine with a photograph it entitled The Resting Sylph. Sven Broman has quoted Greta Garbo as having said, 'We sat in a lovely drawing room and Selma Lagerlöf thanked me for my work in Gosta Berling's Saga and she praised Mauritz Stiller...She also had very warm and lovely eyes.' While filming Gosta Berling's Saga, Stiller had said, 'Garbo is so shy, you realize, she's afraid to show what she feels. She's got no technique you know.', to which the screenwriter to the film, Ragnar Hylten-Cavallius, replied, 'But every aspect of her is beautiful.' By the time Stiller had begun co-writing the script to Gosta Berling's Saga, he and Selma Lagerlöf had begun to disagree in regard to how her novels were to be adapted. Lagerlöf had asked that Stiller be removed from the shooting of the film before the script had been completed, her having as well tried to acquire the rights to the film to vouchsafe its integrity as an adaptation. During the filming Stiller went further; he then included a scene that had not appeared in either the novel or the film's script. Author Forsyth Hardy lists a number of spectacular scenes from the film before describing "one of the quieter scenes" where two actresses explore the relationships that can for between two female characters, "The two women stand face to face, their minds full of bitter memories. No word is spoken, not a guesture made. Then the women, one at either side of the great press begin to turn to it. Moments such as this, when the camera was used to express great depths of feeling, showed Stiller's gifts as a director." Greta Garbo when interviewed in Photoplay Magazine described being on the set of her first leading character portrayal-Ruth Biery subtitled her second installment to The Story of Greta Garbo with Miss Garbo makes her film debut and appears like a comet in the Northern Sky."She paused again to remember, 'The first days of work I was so scared that I couldn't work. I was sick in earnest...He (Stiller) told me to practice alone. But I knew he was in some corner watching. I looked all around and could not see him, but I knew hw was there. So I would not practice."While visiting Stockholm in 1938, Garbo had asked to view the film, her having said to William Sorensen, "It was the movie I loved most of all." Iris Barry briefly reviewed the film in 1926, "In Sweden, the creative impulse has not some much died down as been bled away" and from that context sees a film that, "shows a gloomy and unusual subject, full of sincere passion and conflict and with the fine somber, photographic quality peculiar to the Scandinavian cinema."
It is not entirely marginal that there are also accounts that Nils Asther had met Greta Garbo in 1924, at the Dramatiska Teatern and that he had then proposed marriage to her, which she apparently declined- the autobiography of Nils Aster, Narrens jag (Fool's Way/The Way of the Jester) was published in Swedish, posthumously. If, in 1928, Ruth Biery was writing about Nils Asther in Photoplay Magazine in order to obtain information about 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." Like Greta Garbo, Mary Johnson travelled from Sweden to Germany. Mary Johnson had starred with Gosta Ekman in the first film directed by John W. Brunius, Puss and Boots (Masterkattan i stovlar) in 1918 for Film Industri Inc Scandia. The film was co-written by John W. Brunius and Sam Ask and was the first in which actress Ann Carlsten was to appear. The following year Scandia merged with Scandia to team Charles Magnusson with Nils Bouveng to run AB Svensk Filmindustri. Having been an actress for several films directed by George af Klerker, Mary Johnson was also that year to appear in the Swedish silent film Stovstadsfaror, directed by Manne Gothson and photographed by Gustav A. Gustafson. Appearing with Johnson in the film were Agda Helin, Tekl Sjoblom and Lilly Cronwin. Significantly, Johnson returned to the screen to act for director John W. Brunius and cameraman Hugo Edlund in 1923 for the film Johan Ulfstjerna in which she starred with Anna Olin, Einar Hanson and Berta Hilberg. To lend a sense of the film as a vehicle for the actress, author Forsyth Hardy has written, "Brunius could work effectively on alarge canvas." Significantly, that same year the actress mary Johnson starred for silent film director Mauritz Stiller and cameraman Julius Jaenzon in the film Gunnar Hedes Saga, in which she starred with Pauline Brunius, Stina Berg, and Einar Hansson. The film was an adaptation of the novel Herrgarssagen. When reviewed in the United States during 1924 while screened as The Blizzard although the film was reported as an adaptation of "The Story of a Country House", the review featured two stills and the subtitle "Swedish Production is Entertaining."; it ran, "This is highly dramatic and interesting, with several excellant scenes of reindeer swimming across a wide sream and following their leader blindly. The stampede is most realistic and well filmed. The rest of the film is quite ordinary and drags near the end." Einar Hanson appeared as Gunnar Hede on the cover of Filmnyheter during 1923; it is an issue in which there article that reads "Mary Johnson, var Svenska Filmingenue framfor kameran".
|Paul Rotha described Greta Garbo in the film The Joyless Street in his volume The Film Till Now, "But Greta Garbo, by reason of the sympathetic understanding of Pabst, brought a quality of lovliness into her playing as the professor's elder daughter. Her frail beauty, cold as an ice flower warmed by the sun stood secure in the starving city of Vienna, untouched by the vice and lust that dwelt in the dark little street." Garbo was to have made a second film for Pabst but declined. Before travelling to Turkey to film Odalisque from Smolna, Greta Garbo returned to Stockholm, appearing on the Swedish stage in the play The Invisible Man, written by Lagerkvist. Stiller had written the script to the film The Odalisque of Smolny and had brought Jaenzon, Ragnar Hylten-Cavallius and Garbo to Turkey only to have the film be left unmade. In the film, Greta Garbo was to portray a harem girl; there were rehearsals held of a exterior where Garbo was to meet her lover. There is a reference to the film made by Greta Garbo in a 1928 interview for Photoplay Magazine,
''We never started on that picture. The company went broke. Mr. Stiller had to go back to Germany to see about the money which was not coming. I was alone in Constantinople. Oh, yes, Einar Hansen,' she paused, 'the Swedish boy who was killed here in Hollywood not so long ago- was there too. He was to play with me in the picture. But I did not see him often.'' In Denmark, Einar Hanson had appeared in the films The Bilberries (Takt, Ture Og Tosser, Lau Lauritzen, 1924) and Mists of the Past (Fra Piazza del Popolo Anders W. Sandberg, 1925), the latter having starred Karina Bell.
When interviewed in 1924, Stiller had said, 'You have to leave room for people's imagination. The film camera registers everything with such merciless clarity. We really have to leave something for the audience to interpret.' Irregardless of how accurate one clue about the film left behind by Photoplay magazine in 1930 may be its title, the magazine claiming that it would be rereleased in the United States under the title "When Lights are Red", "Garbo's supporting cast consists of Einar Hansen, the young actor who met with an accidental death in Hollywood several years ago and Werner Krauss. Garbo was exotic in those days, too, but not the calm, poises woman of the world she is today." Ake Sundberg quotes Greta Garbo as having said, "I saw Hanson seldom. He was so ashamed of his ragged beard that he hardly dared show himself." The actor was sporting the beard for the requirements of the script. In That Gustafsson Girl, written for Photoplay Magazine by Sundberg in 1930, Mauritz Stiller is attributed as having been the first European director to shoot in close-up, to shift the camera and to find "new, striking angles" "Constantinople had fascinated the Swedish girl, who had never been away from the cold countries." There would be a letter from Greta Garbo to Vera Schmiterlow sent from Constantinople. Stiller had, "written much of the story himself" and that there was a rewrite of the script required is seen as having contributed to the films having been left uncompleted. Forsyth Hardy gives an account of the film then bearing the title Konstantinopel. Accompanying the history of the film not having had been being made is the atmosphere, or innuendo, that circulated among journalists, particularly those from other European cities that had travelled to Stockholm, their heaving linked Stiller and Garbo romanticlly, to a point where there was "the rumor that Garbo married Mauritz Stiller, the Swedish motion picture director, back in 1924 when they were both working on a picture in Constantinople...Garbo, said the whispers, is a widow." One could interpret that these were encouraged by Greta Garbo having been a recluse. As late as 1933, after the Garbo image had been established, Axel Ingwerson published an article in Photoplay entitled, "Did Garbo Marry Stiller?" with the subtitle, "Is there any b asis in fact for this strange rumor." Ingwerson continued and while describing Stiller included, "The original story was that Garbo had married Stiller in Constantinople under a mutual pledge of secrecy. That Garbo, furthermore, would have kept the marriage a secret forever if she hadn't found it necessary to put forward her claim to Stiller's estate."
Bengt Forslund notes that the filming of an adaptation of Anna Karenina had at first been thought of for actress Lillian Gish, who in Sweden, Greta Garbo had seen in the film The White Sister. In her autobiography, Gish wrote, 'I often saw the young Garbo on the lot. 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.' When refilmed, her Hollywood screen test would be filmed by Stiller and, purportedly spliced into the rushes of The Torrent, seen by director Monta Bell, who then insisted the script of the film be given to Garbo. 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 about Garbo 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. At first Garbo was reluctant to accept the role in the film, although it was a large role that had been considered for Norma Shearer, Stiller having advised, 'It can lead to a better parts later.' to which she replied, 'How can I take direction from someone I don't know.' Monta Bell had directed Norma Shearer in the film After Midnight (1921). The subtitle to one section of The Story of Greta Garbo As told by her to Ruth Biery, published in Photo-play during 1929, reads "Tempermental or misunderstood". In it Greta Garbo relates the events that led up to her having left the studio for less than a week, "Then it was for months here before I was to work with Mr. Stiller. When it couldn't be arranged, they put me in The Torrent with Mr. Monta Bell directing...It was very hard work but i did not mind that. I was at the studio every morning at seven o'clock and worked until six every evening." She goes further while explaining that there was a language barrier that would later contribute to Mauritz Stiller also being taken off her next picture, "Mr. Stiller is an artist. he does not understand about the American factories. He has always made his own pictures in Europe where he is the master. In our country it is always the small studio." The production stills of Greta Garbo during the filming of The Torrent were photographed by Ruth Harriet Louise; Robert Dance and Bruce Robertson, in their volume Ruth Harriet Louise and Hollywood Glamour Photography, note that Greta Garbo was in Ruth Harriet Louise's studio within months of having filmed, but also note that 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. Ruth Harriet Louise also published an early portrait of Greta Garbo in Motion Picture Classic magazine. During 1927 Photoplay added to the dynamic of extra-textual discourse and the spectator's relation to fantasy by making photographer Ruth Harriet Louise into either a real person or a celebrity, and or both, "Ruth Harriet Louise just couldn't keep away from the camera even at her own wedding...Ruth dashed behind the cameras to make certain that the lighting effects were just as she would have them...Now we wonder if Mr. Jacobson, a scenario writer at Universal followed the lead of his only-woman-photographer mate and wrote the newspaper accounts of the wedding." 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 her assigned translator while under Monta Bell's direction. In The Private Life of Greta Garbo by her most intimate friend, Borg relates 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, the picture would decide her fate began, he would not be there terrified her." Borg continued as the interpreter of Greta Garbo until 1929. Photoplay Magazine looked at the film during 1926, "Monte Bell stands well in the foreground of those directors who can take a simple story and so fill it with true touches that the characters emerge real human beings and the resulting film becomes a small masterpiece....Greta Garbo, the new Swedish importation is very lovely." National Board of Review magazine during 1926 typified the film with, "The story preserves a European atmosphere in which parents still have the least say about their children's marriages." Eugene V Brewster began the watching of Greta Garbo on the part of Motion Picture Classic magazine with his own view, "At Metro-Goldwyn Studion 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 that the company expects." Fredrick James Smith continued for Motion Picture Classic with Greta Garbo Arrives, The newcomer is a somber-eyed Norsewoman, one Greta Garbo, who seems to have more possibilites than anyone since Pola negri of Passion...She isn't afraid to act. That she was able to stand out of an inferiror story, poorly directed, is all the more to her credit...The Ibanez story is full of claptrap, including the dam that bursts without having anything to do with the story. Monta Bell has tossed it into film form without any apparent interest." It was quickly followed by the article "The Northern Star, The Screen's Newest Meteor is a moody daughter of Sweden", written by Alice L. Tildesley. It was very soon after that Greta Garbo began a love letter with her movie going audiences that would be nearly contained to her appearances in front of the camera only- Photoplay author Myrtle West that year published an article on Greta Garbo that year entitled That Stockholm Venus, and although it can almost be reduced to paragraphs confirming the need of an interpreter on the part of Greta Garbo when she had first reached Hollywood, and while it connects her with Anna Q. Nilsson and Greta Nissen in her being unfamiliar to Hollywood, it begins with, "Greta was very worried. A frown corrugated her brow." and concludes, "A face that you would remember long after the body had crumbled away.". It attempts to describe her first impression on Hollywood, "Greta has no desire to join the vacous circle of teas, dinners and dances into which this favored newcomer is invited. Besides, she has little time for men...or love. This by her own admission." The picture of Greta Garbo in a chair seated next to a lion, Garbo photographed outdoors on what at first looks like a bench and the lion posing with his front feet elevated on a log, as it was published in Motion Picture Magazine during 1926, was printed without her name; the photo-caption reads, "for the best title to this picture." It was followed pages later with "Why Girls leave Sweden, "Presenting to you Miss Greta Garbo- a lady who is said to have all the qualifications of a star." Journalist Rilla Page Palmborg followed that with the article, The Mysterious Stranger, which began with "She is a mystery to those of her own profession!" The photograph accompanying the article was taken by Ruth Harriet Louise. " 'Ever since I can remember I must be an actress,' she explained in suprisingly good English, when I asked her to telll us about herself." Louise Lagterstrom of the Swedish Film Institute adorned her writing on the arrival of Greta Garbo in Hollywood, Mot Hollywood, with a photo taken in 1924 by Arnold Grethes, almost reiterating that Garbo was photographed extensively, often posing as a photo-model for publicity stills, before her living in self-imposed exile.
