Alone (28 page)
BIBLIOGRAPHY
1. Greta Garbo
Bainbridge, John.
Garbo.
New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1971.
This is probably the best biography published during its subject’s lifetime, updated twice by the author.
Cahill, Marie.
Greta Garbo: A Hollywood Portrait.
New York: Smithmark, 1992.
Basically a picture book, formatted for the coffee table. Photos tell the truest story of Garbo’s life on film, and the text, although brief, is informative and accurate.
Conway, Michael, McGregor, Dion, and Ricci, Mark.
The Complete Films of Greta Garbo.
Secaucus, New Jersey: The Citadel Press, 1991.
The Citadel series is the Bible of professional information, actor by actor, and this volume is no exception. Parker Tyler’s thumbnail biography and analysis of Garbo’s screen persona is a valuable addition to this exhaustive filmography since its first appearance in 1968.
Gish, Lillian.
Dorothy and Lillian Gish.
New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1973.
Lillian Gish, who was present when the first flicker of light appeared on the silver screen, was an accomplished wordsmith (particularly for a silent-screen star!) and a keen observer of the motion-picture industry throughout its first eighty years. This book shed some light on John Gilbert’s appearance in
La Boheme,
whose set he abandoned to attend his infamous wedding-that-never-was with Garbo.
Horan, Gray. “Greta Garbo: The Legendary Star’s Secret Garden in New York.” Los Angeles:
Architectural Digest,
April 1992.
Architectural Digest’s
“Hollywood at Home” issue, recently reinstated as a recurring feature, is a treasury of personal and professional information on contemporary and classic movie icons. Horan’s article, the first exhaustive piece to appear following Garbo’s death in 1991, provides details of her later years hitherto kept from the public by the small circle of loyal intimates with whom she shared it. The cover story coincided with Sotheby’s auction of personal items from her