The screenplays to the first two films in which Greta Garbo had appeared, The Torrent and The Temptress (nine reels) both had been adaptations of the novels of Vincente Blasco Ibanez, their having been titled Among the Orange Trees and The Earth Belongs to Everyone, respectively. The novels written by Vincente Blasco Ibanez also include The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse filmed after Blood and Sand, in 1921, Enemies of Women (Crosland), starring Alma Rubens and Marie Nostrum, filmed in 1926 . When interviewed by Motion Picture Classic magazine, Vincente Belasco Ibanez was quoted as having said, "The future of the camera is limitless. Now it is not going ahead very fast. There is no standard in the cinema. Who do the artists not get together and set up standards?" Photoplay reviewed the film, "While this Vincente Belasco Ibanez story is crammed full of melodramatic action- much of it preposterous-Greta Garbo makes the proceedings not only believable, but compelling...Such a role strains at the probabilities, but Miss Garbo makes Elena highly effective. She is beautiful, she flashes and scintillates with singular appeal...The Temptress is all Greta Garbo. Nothing else matters." Ruth Biery in 1932 intimated that Stiller was removed from The Temptress because of an objection made by Antonio Moreno, the director having insisted that the actor wear a pompadour to compensate for Garbo's having had been being the taller of the two. Bosley Crowther's account of it in his biography of Mayer depicts Stiller as possibly unfamiliar with the studios in the United States, "Stiller was allowed to start this one, but proved too finicky and slow, one of those 'difficult' directors that were now being got out of the studio." The advertisements in magazines that were part of Metro Goldwyn Mayer publicity for that time period did in fact, like the earlier "Eminent Authors Series", present to readers a growing collection of foreign directors imported by the studio. Before the release of the film, Motion Picture Magazine featured a photograph of Mauritz Stiller and Greta Garbo on the film's set, captioned with, "The dancing scenes of Greta Garbo and Antonio Moreno in The Temptress, which Mauritz Stiller is directing in this photograph, were filmed by a camera attached to a moving platform which followed them about the floor." If this were Stiller's only contribution to, or influence upon classical narrative and the temporal-spatial relationships of camera to subject in film, it would be notable, excepting that Stiller had previously filmed in Sweden and built the traditions of film making there as one of its pioneers under Charles Magnusson. The magazine also published a photograph of Greta Garbo "vamping" before the film's release, capitoned, "Judging from the oval photograph above, The Temptress is well named. Although Greta Garbo has only been on the American screen for a short time, she enjoys quite a vogue." It then reviewed the film, "It must be admitted that The Temptress is a bore...Greta Garbo as the unhappy Temptress has a role which requires precisely nothing."
Charles Affron particularly looks to the entrances that Greta Garbo makes during the opening scenes of her silent film and notes that silent film director Fred Niblo, after taking the helm upon Stiller's leaving the filming of The Temptress, studies Garbo's beauty, her ethereality, by adding a second screen entrance of his own where Garbo, clasping flowers, is exiting a carriage- he then illustrates its use in Niblo's later film The Mysterious Lady (Den Mystika kvinna, 1928, nine reels) where Garbo, in the middle of watching an opera is seen by Conrad Nagel as he is making his entrance and then by the camera in a profile close shot. In the sequence, the camera is authorial in accordance with the action of the scene; Garbo's look is momentarily uninterrupted as Nagel, almost an interloper, is introduced into the scene by his entering the frame and by the camera nearing her as she is near motionlessly surveying the proscenium, the theater in the film a public sphere of address that envelopes its characters to where Garbo, and her act of watching becomes the subject of the cinematic address and the object of both Nagel's and the audience's interest. Affron writes that it may have been Stiller's keeping Garbo on the screen and in front of the camera that had been among the reasons for his being replaced on the set of The Temptress.
Author Mark A. Vieira was asked by Turner Classic Movies to provide audio narrative commentary to the film The Temptress for its The Garbo Silents collection, his on occaision quoting the actress during the film as well as his quoting from her correspondence. The Temptress begins with a blue-tinted exterior shot, Fred Niblo then cutting what seems to be an opera house during which there are lights from the cieling that sway back and forth across a costume dance. During the next scene Garbo in an evening gown that is folded like a robe enters a drawing room where there is a visitor that has been invited to dinner. During the dinner, there is an pullback shot over a table that is elaborately included in the scene, it having been designed almost as though the scene from a pre-code film in the plunging necklines of its tight clinging evening gowns in contrast most of the films scenes that seem bookended between the beginning and end of the film. After a series of exterior shots filmed by assistant director H. Bruce Humberstone, Lionel Barrymore is introduced in the film, Greta Garbo shortly thereafter reintroduced as the camera cuts away from her before it is finished panning up, it cutting back after an interpolated shot to finish panning from her waist upward, the camera slowly reflecting upon the unexpectedness of her being reunited with the other characters. Director Fred Niblo had apparently also taken over behind the camera for Lynn Shores during the shooting of The Devil Dancer (1927, eight reels), actress Gilda Gray having had been being on the set.
In a scene where Garbo is shown in an extreme close up sitting with Lionel Barrymore, author Mark A. Vieira chooses to discuss that whereas previously close ups had often been used in silent film as being concerned with a different plane of action as other shots filmed from other camera distances, Niblo seems to include closeups into the characterization through a use of lighting and diffusion while filming. Irregardless of this, later in the film there is extreme close up of Garbo that is abruptly cut almost on a reverse angle right before her and her lover are about to kiss. The character movement of the two nearing each other is held, if only briefly, Garbo near stunning as the camera only briefly contains her within the frame. There in the film is a scene with a rainstorm and flood that, and although it was more than quite concievably added to the plotline for its excitement, is almost a haunting acknowledgement of the camerawork of either Mauritz Stiller or Victor Sjostrom in Sweden and the role of nature in Swedish silent film, in this instance an acknowledgement punctuated by Greta Garbo, who is seen right before the rain during a night exterior in the mountains, alone with her lover in a series of close shots, her then being only briefly seen in profile during the thunder and lightning and then again in one of the most beautiful evening gowns of the film, her shoulders bare as she is reading a letter.
The Exceptional Photoplays department of National Board of Review magazine credited by William Daniels and Gaetano Gaudio as having been the photographers of the film The Temptress, "The Temptress brings Greta Garbo to the attention of American audiences as an actress of note and unusual beauty...She is not half a minute on the screen before you know her for an artist, pliable and lovely. This big starring vehicle gives her the ample opportunity to prove her versatility...The first Paris sequence is the equal in tonal quality and feeling of anything that has been done in films. It is true with strong character drawing. Miss garbo makes Elena a breathing person."
While Garbo was finishing the The Temptress, Stiller, having written the script before the script department had reworked its plot, had begun shooting Hotel Imperial (1927, eight reels) for Paramount; she went to the preview of the film. Greta Garbo had said, 'Stiller was getting his bearings and coming into his own. I could see that he was getting his chance.' The conversation between the two actresses related in retrospect by Pola Negri may almost seem eerie, her account beginning with a telephone call from Mauritz Stiller, "May I be permitted to bring along a friend? She does not know many people here yet. Greta Garbo." After dinner Negri gave Garbo advice in creating for herself a unique personna, something individual, her going so far as to say, "Never be aloof or private" with Garbo adding the rejoinder without noting that they were both actresses that had worked abroad that they were in fact both remaining private while in Hollywood and Negri telling Garbo that she would soon have to film without Stiller. Negri writes, "She held her head high. A look of intense interest was spreading over that perfectly chiseled face, making it the one thing that one would not have thought possible: even more beautiful." In a letter to Lars Saxon, Greta Garbo wrote, 'Stiller's going to start working with Pola Negri. I'm still very lonely, not that I mind, except occaisionally.'
Of Stiller's camerawork in the film, Kenneth MacGowan wrote, 'Hung from an overhead trolley, his camera moved through the lobby and the four rooms on each side of it.' In a brief review of the film R.E. Sherwood complimented Stiller on his use of camera postion and shot structure, but while praising Stiller as a director and the film's "visual qualities", which included "trick lighting" among its camera effects, which according to the author harken back to earlier "photo-acrobatics" from silent film director F.W. Murnau, Sherwood sees a lack of depth or meaning in the film's screenplay or its message as an organic whole in its having moment. Whether or not the United States can be viewed as imperial, as it is as seen by Dianne Negra, she writes about Pola Negri's character in Stiller's film, her almost connecting thematically the difference between Negri's role in the film and earlier vamp roles with the film's ending and its reuniting of Negri and her lover in a plotline similar to that of Sjöstrom's The Divine Woman (En Gudomlig Kvinna). 'The film closes with its most emphatic equation of romance and war as a close up of a kiss between Anna and Almay fades to the images of marching troops.' Mauritz Stiller, when invited to a private screening of Hotel Imperial for Max Reinhardt had said, 'Thank you. But if not for Pola, I could not have made it.' Photoplay Magazine reviewed the film favorably, "Here is a new Pola Negri in a film story at once absorbing and splendidly directed...Actually, "Hotel Imperial" is another variation of the heroine at the mercy of the invading army and beloved by the dashing spy. This has been adroitly retold here, untill it assumes qualities of interest and supspense...Miss Negri at last has a role that is ideal..."Hotel Imperial" places Stiller at the formost of our imported directors."
Stiller also directed Pola Negri, and Clive Brook, in Barbed Wire (1927, seven reels). When Stiller directed the actress again, with Einar Hanson in The Woman on Trial (1927, six reels), Photoplay reviewed the film as "An unusually fine story and one that offers Pola Negri a chance for penetrating character study. Not for children." The previous year Pola Negri had starred in the films The Crown of Lies (Buchowetski, five reels) and Good and Naughty (Malcom St. Clair, six reels). In her autobiography, Memoirs of a Star, Pola Negri describes her first meeting with Greta Garbo.'To tell the truth, I was also very curious about the girl...She smiled wistfully, as we shook hands...Through dinner she was resolutely silent...', her then giving an account of their conversation and of her having given Garbo advice. The Street of Sin (1928, seven reels) starring Fay Wray and Olga Barclanova was begun by Stiller and finished by the director Joseph von Sternberg. It would be Stiller's last attempt to film in the United States before returning to Sweden in late 1927 and presently there are no copies of the film. Author Paul Rotha reviewed "that most extraordinary of movies" shortly after the release of the film, "No expense was spared on its making. The script was well-balanceed;the continuity was good; the setting natural. yet for some obscure reason it was one of the worst films ever done. It defied analysis." Kenneth MacGowan writing about the film notes, 'The film was more distinguished for its players-Jannings and Olga Barclanova- than for its script by Joseph Sternberg. Sternberg's work on Stiller's film has been credited as having secured his position as the writer and director of the silent films The Last Command (1928) with Evelyn Brent and The Case of Lena Smith (1929) with Esther Ralston. During 1928, actress Olga Barclanova also appeared in the films The Man Who Laughs (Paul Leni, ten reels), The Dove (Roland West, nine reels), Forgotten Faces (Victor Schertzinger, eight reels), Avalanche (Otto Brower, five reels) and Three Sinners (Rowland V. Lee, eight reels). Three Sinners, with Warner Baxter was the second film to pair Olga Backlanova and Pola Negri, their both having appeared in the film Cloak of Death in 1915. Pola Negri during 1929 had starred in The Secret Hour (eight reels), directed by Rowland V Lee.
In 1927 alone, Einar Hanson appeared in the films The Lady in Ermine (seven reels, James Flood), The Masked Woman (six reels) with Anna Q. Nilsson, and Fashions for Women (seven reels, Arzner) with Esther Ralston. Gladys Unger, who later worked on the scenario to The Divine Woman, had written the screenplay to the film Fashions for Women. Photoplay Magazine reported, "Here is a tragedy- and a mystery. Einar Hansen was found fatally injured, pinned beneath his car on the ocean road. Earlier in the evening, he had given a dinner party for Greta Garbo, Mauritz Stiller and Dr. and Mrs. Gustav Borkman...Hansen was unmarried. He is survived by his parents, who live in Stockholm."
Glimpses of the Garbo of 1924, a year when in the United States Viola Dana and Jetta Goudal were starring together in the film Open All Night (six reels), can be seen in the letters between her and Swedish actress Mimi Pollock authenticated by author Tin Andersen Axell, letters on which his newest book is based. Leaving us again with something mysterious, the letters written by Pollack to Greta Garbo have been unseen by the public and are thought to be currently included in the collection of Scott Riesfield.
Among the events of 1924 was a visit by silent film stars Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks to Stockholm, Sweden. The two had that year appeared on the September cover of Motion Picture Magazine in the United States. There are accounts that while in Sweden, Pickford and Fairbanks sailed on the small vessel The Loris with Greta Garbo and Mauritz Stiller, their departing from Lilla Skuggan, and before arriving in Saltsjobaden, their passing where Charles Magnusson lived at Skarpo.
King Vidor in 1924 paired John Gilbert and Aileen Pringle in two films, Wife of the Centaur, with Kate Lester, and His Hour. Conrad Nagel would that year team with Aileeen Pringle for the film Three Weeks. Nagel would appear on the screen with Eleanor Boardman for the 1924 film Sinners in Silk (Henley) and then the following year for The Only Thing, directed by Jack Conway. Silent Film actress Norma Shearer, in 1924, was starring in Broadway After Dark (Monta Bell, seven reels) with Anna Q. Nilsson, The Snob (Monta Bell, seven reels) with John Gilbert, Empty Hands (Victor Fleming, seven reels), Married Flirts (Robert Vignola, seven reels) with Conrad Nagel and The Wolfman (Edward Mortimer, six reels) with John Gilbert.
During January of 1922, Victor Sjostrom was already known in the United States as Victor Seastrom. Apparently he was then the object of the desire of the female spectator, which is reflected in the extratextual discourse of Helen Hancock, in Pantomine Magazine, who wrote, "We have kept Victor Seastrom untill the last. Because perhaps Mr. Seastrom might not like to be called a matinee idol- leaving that phrase to younger and perhaps handsomer men. But he is one, just the same...Of the heavy, rugged type, portraying men of strong emotions and virile personalites." She claims he was one of the foremost directors and a pioneer, and then compliments him on being an actor of the legitimate stage. Director Victor Sjostrom had left Sweden for Hollywood in 1922 upon the completion of the film The Hellship. During 1924 Carl Sandberg reviewed the film Name the Man (eight reels), his remarking upon Sjostrom's use of lighting, which, whether or not it may have had been a use of realism or naturalism, seemed underplayed to Sandberg and based on the enviornment rather than made more elaborate or as being artificial. "He was an actor, rated as Sweden's best, and his voice leads actors into slow, certain moods." The film stars Conrad Nagel and Mae Busch. Iris Barry is timely writing in 1924, imparting to the readers of Lets Go to The Movies, "Victor Seastrom, who had made Swedish pictures before Germany had begun its work (and too good to be popular) went last and they had they idiocy to put him to turning one of Hall Caine's intensely stupid stories into moving pictures. He did the best he could and played about a bit with the Yankee studio devices."
1922 was a year during which Gustaf Molander's second film, Amatorfilmen, the first film in which actress Elsa Ebbengen-Thorblad was to appear, brought actress Mimi Pollack to Swedish movie audiences. Molander had made the film The King of Boda (Tyrranny of Hate, Bodakungen) in 1920. It was the first film to be photographed by Swedish cinematographer Adrian Bjurman and starred Egil Eide and Wanda Rothgardt. Karin Molander had in 1920 starred in two films by Mauritz Stiller, in When We Are Married (Erotikon) with Lars Hanson, Tora Teje, and Glucken Cederberg, and in Fiskebyn. She also that year appeared in the film Bomben, directed by Rune Carlsten. And yet Karin Molander would only later be mentioned to audiences in the United States, Photoplay Magazine noting in 1926 that she was no longer in Sweden and no longer married to Gustaf Molander, "With Lars Hanson came his wife, Karin Nolander, leading woman in the Royal State Theater of Stockholm and billed as 'Sweden's most beautiful woman' She hasn't appeared on the screen yet, but it shouldn't be long now with so many good Scandinavian directors over here." There is an account that Greta Garbo had seen Mauritz Stiller's film Erotikon in a theater in Sweden.
Appearing on the screen in the 1920 Gustaf Molander film Bodakungen was Franz Envall, whom Greta Garbo mentioned in a 1928 Photoplay magazine interview with Ruth Biery, "Then I met an actor...it was Franz Envall. He is dead now, but he has a daughter in the stage in Sweden. he asked if they would not let me try to get into the Dramatic School of the Royal Theater in Stockholm."
As an act of spectatorship, Iris Barry looked at film directors in the United States, "Seastrom, the Swedish director, is a man whom America has ruined. In Sweden, one cannot help feeling the cinema has steered its own sweet course irrespective of a desire to please the people at all costs...There has been much poetry and a great deal of fancy in Swedish films." Paul Rotha, writing at the time of the silent era having come to and and sound film making its beginning in his volume The Film till now, a survey of the cinema, helped formulate the consensus that the value of Swedish Silent Film lay in its depiction of man's relation to the enviornment, shown through exterior shots during the period of the silent film of Victor Sjostrom untill the interior shooting of Gustaf Molander during the early sound era, that there was a "lyricism" that brought "depth and width" that would make each director the others contemporary. "With Seastrom it manifests itself in his shots of landscape, his feeling for the presence of the elements, his love of the wind and sky, and flowers...Seastrom too this reality of nature with him to the mechanized studios of hollywood and it blossomed even in that hot-house atmosphere." The Film Daily during 1923 had advised, "Keep your eye on Seastrom. He is liable to do some things that will make him one of the most important directors in this country." Readers in Sweden can affectionately know that it added, "Incidentally, if they can prevail upon him to act in one of of his productions he will also prove suprising." Photoplay magazine featured a magnificient photo Victor Sjostrom in which he is holding a megaphone while standing next to his camera and camera crew in a foot of water while on location, shooting a scene from the middle of a stream; it is the same photo that appeared in Screenland Magazine, which, during October of 1923, in addition to that featured cameraman Charles Van in a photograph, his having been on the set of The Master of Man. The title of the article, written by Constance Palmer Littlefield, was New Hope for the AmericanPhotoplay. It described the film Mortal Clay directed in Sweden by Victor Sjostrom as a film that was more artistic than commercial and anticipates the director's next film as there being on the screen "food for comparision", the soon to also be an adaption of thewriting of Sir Hall Caine with The Master of Man, directed in the United States by
Victor Seastrom. Sir Thomas Henry Hall Caine had been secretary to Dante Gabriel Rosetti during the last year of the painter's life, his novels having been adapted to the screen by George Fitzmaurice, who filmed Barbara LaMarr in The Eternal City (1923) and by Hugh Ford, who filmed Katherine McDonald and Katherine Griffith in The Woman Thou Gavest Me (1919.) "But in Victor Seastrom lies hope. Since his coming to us from Sweden, he has been instrumental in organizing the Little Theatre movement of the screen." Screenland Magazine notes that
Joseph Schildkraut was originally been slated for the lead role in the film untill his scenes were reshot with Conrad Nagel. King Vidor in 1924 paired John Gilbert and Aileen Pringle in two films, Wife of the Centaur with Kate Lester, and His Hour. Norwegian film director Tancred Ibsen, while briefly in Hollywood, worked on the set design to the Vidor film His Hour. Monta Bell that year directed John Gilbert in The Snob (seven reels).
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." Notably, Clarence Brown in 1925 directed Rudolph Valentino in the film The Eagle, which is of interest not only for its introduction of the pull-back shot, a tracking shot moving away from its subject similar to the present day zoom-out, but it was also one of the first films for which Adrain had designed the costumes, the other that year having had been being Her Sister From Paris.
Basil Rathbone, who co-starred with Greta Garbo, under the direction of Clarence Brown, in the sound version of Anna Karenina, wrote of his aquaintance with her in his autobiography, In and Out of Character. "I first met Miss Garbo in 1928 when Ouida and I were invited to lunch with Jack Gilbert one Sunday." Rathbone and his wife had been present at the premiere of the film Flesh and the Devil. Of his starring in film with her, he wrote, "And so upon the morning previously arranged I called upon Miss Garbo. The house, a small one, was as silent as the grave. There was no indication it might be occupied." Rathbone had also appeared in silent films- Trouping with Ellen (T. Hayes Hunter, seven reels) in 1924, The Masked Bride (Christy Cabanne, six reels), starring Mae Murray, in 1925 and The Great Deception (Howard Higgin, six reels) in 1926. Jane Ardmore's biography, The Self-Enchanted- Mae Murray: Image of an Era, only briefly mentions Basil Rathbone or Greta Garbo but is an account of off-screen Hollywood, "Every fourth Sunday Mae threw open her house for lavish entertainment...Jack Gilbert brought Greta Garbo. They were in love and radiant, but Greta was worried about the studio, she was shy, there seemed such commotion, her engeries were sapped. 'You should have a dressing room on the set as I do, Darling.' Mae told her." Mae Murray would be attending a birthday party later that year for Rudolph Valentino given by Pola Negri. Rathbone and his wife had been present at the premiere of Flesh and the Devil. On learning that Greta Garbo had already had the film Mata Hari in production, Pola Negri deciding between scripts that were in her studio's story department chose A Woman Commands as her first sound film, in which she starred with Basil Rathbone. Of Rathbone she wrote in her autobiography, 'As an actor, I suspected Rathbone might be a little stiff and unromantic for the role, but he made a test that was suprisingly good.' Directed by Paul L.Stein, the films also stars Reginald Owen and Roland Young.
During 1925 actress Vilma Banky was filming for George Fitzmaurice rather than Victor Sjostrom, who featured her in his first sound film, A Lady To Love, that being before her Hungarian accent purportedly had contributed to an unacceptance on the part of movie going audiences. The Great Goldwyn, an early biography on producer Sam Goldwyn written by Alva Johnston, gives an account of her having been brought to the United States States, "He discovered Miss Banky when he saw her picture in a photograph shop in Budapest. This was a feit, because when the photograph was sent to Hollywood, the Goldwyn executives could see no possibilites in her. She arrived in Hollywood herself a few days after her photograph. Miss Banky was bewildered on her arrival in Hollywood. 'I thought I was being tricked,' she told an interpreter, 'I didn't believe the man was Goldwyn untill he gave me two thousand dollars.'" During 1925, Victor Sjostrom, brought Lewis Stone and Alice Terry to the screen in the film Confessions of a Queen. With him was a cinematographer that became widely used on the back lots of the silent films of the decade to turn flicker into fantasy, Percy Hilburn, his having worked with several directors, notably Reginald Barker, George Melford, Fred Niblo and Monta Bell. Picturegoer Magazine reviewed the film, "Confessions of a Queen is a Ruritanian theme, with a long suffering Queen- Alice Terry, and a dissolute King- Lewis Stone; and here the acting of the principals lifts Seastrom's production shoulder-high above the ordinary." Sjostrom's film was written by Agnes Christine Johnson, adapted from The Painted Laugh a novel by Alphonse Daudet. Picturegoer magazine saw Sjostrom's contribution to film as being exemplary as a literate director, "You may have noticed that Seastrom has changed the titles- this however is not an example of vandalism; he changed the stories too, and, if I may say so, with all deference to the authors, has changed them for the better...Yes they have box office appeal, but they are still and sober, artistic and sombre." To the present author, it seems that this is in part due to Sjostrom having been an actor during the time of August Strindberg and in part a nod to his having worked with Selma Lagerlof, harkening back to when the reverse was true for Mauritz Stiller and his break with Lagerlof over how faithfully her writings should have beeen adapted. In Sweden, Par Lagerkvist that year published the novel Guest of Reality (Gas hos verkligheten). It is an account of the events of his childhood an his claim of his reluctance to accept religous ideals. Gustaf Molander in 1925 directed the film Constable Paulus' Easter Bomb (Polis Paulis' Easter Bomb). William Larsson that year directed the films Broderna Ostermans huskors and For hemmet och flickan, with Jenny Tschernichin and Elsa Widborg in what would be the first film in which she was to appear. John W. Brunius in 1925 directed the film Charles XII (Karl XII), photographed by Hugo Edlund and starring Gösta Ekman, Pauline Brunius and Mona Martenson. Its screenplay was written by Hjalmar Bergman and Ivar Johansson. Many of the scenes of Brunius' film were shot on the actual historical locations and battlesites, it having had been being one of the most expensive films to have been made in Sweden up untill that time. Gosta Ekman had earlier been seen as leading man in the United States, as a "romantic type" In Pantomine magazine it was surveyed that, "he plays the impudent, but loveable adventurer to life and his slender blonde figure lends itself most admirably to graceful interpretations of this kind." Photoplay magazine saw Ekman in a similar way, describing him in 1923 as "the Swedish shiek" (the Swedish Valentino) and predicted his soon aquiring famem in the United States, as it did that year with Sigrid Holmqvist. Photoplay reported, "Arriving with him from Stockholm was Edith Erastoff, the wife of Victor Seastrom, the Swedish director who is now working for Goldwyn. Miss Erastoff played opposite Mr. Ekman at the Stockholm Theater....'A beautiful boy,' says director Seastrom, 'Too beautiful- but he is a great actor and never hesitates to conceal his good looks for a character part which demands make-up.'" The magazine that year speculated that "in all probability" Ekman woulod appear on screen in a version of "Three Weeks", concievably opposite actress Theda Bara. In Sweden, in 1925 Ragnar Ring directed the film Tre Kroner (1925), following the next year with the film Butikskultur. Ett kopmanshus i skargarden starring Anna Wallin and Anna Carlsten was written and directed by Hjalmer Peters, its photographer Hellwig Rimmen.
In his biography of Greta Garbo, Raymond Durgnat quotes "the austerest of all film directors", Carl Dreyer, although the quote seems superfluous or decorative to the essay, as having said, "Nothing in the world can be compared to the human face. It is a land no one can never tire of exploring." The context was that Garbo, being a film star, was an object of art.
It was in 1926 that Lillian Gish, while filming La Boheme (King Vidor, nine reels) with John Gilbert, had met Victor Sjöström. Lillian Gish was quoted by an early biographer as having said that it was on the set of La Boheme that she began working with Frances Marion on the continuity behind The Scarlet Letter. Photoplay Magazine in 1926 added a photocaption to a still from Victor Sjostrom's film, for they had trouble getting Lillian to put torrid temperature into her La Boheme scenes. Here is Lillian sending hot looks to Lars Hanson. Quoted by Liberty Magazine during 1927, Lillian Gish said, "King Vidor directed La Boheme, and one of the best cameramen in my experience, Hendrik Sartov, lent his aid...We finished it on a Saturday, and without waiting for my weeks holiday, we began The Scarlet Letter on Monday."
There is an account of Victor Sjostrom's shooting the exterior scenes to the film The Scarlet Letter in which during the film he climbed down from a platform after Swedish silent film director Mauritz Stiller had announce that he was there, Stiller then saying, "This is Garbo." Victor Sjostrom and Mauritz Stiller had met in Stockholm the day before the shooting of the 1912 film The Gardner/The Broken Spring Rose was to begin at the studio in Lindingo, Bengt Forslund later chronicling that "Sjostrom didn't know Stiller befroe they became associated at Svenska Bio, but he was aware of his reputation." The Film Daily magazine reviewed the work of actress Lillian Gish, "Another very credible performance. At times Miss Gish reaches real heights." It reviewed the film favorably, "Metro Goldwyn Mayer and Victor Seastrom are to be congratulated for their courage in telling this dramatic without any extraneous and unnecessary flourishes", but also advice as to its "Exploitation". "No ballyhoo for this. It isn't that type of a picture. The import of the letter A which Lillian Gish carries like a cross might be used to arouse interest." It was a set where "Lillian Gish is gelatinzining the famous Scarlet Letter" as seen by Photoplay of that year.
Silent Film: Lost Film, Found MagazinesThere were 478 silent films made in Sweden; of them only 192 still exist, although there are copies of fragments from a number of them. Added to that, countless Danish silent films produced by Ole Olsen for Nordisk Films Kompagni are "presumably lost": the Danish Film Institute notes that approximately 1600 silent short and feature films were made whereas only 250 films presently exist, Not the only webpage concerned with the preservation of Silent Film, the lost films webpage from Berlin show clips and stills from fifty silent film that it claims are "unknown or unidentified". Bengt Forslund penned a brief paragraph about the silent film The Divine Woman (En Gudomlig Kvinna, 1928), directed by Victor Sjostrom under the name Victor Seastrom, "This was written 35 years ago and even at that stage all prints seem to have vanished. There is not much hope of finding one today since Garbo's films have been the subject of more research than those of most other stars.". Lon Chaney is quoted as having said, "I told Garbo that mystery served me well and it would do as much for her." Forslund reflected upon the exisiting early silent film of the Swedish director, "Even more regrettable is that out of the 31 films directed by Sjostrom during this period, only three have survived, and out of the other 8 films in which he acted, not a single one remains." Not only is the film in which Victor Sjostrom directed Greta Garbo lost, Sjostrom, while in the United States was to direct the first feature released by Metro Goldwyn Mayer, He Who Gets Slapped, (seven reels 1924), starring Lon Chaney, Jack Gilbert and Norma Shearer. It was Norma Shearer who was to star opposite Lon Chaney in the other M.G.M directed by Victor Sjostrom under the name Seastrom of which there are no existant copies, that film being Tower of Lies (1924, seven reels). During 1925, Lon Chaney, in an article entitled My Own Story and published by Movie Magazine, while pointing to the themes of "self-sacrifice and renunciation" in his films wrote, "The picture I have just completed, Tower of Lies, is the story of a father's enduring love and sacrifice, even to death, for his wayward daughter. I do not know that it is my favorite of all roles that I have portrayed, but certainly it is one of them and I consider Victor Seastrom, who directed it, the greatest director in the motion picture profession." Also in 1925, The Reel Journal, a sister publication to the magazine New England Film News, reviewed the films of Lon Chaney with the article "Lon Chaney Turns to Less Grotesque Roles". The article initially began by noting that, in regard to depiction of thematic character, "Lon Chaney, who has attracted stardom by playing roles of a weird and grotesque character, is turning to portrayals depending on more deeply human qualities for their interest.", the professionalism as a make-up artist on the part of Lon Chaney is not without having been noticed, "In his first Metro-Goldwyn Mayer picture, Victor Seastrom's production of Leonid Andreyev's He Who Gets Slapped...Chaney donned two make-ups, one as a European scientist, and the other as a clown. It was said by critics of the latter that this portrayal was the first circus clown interpretation to express the humanity which lies behind the painted mask of a mountebank...In The Tower of Lies, his make-up demonstrates a transition from middle age to old age." Both films The Tower of Lies and The Unholy Three were unreleased at the time of the review. An earlier film starring John Gilbert and Norma Shearer, The Wolfman, directed by Edmund Mortimer in 1924, is also among the myriad of films now thought to be lost. Included among them are The Dark Angel (George Fitzmaurice, 1924) pairing Vilma Banky and Ronald Colman, The Chinese Parrot (1927, seven reels), adapted for the screen from the pen of Earl Der Biggers by Paul Leni and starring Marian Nixon and Florence Turner and Four Devils, filmed in the United States by F. W Murnau in 1928 and starring Janet Gaynor and Nacy Drexel. Photoplay, while providing a still from the film, saw The Four Devils as the "long awaited successor" to Murnau's Sunrise and as a source of a plot summary to the film, it alludes to the film's tone, "the final shot implies a happy ending. The film will probably be cut to eliminate the over drawn scenes before it is released." Silent film journals have noted that no matter how star-struck audiences may have been, John Barrymore's film When a Man Loves was eclipsed and while thought to be a lost film, it was not screened between 1927 to 2000, but add to this that the film The Lotus Eater (Marshall Neilan, 1921), in which he appeared with Colleen Moore and Anna Q. Nilsson, was also during that entire time taken to be a lost film; one source listed as many as thirteen films in which John Barrymore starred that are believed to be missing. One film thought to be non-existent before preservation attempts is a film which introduced actor Nils Asther in his first appearance onscreen, a Lars Hanson film directed by Mauritz Stiller in 1916, The Wings (Vingarne)- it was remade, or re-adapted rather, as a silent by Carl Theodore Dreyer.
In regard to Lost Films, Found Magazines, Photoplay reviewed the film London After Midnight, "Lon Chaney has a stellar role in this mystery drama and the disguise he uses while ferretting out the murderer is as gruesome as any has ever worn...Chaney plays a dual role." Carl Sandberg reviewed the film in 1928, "No wonder Inspector Burke is played by Lon Chaney with little or no make up. The world had forgotten what Lon Chaney's real face looks like and when he lets his own countenance shine forth he is disguised most of all...The story of how Inspector Burke solves the mystery is one of the most diverting and suspenseful in all the long associations of Chaney, the actor, and Tod Browning, the director. Conrad Nagel, Marceline Day and H. B. Walthall have parts, but do not have them seriously enough to interfere with Mr. Chaney and his performance."
Screenwriter Frances Marion had written the early revision to the photoplay The Mysterious Lady, which was rewritten by screenwriter Bess Meredyth. During the time in between it had been elaborately reworked by Danish film director Benjamin Christenson. Upon first arriving in the United States, the Danish silent film director Benjamin Christenson had sold the scenario to The Light Eternal, his remarking later that 'writers were let loose on my script and altered the whole tone and message'. The first film Christenson had directed in the United States, The Devil's Circus (1926, seven reels) with Norma Shearer and Charles Emmet Mack, had had a script which he had written himself. The Haunted House (seven reels) with Thelma Todd, Montague Love and Barbara Bedford,The Hawk's Nest (eight reels) with Milton Sills, Montague Love and Mitchell Lewis were to follow in 1928. Author John Ernst published the biography Benjamin Christensen in 1967.
Today, there are no known existant copies of the 1929 film The House of Horror (7 reels) for which Thelma Todd returned to the screen to film under the direction of Benjamin Christensen. Nor are there existant copies of the silent films The Haunted House and The Hawk's Nest; untill they are found and or restored, the films made in the United States by Benjamin Christensen continue to lurk within the shadows of the silver screen theaters, and although many of the theaters, with all their granduer that introduced the films are also gone, particularly in Boston, the detectives of film can find them in the world of Lost Film, Found Magazines with each newly discovered poster, still or full page advertisement. It need not be overlooked that the Journal of Scandinavian Cinema recently published the article Scandinavian Auteur as Chameleon: How Benjamin Christenson reinvented himself in Hollywood 1925-29, written by Arne Lunde, who looks at correspondence written by the film director. Lunde sees an influence Christensen, "a visionary stylist and innovator" (Lunde), made on the technique used to film The Mysterious Island (1929), although, much like Stiller's having been replaced by Fred Niblo, he had been replaced on the film by Lucien Hubbard. "Silhoetted lighting in a submarine-interior shot also shows traces of a key Christensen stylistic signature." When shown in the United States during 1922 under the title The Stroke of Midnight, the film was reviewed by Photoplay Magazine as being, "Drama from the Swedish- so drab and grim in its realism tha one longs, almost, for a bit of unassuming splapstick to liven it up...Impressive, but depressing." Picture-play Magazine in 1922 reviewed the film, "It is a Swedish film and full of gloom. But the strong point of 'Midnight' is not the gloom, but its ghost story." it continued to note that the film "will send shivers up your spine" the reviewer conceded that they "had to sit through reels of endless dreary moralizing." When asked about Victor Sjostrom, Ingmar Bergman had told Torsten Manns, "His films meant a tremendous lot to me, particularly The Phantom Carriage and Ingeborg Holm. Adapted from the novel by Selma Lagerlof, directed by Victor Sjostrom from his own screenplay, the film was photographed by Julius Jaenzon. Einar Lauritzen wrote, "The double exposures in the graveyard scenes and in the scenes with the phantom chariot are beautifully executed, and, as always in Julius Jaenzon's photography, the interplay of light and shoadow is superb. Peter Cowie has noted that during the scene, "Occaisionaly as many as four images are superimposed on a single frame." During 1920, Victor Sjostrom had veered from Selma Lagerlof and had adapted, that is to say wrote and directed, a story by Franz Grillparzer, his relying upon Swedish camerman Henrik Jaenzon behind the lens to film The Monastery of Sendomir (Klosteret i Sendomir/The Secret of the Monastery, starring Tora Teje, Renee Bjorling, Jenny Tschernichin-Larsson and Erik A Petschler.
Greta Garbo photographer William Daniels in 1926 was cinematographer to the films Altars of Desire (seven reels), under the direction of Christy Cabanne and starring actresses Mae Murray and Maude George and Bardley the Magnificient under the direction of King Vidor. Greta Garbo and John Gilbert were to attend the premiere of the film Bardley the Magnificient together. Motion Picture Magazine printed, "Hollywood is still talking. The newspaper wires still buzz every time either one telephones the other. Yet in spite of all this, Greta Garbo and John Gilbert dare appear in public together at openings and other Hollywood functions." During this, Silent film scriptwriter Dorothy Farnum ran magazine advertisements announcing her having had written the screenplay to the film Bardley the Magnificent, the portrait of John Gilbert from the film printed in Motion Picture Magazine had been taken Ruth Harriet Louise. 1926 was also the year that Greta Garbo, John Gilbert and Lars Hanson would film an adaption of the novel The Undying Past, bringing to the screen its plotline untill its emotional concluding scene at the Isle of Friendship during Flesh and the Devil (Atra, Clarence Brown). When reviewed by Photoplay Magazine it was seen that it was "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 overshade some of his scenes". Of her off-screen romance with John Gilbert, director Clarence Brown, who had introduced the two to each other, had said, "After I finished 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 alone in a world of their own." Writing about Greta Garbo, Richrad Corliss quotes film director Clarence Brown as also having related that he would "direct her very quietly" and never "gave her director above a whisper." In an interview during which she outlines her having met John Gilbert, Greta Garbo, as quoted by Ruth Biery in The Story of Greta Garbo, said, "When I finished 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 by 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 the background to its addressing the desire of Greta Garbo to leave her ealier "ladies of vampish repute" characters and to be seen as a more serious dramatic, or romantic dramatic, actress. It primarily sees her as being more believable character, "Miss Garbo in her later day impersonation shows a frail physique and a fragile ethereal air. She is infinitely more civilized and all the more subtle for not being so deliberate." Paul Rotha reveiwed "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 closeups to get this across with considerable effect. Notable also was his use of angles, different indeed from either customary German or American method, and the happinesss with which he settled the characters in their enviornment." National Board of Review magazine encapsulated the film with "The directorial skill of Clarence Brown, the cinematic slickness of the photography, and the careful attention to detail do the rest. Greta care has been taken in the scenification of the who picture to create an atmosphere in which duels and a society whose moral codes have been tinged by a military regime will seem natural." Clarence Sinclair Bull contributed a portrait of Lars Hanson to Motion Picture Magazine, the photo-caption reading, "Here's a new hero for you. Whether its acting ability, sincerity, or sex appeal you're looking for, Lars has got it. He was a match for the screen's foremost actress in The Scarlet Letter, and we've no doubt he'll make even John Gilbert look to his laurels in Flesh and the Devil." The portrait of Greta Garbo that year in Motion Picture Magazine had been photographed by Ruth Harriet Louise, its caption reading "We are feverishly awaiting her performance opposite John Gilbert in Flesh and the Devil"- by then it was becoming increasingly unnecessary to introduce her as a star that was rising. And yet the when the magazine reviewed the film with the article An Idyll or a Tragedy- Which? When Clarence Brown filmed the Love Scenes of Greta Garbo and John Gilbert for Flesh and the Devil, he was working with raw material, the author began with, "None of us knows very much about her." When the film was reviewed by Motion Picture Magazine the film was praised with "Here is one of the best pictures relected upon the old 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 havoc in a man's world." Film Daily listed the adaptation credit as Hans Kraly and the scenario and continuity credit as Benj F. Glazer, "Story Strong in Sex Appeal but Splendidly Handled." It looked at both co-stars, "John Gilbert renews his hold on the title of the screen's great lover...Greta Garbo about the most alluring creature imaginable...An overindulgence in painted backdrops and a fairly unconvincing, sugar-coated ending are the only criticism to be offered."
The story of John Gilbert and Greta Garbo was often retold after the advent of the sound film. There is a photograph that appears to be from the filming of Flesh and the Devil; the photocaption is from the Photoplay article "Unknown Hollywood I Know", written by Katherine Albert in 1932, and reads, "An old and never-published snapshot of Garbo and Gilbert in the flush of romance. Garbo liked to picnic alone. Jack liked to go to parties. So they picnicked alone." The article gives an account of John Gilbert futilely waiting for Greta Gabo to call him, "Jack worshipped Garbo, there's no doubt about that..Well, she gave him a cool, dispassioned regard."
In Sweden, during 1926 author Selma Lagerlof watched filmstrips of the adaptation to the screen of her novel by Victor Sjostrom as Seastrom in the United States, the scenario having been drawn up by Agnes Christine Johnston. All seven reels of the film are presently considered to be lost. Norma Shearer, who had starred under Victor Sjostrom's direction in Tower of Lies with William Haines had said that Sjostrom "was more concerned with the moods he was creating than the shadings he would have injected into my performance." When reviewed by Photoplay Magazine, the film was seen as "a worthwhile picture spoiled by a too conscious effort to achieve art. Consequently, a human story suffers from artificiality." When further reviewed by Photoplay, it was added that, "If the director had been as concerned with telling the story as he was thinking of symbolic scenes, this would have been a great picture. As it is, Victor Seastrom was so busy being artistic that he forgot to be human. The emotions are of those of the theater, not of life." Actor William Haines later was to tell Photoplay Magazine, "But then it is strange, too, that I have worked here for several years on the same lot with Greta Garbo and have never met her." On Sjostrom, Author Iris Barry observed, "He has a genius for the rural. In Tower of Lies he has redeemed himself on exactly these lines. Also witness the love scene in He Who Gets Slapped, the only really attractive part in that rather tedious picture." Danish film director Carl Th. Dreyer was in Norway during 1926 shooting the film The Bride of Glomdal (Glomsdalsbruden), photographed by Einar Olsen and starring Tove Tellback. The Norwegian Film Institute during 2007 announced the restoration of the film The Bridal Procession (Brudeferden i Hardanger), also filmed in Norway in 1926; the film stars the very beuatiful actress Ase Bye and was directed by Rasmus Breistein. To flashback to 1921 and the Danish actress Asta Nielsen, the last volume of poetry written by Vilhelm Krag, Viserg of Vers had appeared in Norway in 1919, and with it are two novels, Stenansigot, from 1918, and Verdensbarn, from 1920. Vilhem Krag then adapted his work Jomfru Trofest for the screen in a script co-written by the director Rasmus Briestein. Interestingly enough, Asta Neilsen waited untill having returned to Germany to appear in the film Hedda Gabler under the direction of Franz Eckstein, but not before her having made the film Felix with Rasmus Briestein. The film was based on a novel written by Gustav Aagaard and photographed by Gunnar Nilsen-Vig, who would later go on to photograph for the directors John Brunius and Tancred Ibsen. It was a fertile time period in Scandinavia for literary adaptations that should have brought the name of the Norwegian author Sigrid Undset to the forefront with film going audiences in the United States. In 1920 Sigrid Undset published the first volume of her Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy, Krasen, followed by the volumes Husfrue and Korset, in 1921 and 1922, respectively. They had been preceded by a volume of essays, Et kvindesynspunktina, in 1919.
|Photographer Oliver Marsh that year would be behind the camera lens Norma Talmadge in the film The Dove (nine reels), director Roland West adapting the play written by Willard Mack for the screen. W. S. Van Dyke that year brought Wanda Hawley to the screen in the film The Eyes of Totem, also starring Ann Cornwall. That Movie Classic Magazine included the title New Styles for Sex Appeal on its November,1933 cover featuring Greta Garbo is a fitting contrast to when the magazine had featured Garbo the silent actress on its cover during 1927 before it had changed its name, a look, from Motion Picture Classic. Alice Joyce had been the magazine's cover girl during the previous month and silent actress Betty Bronson followed during March. Included among those chosen to be covergirl for Photoplay Magazine during February of 1927 were actresses Olive Borden, Arlette Marchal, Lois Wilson, Mae Murray and Mary Brian. Actresses chosen by Screenland magazine in 1927 to grace its cover included Marie Provost, lya De Putti,Anita Parkhurst, Gilda Gray and Jetta Goudal: Each month Cal York wrote a page entitled Girl on the Cover; in regard to any personal favorite covers to Photoplay Magazine of the present author, so far there are two, both from 1926, Marion Davies and Alice Joyce. While author Deebs Taylor explains that 'it' as typified by Elinor Glyn was sex appeal, he also writes that silent film actress Clara Bow had brought the excitement of the flapper to the screen a year before her having been given the role in the 1927 film It (seven reels) during her appearance in the film Mantrap (Victor Fleming, seven reels). She appeared on the cover of Filmjournalen Magazine in 1927 and in 1929. Photoplay Magzine covers for the year 1928, featured the actresses Corinne Griffith, Marion Davies, Evelyn Brent, Billie Dove, Ruth Taylor, Ester Ralston and Eleanor Boardman. Clara Bow is a particular instance of Lost Films, Found Magazines; a highly publicized silent actress that was often written about, if not written about in within the extra-textual discourse of fan magazines as one the earliest forms of film criticism, with the expectation that modern novels that had not yet been filmed would soon be brought to the screen, Clara Bow appearred in several films that have only been seen due to recent efforts to preserve them. Parts of silent films are missing- among the films featuring Clara Bow either still incomplete, but restored, or restored in their entirety are Down to the Sea in Ships (1922), Maytime (Gasnier, 1923), Poisoned Paradise (Gasnier, 1924), Black Oxen (Frank Lloyd, 1924) and the 1925 film My Lady of Whims. Without the films, all that is left are magazine advertisements where the screen star cordially invites our consumership, not only our consumership as spectators for the advertised product, but as spectators for the fantasies of 'a now by gone era', the look of the female directed to a time only preserved as being seldom seen on the silent silver screen, once captured by the moving camera and now guessed at through the pages of magazines.
John Gilbert that year made the films The Show (Tod Browning, seven reels), Twelve Miles Out (Jack Conway, eight reels). John Gilbert also appeared that year with Jeanne Eagles in the film Man, Woman and Sin (seven reels), which Photoplay reviewed as being of interest because the actresses and actor were paired together but concluded, "Miss Garbo needn't worry over Miss Eagles.", it thinking that the film and the part played by the actress was tailored in order to substitute for Garbo. "Director-and author-Monta Bell knows his city room. After that the film disintegrates into cheap melodrama." The following year John Gilbert appeared in Four Walls, made with him by director William Nigh, (eight reels), and actress Vera Gordon.
"Came the talkies- came Gilbert's unfortunate and subsequently not-so-good pictures...I believe unquestionably that Jack Gilbert would have made a great motion picture star after the talkies. I believe with a little study, a little direction, a good deal of careful help and selection of stories and directors, he might have survived them as well as his beloved Greta Garbo" It was during the summer of 1935 that Adela Rogers St. Johns predicted "his bitter destruction", her writing the article What Defeated Jack Gilbert for Photoplay magazine. It might be noticed that she is in no way maudlin, but rather morbid, if not eerie. "It would be easier to bear if it had been Jack's fault. But it wasn't. Never." And yet it was six months before the actor's death; as she surveys his marriages and pronounces his love for Greta Garbo as having been all-consuming, she approaches the "beautiful letters" of literature; she is hauntingly like those actresses that had buried Rudolph Valentino, "Amid the glitter of Hollywood there have been many tragedies, but none more poignant or more heartbreaking than Gilbert's."
John Gilbert would make only one film after having been reunited with Greta Garbo in Queen Christina, The Captain Hates the Sea (1934). There is one account that the role in Queen Christina was first going to be offerred to Lord Olivier and was given to John Gilbert at Greta Garbo's insistence.
Actress Emily Fitzroy, who appeared with John Gilbert and Greta Garbo in the 1927 film Love, had that year appeared in the films Married Alive (Emmett Flynn, five reels), with Margaret Livingston and Gertrude Claire, Orchids and Ermine (Alfred Santell, seven reels) with Colleen Moore, Hedda Hopper and Alma Bennet, One Increasing Purpose (Harry Beaumont, eight reels), with Lila Lee, Jane Novak and May Allison, and Once and Forever (Phil Stone, six reels), with Patsy Ruth Miller and Adele Watson.
During 1929 Motion Picture Magazine had introduced Jearaldine DeVorak, a fashion model who was given a small salary to become "Greta Garbo's official double" when she had been noticed as an extra, working as a dancer. "'I adored Garbo on the screen,' she explained.'Once i spent the whole day sitting through five show of The Temptress...They made tests of me and dressed me in gorgeous gowns...She is so lovely and i know she taught me a great deal about acting." In 1927 Greta Garbo had written, 'I could not believe that what I saw when I was first taken to the Metro-Goldwyn Mayer lot was a studio. I found that it covered acres and acres of ground and boasted some twenty stages, each one of which was larger than our entrie studio in Sweden.' The quote is from an article printed in Theatre Magazine entitled 'Why I am a Recluse.' and it either smooths out the extatextual discourse surrounding her on-screen sphinx-like image or was only partly written by Garbo for the studio publicity department; she had earlier renounced her 'vamp roles' in order to film melodrama- in any event Greta Garbo herself relished reading fan magazines no matter how taciturn she had been. In the article, she explains the difficulty involved in acting in the United States, 'My country, Sweden, is so small. It is also so quiet...During my first picture, Ibanez's Torrent, it was exactly as if I had to learn the making of motion pictures all over again. I was just beginning to learn the language... Now of course, things are easier for me. The second picture, The Temptress, I found less hard. The Flesh and the Devil fairly spung along, and now Love is going easier still. The studio does not seem as large as it did.'
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!!" 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 deep in the breast of Garbo." He alludes to Garbo not wanting to have married John Gilbert and of her keeping the details of the romance from Stiller. 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, "this picture deals exclusively with the central love intrigue and resolves itself into a series of love scenes, scenes of renunciation and scenes of self sacrifice. It is a fine solo performance for Greta Garbo, seconded by Mr. John Gilbert."
Photoplay added, "Greta Garbo's pet hobby is Swedish fan mail." Two magazines of which copies may have belonged to her during 1928 were issues that featured Greta Garbo as a covergirl for Motion Picture Classic and Greta Garbo as a covergirl for Screenland in 1927- in regard to magazine art and the actress as model, the magazine cover as modern canvas, Greta Garbo was on the cover of six issues of the magazine Screenland: February 1927, May 1928, November 1929, June 1931, June 1934, and November 1935. Interestingly, while readers were awaiting her picture on the cover of the June 1931 issue, which included the caption "A New Slant on Garbo", her name appeared on the caption of each preceding issue, irregardless of who the actress covergirl for that month was. The cover to February's issue had read "Garbo Menace", April's had read "The Real Garbo", and July's had read "Etching of Garbo"- the most beautifully erotic cover of Marlene Dietrich during March of 1931 had had, below the portrait of the German actress, the words "Dietrich's Shadow on Garbo's Path." Actress Greta Garbo, while still fairly new to Hollywood, appeared on the covers of Photoplay Magazine for May 1928, August 1929, August 1930, January 1932 and January 1933. During the four short years between 1934 and 1938, Greta Garbo appeared on seven covers of the magazine Film Pictorial. It is now beyond asking if James Quirk's Photoplay is literature, it was, for the most part art, and if about the cinematic art, it was painterly. During 1928, it happenned to read, "The plans for Brown to direct Greta Garbo in "Java" have been shelved and he will now direct John Gilbert and Miss Garbo in "The Sun of St. Moritz." Garbo, incidently had declined a role in the silent film Women Love Diamonds (Edmund Goulding, seven reels,1927), it not having met with her approval; the film was to star Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Lionel Barrymore and Owen Moore. "And there I met him for the first time, except to nod to him, John Gilbert. He has such vitality, spirit, eagerness. Every morning at nine o clock he would slip to work opposite me...When I finished The Flesh and the Devil, they wanted me to do Women Love Diamonds. I could not do that story....Finally, they call me and say they have a story. I read it and went out and asked what part I was to play and they said the little part. Aileen Pringle and Lew Cody were to play the big parts...and was ready to play the little part in the picture when Miss Pringle said sh would not do it."
|For Photoplay, Agnes Smith in 1927 wrote on 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 mountain 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.'" In Sweden, Ragnar Hylten-Cavallius continued directing with Youth (Ungdom), starring Ivan Hedqvist, Marta Hallden and Brita Appelgren. Erik A Petschler in 1927 directed Hin och smalanningen, photographed by Gustav A Gustafson and starring Birgit Tengroth, Ingrid Forsberg, Greta Anjou, Jenny-Tschernichin-Larsson, Helga Brofeldt, Emy Bergstrom and Emy Albiin. Gustaf Edgren in 1927 directed The Ghost Baron (Spokbaronen) starring Karin Swanström and photographed by Adrian Bjurman, which was followed by Black Rudolf (Svarte Rudolf, 1928) starring Inga Tiblad and Fridolf Rhudin, both films having been written by Sölve Cederstrand. The assistant director to the film Black Rudolf had been Gunnar Skogland, it having been the first film in which the actress Katie Rolfsen was to appear. Gustaf Molander directed Sealed Lips (Forseglade lappar) with Wanda Rothgardt, Mona Martenson and Karin Swanström and His English Wife (Hans engelska fur), with Margit Manstad, Wanda Rothgath, Lili Dagover and Margit Rosengren in what was to be her first appearance on screen in 1927. In 1928 he continued with the film Sin (Synd) starring Lars Hanson, Ragnar Arvedson and Ellisa Landi and Woman of Paris (Parisiskor), with Ragnar Arvedson and Karin Swanström and photographed by Julius Jaenzon.
The screenplays to The Kiss (Kyssen, Feyder, seven reels) and Wild Orchids were both written by Hans Kraly during a year in which he had also written Eternal Love (Lubitsch, nine reels), Betrayal (Lewis Milestone, eight reels), The Garden of Eden (Lewis Milestone), starring Corrinne Griffith and Lowell Sherman, and The Last of Mrs. Cheyney. Kraly also in the United States had earlier penned the screenplays to Rosita (Lubitsch, 1923, nine reels), Black Oxen (Frank Lloyd, 1924, eight reels), Three Women (Lubitsch, 1924, eight reels), Forbidden Paradise (1924) and Her Night of Romance (Sidney Franklin, 1924, eight reels). In Germany, Kraly had written the scripts to the films of Danish director Urban Gad, including the 1913 film The Film Star (Die Filmprimaddonna, starring Asta Nielsen. Opposite Greta Garbo from the first scene of The Kiss onward was actor Conrad Nagel.
Cal York in of Photoplay in 1928 quoted Greta Garbo as then saying, "Eef I was tempermental, I would not work untill I got what I wanted." the journalist haing added that the "rumors about Garbo's temperment" at the time included that "she likes to be alone, that she is different, 'the one great exception'." If nothing else, the quote may show how inaccessible to the press, or how inaccessible it seemed she should be depicted. The context was when "Production had begun on the Greta Garbo picture War in the Dark when the fact was disclosed that the star was to wear another fur cape or coat. She stoutly rebelled saying she had worn a coat in every picture she had made and would not wear one in this." On other pages that year the magazine added a provocative photo of Greta Garbo, seductive, bareshouldered in a low cut evening dress with the caption, "Who wants movies with incidental sounds? Who would be disturbed by the smack of the kiss Conrad Nagel is planting on Greta Garbo's kneck in War in The Dark? Norma Shearer in 1928 appeared on theater marquees in The Actress (Sidney Franklin, seven reels), a film photographed by William Daniels, The Latest from Paris (eight reels) and A Lady of Chance. Silent film actress Vilma Banky was seen on the screen in theaters across the United States during 1928 with Ronald Colman in Two Lovers (nine reels), directed by Fred Niblo. That same year it was reported, "Vilma Banky's first picture following Two Lovers will be entitled The Awakening (nine reels) instead of The Innocent. It is an original Frances Marion. Victor Fleming is to direct."
Apparently some of the scenes in which Eva von Berne had appeared were refilmed after the shooting of the film Masks of the Devil (Victor Seastrom, 1928, eight reels) had concluded. New to film, Eva von Berne was to star opposite John Gilbert under the direction of Victor Sjostrom. Photoplay magazine lent acclaim to the film with, "A creditable effort to delve into the minds of a group of strange, Continental characters. The fans may not like John Gilbert as a sinister character, but he is always a great actor. She (Eva von Berne) has a difficult role even for an experienced actress". In another review it touted, "John Gilbert is great in a weird and sinister story." Bengt Forslund surmises that the use of double exposures to depict interior monolouge was Victor Sjostrom's interest in directing the film. Sven Gade was asked to revise Frances Marion's adaptation of the novel before it went to Monte Katterjohn. "I have the feeling that Sjostrom took the assignment for almost the same reason he had done Kiss of Death; the plot gave him an excuse to play around with the technical side again." Important to modern authors, Movie Makers magazine, a journal for semi-professional or amateur cameramen, published in 1929 the shot structure from a scene from Masks of the Devil in Central Focusing, Technical Reviews to Aid the Amateur, it putting the film making of Victor Sjostrom on to paper as one of the forerunners to modern film criticism and theory.
Photoplay magazine in a 1932 article writen by Ruth Biery, alluded to Lon Chaney and Greta Garbo having known each other, "He spent many hours with her while she was making her first pictures. And he gave her his opinion on this weird unparalleled buisness..."If you let them know much about you, they will lose interest,' he admonished her again and again." In a Photoplay article entitled, "They Think Alike, both "Sphinxes" Greta Garbo were drawn into paralell by Cal York. In the article Garbo and Chaney are both quoted as they were to trade complimentary remarks. "Of Chaney, Garbo has said, 'His work intrigues me. He is an artist, a creator of illusions. I think he is a magnificent character actor." Chaney is quoted as having returned with a compliment for Greta Garbo, "Garbo is the Bernhardt of the screen" and there is the quotation, "Chaney recently declared, 'She is the greatest feminine personality I have ever seen in the theater and film.'" Greta Garbo, as had Lillian Gish, had asked that Sjostrom direct. Of Greta Garbo he had said, "She thinks above her eyes. Certain great actors posses what seems to be an uncanny ability to register thought- Lon Chaney was one- Garbo is another. They seem to literally absorb impressions...Garbo is more sensitive to emotions than film is to light, (and) you see it through her eyes." The Divine Woman (En Gudomlig Kvinna, eight reels), one of the three films directed by Victor Sjostrom in 1928, was photographed by Oliver T. Marsh, who had photographed the silent film Camille using panachromatic film. The earlier films of Greta Garbo had been filmed on orthochromatic film. Austin Lescarboura, author of Behind the Motion-Picture Screen seems timely in divulging, "Scenery is no longer painted in the prevailing tones of blue and brown, but in full real life values. Costumes are quite as colorful. As a result, orthochromatic registry is correct." Victor Sjostrom's film The Divine Woman was based on the play starlight by Gladys Unger, who had also written an early revision of the screenplay. The final rewrite of the screenplay was given to Dorothy Farnum, the titles written by John Colton. The film took six weeks to shoot. Silent film director Victor Sjostrom had remarked after filming, "I and Metro's own scriptwriter, Frances Marion, wrote the story eight times before it was accepted. By that time, nothing remained of the original material." While there are several accounts that would keep the researcher on tenterhooks written by biographers in regard to a synopsis of the film, and each of those only adding to the mysterious eroticism belonging to the silent films of Greta Garbo, this film in particular displaying her in a more girlish promiscuity with a playfullness rather than an the more distant Garbo, the script itself now lingers as a ghost or phantom as Garbo filrts with the movement of onswcreen shadows; to this Bengt Forslund adds that there were further revisions after the completed script was approved and the ending was made more tragic. John Bainbridge wrote that the film had been "well recieved", that Sjostrom spoke "glowingly" of Garbo's work in the film and also of Stiller's having had an interest in directing it. Bengt Forslund hints that the script itself had been Stiller's idea as a way for him to return from directing at Paramount. Forslund, in his book Victor Sjostrom: His Life and Work writes, "One recogzines that the story could not be helped, but clearly Sjostrom was trying to do something different with Garbo, to make her a softer, more easy-going woman than she appeared in her earlier films." This is premonition is echoed by Paul Rotha, writing in 1930 in The Film till now, "But Seastrom had ceased to develop. He remains stationary in his outlook, thinking in terms of his early Swedish imagery. He has recently made little use of the progress of the cinema itself. The Divine Woman, although it had Greta Garbo of The Atonement of Gosta Berling, had none of the lyricism, the poetic imagery of the earlier film. It is true, however, he rendered the Scandinavian less of a star and more of a woman than in any other of her American films." Biographer and actor Fritiof Billquist quotes Sjostrom as having said, "She never once came to the set without having prepared herself thoroughly down to the last detail, and if one gave her directions, she accepted them, gladly, even though she was a big star even then."
Forsythe Hardy only briefly mentions The Divine Woman in Scandinavian Film, after earlier having announced that the films directed by Mauritz Stiller in the United States also were to lay outside the province of his writing, but he appears to in general be in concordence with Bengt Forslund that the films made in the United States by Stiller and or Sjostrom were not up to par with those they may have or would have made in Sweden, although he favorably notes, "His direction of Greta Garbo in The Divine Woman had the understanding we might have expected." The fragment of Greta Garbo in The Divine Woman showcases the interior editing of Victor Sjostrom. Garbo and Lars Hanson are filmed from behind a dining table in a stationary medium full shot, a brief insert shot included in the sequence. The insert shot of the clock acquires the qualities of a similie and trope as it is repeated, much like the isolated metaphors in Wild Strawberries(Bergman) and Cries and Whispers (Bergman). They are filmed in a series of alternating closeups while seated at the table. On Garbo's later delivering the line of dialouge, "I'd give up the whole world for you, "Sjostrom dissolves to another insert shot of a clock, using the oject, and the motion of an inanimate object within the image, to punctuate the events driven by the characters, spatial-temporality illustrated through lietmotif. For film detectives that look to piece together the scirpt details from magazine articles, the clock also appears in the 1928 review of the film in the bi-weekly The Film Spectator and it is put into relation with Lars Hanson's dialog as he relates to Garbo that his time with her could be limited, but it then chides the actor and actress for their not seeing the seriousness of their existential engagement and involvement with their circumstances. In a second later review it pointed out, "Greta Garbo establishes the fact that in The Divine Woman that it is all right for young Parisian washerwomen to have plucked eyebrows." For Greta Garbo, in the role of Marianne, it is not a choice between Lucien (Lars Hanson) and Legrande (Lowell Sherman); her mother's lover, brings her to acclaim on the stage when Lucien has to return to his conscription. Despondent, she leaves the theater, but then Lucien finds her again. He takes her to South America where they can begin again. (One rewrite of the continuity script has the character's names as being 'Marah', who is introduced by a dollyshot, her apparently coming to Paris from the province of Auverone. When reviewed in the United States, it was deemed that, "Mr. Seastrom reveals in sharp contrasts...When the actress tries to end her life because of her love for Lucien, Mr. Seastrom introduces the idea of having a group of sympathizers, some with a boquet of flowers, filling a doorway while Marianne is unconscious on her bed." Photoplay reviewed the storyline,"Marianne, as they have called the Divine Sarah is brought to Paris as a suprise present to a worldly wise mother who does not wish to openly acknowledge an eighteen year old daughter. She is gawky, untutored, ugly. Thrown upon her own resources she falls in love with a soldier. Chance introduces her to the stage. The conflict between her and her love for the stage and the man is the theme of the story. Watching Marianne make love; watching her suffer in poverty; glory in applause;rage at the unkindness of Fate-makes it well worth your while to see this picture." It continues, "How an ugly duckling becomes a great actress." It is interesting that when Photoplay reviewed the reissue of The Saga of Gosta Berling a year later, it claimed the film was a European film that proved that, with Greta Garbo, "Hollywood had turned an ugly duckling into a swan". As there are no copies of the film, I have added the entire review of The Divine Woman as it appeared in National Board of Review magazine, "Paris is the background for this romantic drama. Scorned by her pleasure loving mother, a young girl is brought up in the home of a Briton peasant. later she enters the realm of the theatre winning fame and recognition, all of which she gives up for the love of a poor peasant. The story holds the interest and the acting of the two Swedish stars, now well known in America, is excellant." The portraits of Greta Garbo published in Photoplay during the first run of The Divine Woman were taken by Ruth Harriet Louise. In an atricle entitled Love Stories, Photoplay during 1928 used a still photo from The Divine Woman that the present author was unfamiliar with as having had been published elsewhere,but added a photocaption to a still of Lars Hanson on the floor with Garbo putting her cheek next to his while nearly laying on top of him during an embrace that read, "By nature we are polygamous or polyandrous. Such love scenes between Greta Garbo and Lars Hanson are a pretty safe way of satisfying that desire to philander." There is another movie still later that only add to whether the photocaption is incorrectly, or hurriedly, used, "Because we are curious about love, because we are always seeking the perfect love affair, the screen romances of Vilma Banky and Ronald Colman have a constant fascination for us. In his Film Essays and Criticism, a valuable introduction to film, Rudolf Arnheim gives Greta Garbo only a two page "portrait", but it is from 1928 and may be more than a cursory glance, his writing, "On cat's feet, her coat pulled tightly about her and her hands folded in her lap, Greta Garbo passes censorship." Arnheim sees Greta Garbo as erotic, as an erotic object. Elevated later, to Bela Belazs, author of Theory of the Film in which she would attain, or become, Heroes, Beauty, Stars and the Case of Greta Garbo, she would "bear the the stamp of sorrow; and loneliness." Bela Belazs takes a thoughtful pause of appreciation before adding his own melancholy, "Greta Garbo's beauty is a beauty which is in opposition to the world of today." The Divine Bernhardt that was immortalized as a model for artist Alphonse Mucha exists, Adrienne Lecouvrer (An Actresse's Romance (Louis Mercanton, 1913, two reels) does not. Other than as seen advertised in magazines of the time period like Motion Picture World, the film regrettably is lost. And yet oddly, or as uncanny, Belaz features a photograph of Asta Nielsen in the film Die Ewege Natt with a caption reading, "The script-writers destroyed a growing art when they gave speech to the great mutes."
Photoplay Magazine announced, "This is Greta Garbo's last picture before she departed for Sweden" It claimed that the role created by writer John Colton had played by Garbo in Wild Orchids had been previously considered for Lillian Gish." Motion Picture Magazine listed the film as being Synchronized (Sound) while recommending the film, "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 had signed a new contract with M.G.M., one that would allow her to go on a 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.
Louise Lagertstrom of the Swedish Film Insitute titled her webpage on the career of Greta Garbo for the period 1928-1929 Superstjarna. While in Sweden, during 1928, Garbo had come across the actress Vera Schmiterlow, whom she had known well and whom she had hoped would venture to Hollywood and also while in Sweden had renewed her acquaintance with the actress Marte Hallden. Lars Saxon, who twice published Greta Garbo in his magazine Lektyr, and who corresponded with her while she had been in the United States at MGM, met her as she was travelling. It was also while in Sweden that she had first met Gösta Ekman, who greeted her by saying , 'But you're so ordinary.' Later she visited Ekman's dressing room to thank him for the use of his seat at a theatrical play that Stiller had directed when it had first began its run. Ekman was purportedly in hope of sharing the Swedish stage with her in a theater run of Grand Hotel. Mordant Hall, writing in 1929, recounts his having a purported assignation with the "Hollywood Hermit, "Soon the door of Miss Garbo's apartment was flung open and the sinuous figure of the alluring actress appreared as if from a ray of sunlight. In a low-toned voice that suited her bearing, she greeted the caller, whose eyes fell from her face to a bouquet of flowers on a table and then to the carpet. 'Won't you sit down?' she asked." he continues to describe her pink silk sweater and black velvet skirt, claiming that of all her films, A Woman of Affairs was Greta Garbo's favorite. She evidently recounted preparing for a role on the Stockholm stage and having memorized the lines and having studied the part but had later decided against appearing in the theater. "She repeated, 'Delighted to have met you."
Greta Garbo Complementing this, Lewis Stone has been quoted as having said, 'She was Garbo, and that said it all. No one has ever created such an impression.', whereas Edmund Goulding is quoted as having said, 'I don't believe that Garbo's astounding success depends on any mystery. She has movie sex appeal, if I may say so, but her success depends more on her unique ability to work and her will to achieve absolute concentration before the camera.' He added, 'For all her enormous success, she is just the same as when we worked together in Love; only perhaps a little more shy and solitary.' Garbo had been slated to film Ordeal with Lon Chaney under the direction of Marcel de Sano, it having been left unmade.What is meant to be fascinating is that after being deemed, or deigned a recluse, when it was announced that she was in a position to consider retirement, interest in Greta Garbo went to a depth that reached Greta Gustasfson and biography about the actress appeared; magazines were still interested in publishing stills Garbo had posed for in Sweden during the the film Peter and the Tramp and, after his death, were still probing into her affection for John Gilbert and Garbo's intention of marrying him in Mexico. In the 1937 article, After Twelve Years Greta Garbo Wants to Go Home to Sweden, readers in the United States discovered, "in 1936 she bought an estate outside Stockholm. Having finished Conquest she will go there to spend a few months, or many." Greta Garbo appears on the cover of the magazine quite possibly only by dint of the photo being in costume from the set of the film.
|Mordant Hall claimed to conduct an interview with Greta Garbo, during which it was attributed as her having said, "If they want me to talk, I'll talk. I'd love acting in a talking picture when they are better, but the ones I've seen are awful. It's no fun to look at a shadow and somewhere out of the theatre a voice is coming." Writing in 1929, the author added, "There is no longer any Swedish coterie in hollywood, for Victor Seastrom is no longer there. Lars Hanson is back in his native land, to which lesser lights have flown." After returning to Sweden in hope that it was there that his daughters would be raised, Sjostrom appeared with Lars Hanson and Karin Molander in a short 1931 beauty contesst film, Froken, Ni linkar Greta Garbo, where Eivor Nordstrom was chosen to be most like Greta Garbo. Its photographer was Ake Dahlquist. With Per-Axel Branner for an assistant director and actress Karin Granberg in the first film in which sshe was to appear,Juilius Jaenzon photographed and directed the fil Ulla, My Ulla, during 1930, while Victor Sjostrom returned to the screen with Brokiga Blad, in which he cast Lili Ziedner. John W. Brunius directed two films during 1930, The Doctor's Secret (Docktorns Hemlighet) and The Two of Us (Vi Tva), in which Edvin Adolphson appeared as an actor with Margit Manstad, Marta Ekstrom and Anna-Lisa Froberg, the film having been the first in which the actress was to appear. Swedish cinematographer Harald Berglund in 1930 began filming under the direction of Ragnar Ring on the film Lyckobreven. Danish film director George Schneevoigt continued the beginning of early Danish sound film the following year with the film Pastor of Vejlby (Praesten i Vejlby). The first Norwegian sound film, The Big Chirstening (Den store Barnedapen) was also the first film directed by Tancred Ibsen.
Two actors that have now become legendary for their having worked together with Sjöström in his film The Wind (eight reels), silent film actress Lillian Gish and Montague Love, were teamed together for the early sound film His Double Life, under the direction of Arthur Hopkins. Two actors that were paired together after the beginning of the use of sound in film were Nils Asther and Fay Wray, their appearing in Madame Spy, directed by Karl Fruend in 1934.
|Photoplay in 1930 noted, "At the end of every picture Greta Garbo gives an entire day to new portraits. She takes it seriously...She will be photographed on in the only in the clothes she wears in her pictures...One Garbo belongs to the public, the other is a private individual. To keep in the sustained mood she likes to have sad music played on the phonograph. To end the silent era two months before Greta Garbo's last silent film, The Kiss (Jacques Feyder), Clarence Sinclair Bull became her gallery photographer. Author Mark A. Viera writes, 'She liked him because, like Clarence Brown, he spoke softly, if at all.' When Geocites closed, the still photographs scanned from the orginal negatives that Mr. Vieira sent via yahoo e-mail to the present author, and the two letters he wrote were transferred to my google blog. They include a still photograph of Greta Garbo in The Kiss left over from his editorial decision. Apparently he owned more photographs than he needed to publish and sent the unused ones to me. Please accept that I may have been the author to introduce the photos to a Swedish readership, years after they were unearthed. As the reader will notice, the photo used on the cover of Mr. Vieira's was sent to without the title Cinematic Legacy lettering. One published photograph taken by Clarence S. Bull found by the present author was in an issue of International Photographer from 1931, a portrait of camerman John W. Boyle, who had only just then returned from Scandinavia filming a "multi-color film" in Denmark and who would make Sweden, Land of the Viking, a travel newsreel shot on color film stock. Before his having met Greta Garbo, the photography of Clarence Sinclair Bull had been published in periodicals under the name Clarence S. Bull. During 1922, Picture-Play magazine ran his portraits of Helen Chadwick and Claire Windsor; in 1923 his portraits of Mae Busch and Mabel Ballin. His portrait of Colleen Moore had appeared in Screenland Magazine in 1922.
Wrting for Photoplay in 1930, Katherine Albert described Greta Garbo, "The screen Garbo is somebody else, a vague,exotic mystery woman. It is not true that the publicity department has built up a Garbo myth, but it is true that the busy press agents at Metro-Goldwyn Mayer have..and the fact that she does not grant interviews and that she draws within herself and keeps secluded is as good as sending a lion around the world. However, Garbo IS mysterious." Trying to delineate the shadow accurately with factual biography, the author added, "Now the great Garbo walks on the set. She is always on time." In 1930 Katherine Albert also penned the article, Is Jack Gilbert Through? for Photoplay Magazine. She outlined Jack Gilbert's power of script approval, notifying his audiences that his first sound film, Redemption, had been "shelved by the studio" and that she wondered if it would ever be shown in theaters. The article reviewed his performance as having been "nervous", "too highkeyed" and "self-conscious". In the same issue, Photoplay released stills from Anna Christie. "This Clarence Brown filming of the O'Neil play for M-G-M is eagerly awaited by garbo fans everywhere...Garbo's first talkie is bound to be one of the sensations of the next few months in the picture world."
"The Great Garbo talks- and remains great! A faultlessly directed picture with superb characterizations by Garbo, Charles Bickford, Marie Dressler and George Marion." - Photoplay
"The Garbo Voice. What will it sound like? The whole world waits to hear the Swedish enchantress for the first time in "Anna Christie" -Picture Play
Garbo talar!!was the title of the page authored by Louise Lagertstrom of the Swedish Film Institute on Greta Garbo having starred in her first sound film in the United States. George Marion, who starred with Greta Garbo in the film, had also played the same role, that of Anna's father Kris, in Thomas Ince's earlier silent version, starring Silent Film actress Blanche Sweet. In addition to his having filmed Anna Christie, in 1929 Greta Garbo photographer William Daniels was cinematographer to the films Their Own Desire and Wise Girls (Kempy (eleven reels), both directed by E. M. Hopper. Other romances that actor Charles Bickford had appeared in before filming with Greta Garbo were to include South Sea Rose and Dynamite; to end the silent era he had co-authored the play The Cyclone Lover. Film historian and theorist Leo Braudy has written, "The lighting that William Daniels created for Garbo's early silent films rendered her more erotic than any spoken dialouge." That is not to say that that is the extent of his contribution to film history; Daniels had been trained on several of Von Strohiem's important films, beginning with Blind Husbands in 1919 and continued in Hollywood passed the 1939 film Ninotchka untill 1970.
Greta Garbo Postscript
"There are many things in your heart you can never tell to another person. They are you. Your joys and sorrows- and you can never, never tell them. It is not right that you should tell them. You cheapen yourself, the inside of yourself when you tell them" Silent Film actress Greta Garbo, Photoplay Magazine
While waiting for the release of Anna Christie, Picture Play magazine included a portrait of Greta Garbo taken by Clarence Sinclair Bull. Edwin Schallert wrote, "Greta Garbo has demanded her private life. She has gone to the extreme even exacting it within the studio itself...Garbo has pursued the same phantom. The ordinary news gatherer, and even a majority of the extraordinary, are not permitted on her set. It is told that once even some of Swedish countrymen of the press came to visit her and were ritzed, or felt they were." With the superlative photography of Clarence Sinclair Bull, Greta Garbo inherited Photoplay Magazine author Katherine Albert, who summarized her writing during 1931 by herself paraphrasing her "I'm bored with Garbo", her looking for and at sensation differently with the articles "Did Brown and Garbo Fight" and "Exploding the Garbo Myth", the former concerned with "the carefully guarded, walled in stage where Greta Garbo was starring in Inspiration, the latter making an event of Greta Garbo objecting to a line of dialog on the set of the film Romance including a photo-caption that read, "The writer, who knows her, says there is no mystery about" After explaining how successful, artisticly, the work of Clarence Brown and Greta Garbo had been, it asks what had happenned during the film Inspiration, "The piece is an adaption of Sappho. The book is now old-fashioned. So is the play. A new script had to be written and neither Garbo nor Brown were entirely satisfied, but there was nothing to do but experiment on the set and se how it read. In order to get anything out of it they must rehearse and rehearse and change and change. That's where the trouble began. Garbo would not rehearse."
Photoplay magazine qualified iteslf in 1935 by quoting its own prediction in its August 1930 issue that had announced, "There is quite a definite rumor that Garbo's next picture will be 'Camille', by telling its readers that it would again print the exact same thing. Interest in Greta Garbo certainly continued as silent film was being shelved, shelved in fact almost in its entirety, and the interest continued for Ruth Biery, who published the article The Garbo Jinx on Her Leading Men in Photoplay Magazine during 1932. The photo-caption read, "They were overshadowed by the Garbo jinx" and it included a list of Greta Garbo's leading men, "Garbo has proved to be an absolute jinx to eleven of the twelve men who have been her screen loves in the sixteen single starring pictures she has made since she came to this country. Look down the list of Garbo's leading men. Recall what happenned..." She included Richardo Cortez, Antonio Moreno, John Gilbert, Lars Hanson (who returned to Sweden), Conrad Nagel, Nils Asther, Gavin Gordon and then the author departs into Robert Montgomery "And Clark Gable. You saw him at his worst in 'Susan Lenox.'" Journalist Ruth Biery also brought Greta Garbo another Photoplay Cover; during 1932 Biery, who Garbo may apparently have declined to speak with, added another facet to the extra-textural discourse that was keeping the off-screen Greta Garbo secretive, enigmatic, "She spent many hours giving me the material. I was fascinated by her sincerity, her warm earthly qualities; her utter lack of affectation. After my story was printed, she said to me, 'I do not like your story. I do not like to see my soul bare upon paper." Beiry's answer was seems as though it is in her opinion, a bombshell- Hollywood had not been fair to Greta Garbo. She profiled four men whom she thought had been kind to her, Stiller, Lon Chaney, Jack Gilbert. Jack Gilbert is credited as have kept her in the limelight but out of public view, "He told her not to pose for pictures, which she did not understand and did not like, not to talk to interviewers if it made her nervous." Motion Picture magazine during the release of Susan Lennox, Her Rise and Fall was explicit; it published a portrait of Garbo by Clarence Sinclair Bull with the caption "The One- and Only" Underneath read: "There's only one gown in the world like this, just as there is only one Greta Garbo. It was designed by Adrian." Photoplay journalist Amelia Cummings in 1933 queried "Is the Garbo Rage Over?" with the subtitle, "Can the popularity that the world is eagerly curious about be on the wane?" During 1932 it was well within the knowledge of "all the more studious Garbo fanatics" (Picture Play Magazine) that Greta Garbo was on screen with Clark Gable, "Thier attraction for each other is understandable, their antagonism predestined, and their desperate reunion at the end of the picture holds no hope of tranquility." Picture Play magazine thought highly of Garbo, adding, "Nor does she triumph in spite of her picture. It is strong, entirely worthy of her.."
To begin My Hollywood Diary- the last work of Edgar Wallace, his wife explains that Wallace wrote his letters in diary form, her publishing those from 1932. Representative of the time period, while discussing his having had dinner with Evelyn Brent and Lowell Sherman, who had brought up the film Mata Hari, Wallace wrote, "By the way, all Hollywood is agog as to whether Greta Garbo will turn up at her premiere. Most people think she won't." He includes a portrait of Garbo captioned merely with "Metro Goldwyn Mayer", and related that people in Hollywood refer to Greta Garbo only as Garbo. He later added, "On Saturday night, I forgot to tell you, I met a Mrs. Glazier, who is a great friend of Greta Garbo's. Greta's reticence is not pose. She told me alot about her. She was an assistant in a barber shop- used to mix the lather- then went into a little hat, where Tiller (Stiller?), the producer met her." Paul Rotha hesitates. In his second quickly penned masterwork on the advent of the new art form of sound film, Celluloid Today, which had followed on the heels of Film Till Now, the film critic, while lamenting the death of silent film director F.W. Murnau, appraises the need for suitable roles for Greta Garbo, by then one of the greatest actresses, after having had been being paired with Gilbert, of the silent era. He calmly includes the film Anna Christie among a trio of films that accordingly are brilliant for the visual expression in their opening scene, but lapse into pure dialogue insufficient to explain character.
Writer Louise Lagterstrom in fact characterized the successful transition on the part of Greta Garbo that marked her continuing from a silent actress to a star of talking pictures by titling her webpage for the Swedish Film Institute "Nya roller". Journalist Ralph Wheelwritght reviewed the film Mata Hari for Photoplay magazine, "Announcements of the co-starring assingment for Mata Hari sounded signal guns for rumors, conjecture and prognostication of all description..Those who have seen Miss Garbo about the lot during the making of the picture commented upon the gorgeousness of her costume, her unruffled contentment." The author mentions that her co-star had only met Greta Garbo socially on one or two occaisions, "On her dressing room table that morning, Garbo found a huge mound of pink roses." He had sent a card reading, "I hope that the world will be as thrilled to see Mata Hari as I am to work with her- Ramon Novarro". Katherine Albert later that year outdid herself with the 1932 article, "How Garbo's Fear of People Started". Cal York was needed for the next glance at Greta Garbo, his quickly dismissing the opinion that she and Barrymore could not work together. "John Barrymore and Greta Garbo instantly warmed to each other...She worked as never before studio associates say. No rehearsal was too arduous; no camera angle too difficult to figure out." During 1932 Picture Play magazine included another portrait from Clarence Sinclair Bull- it began by using the word Dazzling in huge letters beneath a still from the yet to be released Mata Hari, which was followed by the portrait by Clarence Sinclair Bull with the phrase "Good News" in large letters, beside which was the caption, "Oh calm these fears, ye fans whose numbers comprise an army greater than the world has ever known- Greta Garbo is not retiring from the screen." It followed that with another movie still beneath which were the words "At Last!" in large letters with the caption, "Garbo finds a happy ending in As You Desire Me. Of the film Mata Hari it had held, "Certainly it is streching a point say that the picture frequently drags, that the story of a female spy is shallow fiction." Fritiof Billquist, the author of Garbo, A Biography was in Sweden during 1932, starring with Gun Holmquist in the film Landskamp, directed by Gunnar Skoglund. During 1933 Motion Picture magazine left the explanation of the mystery of Greta Garbo to journalist Sven Nordstrom, who penned the article Garbo- Now it Can Be Told,"her desire to go on stage is intense...Garbo not only wants to go on stage; she wants to play the most exacting roles ever created- roles written by the dour, morbid, compelling Henrik Ibsen. She would like to interpret every drama, every tragedy he wrote...After ibsen, the playwright whose drama most appeals to her is August Strindberg, also a Scandinavian, also a realist. She would like to do his play The Red Room.
|The whereabouts of Greta Garbo was in most ways far from being kept as secret during 1936; according to Photplay Magazine, Garbo owned a villa in Nyokoping, Sweden and was celebrating her thirtieth birthday. During 1937 it confidently mentioned, "Garbo will make another picture instead of a trip to Sweden". The Swedish Film Institute (Svenska Filminstitutet), which provides an extensive cataloging of the history of Swedish silent film from its earliest beginnings to present, is thorough in its filmography of Greta Garbo, thorough enough to list her having been included in the film The Romance of Celluloid (Celluloidens romantik), made in 1937. Elza Schallert of Motion Picture Magazine during 1937 contributed the article "With Thalberg Gone, Will Garbo Retire?" Her reasoning began with the death of Thalberg, "Her latest production of Camille was started by him, although carried to completion by others." Her review of the film included, "When Camille is released, audiences will behold a Garbo more beautiful than at any time during her career. And they will see a Garbo so frail that breathing itself will appear an effort." It was a year in which during which Photoplay was still providing biographical data on the elusive Garbo, "She phoned to the Grove and asked for the maitre d'hotel...Garbo herself flung the door open to his knock. She was evidently "in the pink"...Since the day Stiller left Hollywood, heart broken by his failure, Garbo never revisited Coconut Grove. Ruth Waterbury was so thrilled with her performance that while praising the actress's performance of death scenes in Camille (Kameliadamen, George Cukor, 1937) suggested that Greta Garbo star in "Marie Anoinette, "if Shearer decides not to make it." A photocaption in the article reads, "Garbo, entering her eleventh year as a star. She had to die- to live more glamourously than ever." It announced that she would soon appear in the film Countess Walewska wearing a new type of jockey cap, which would have a "deep long bill hanging down in front." Warner Oland returned to Stockholm in 1938 and, just as those who had known Mauritz Stiller in the United States had heard the news of his death, Oland passed away in Scandinavia before finishing the film Charlie Chan at Ringside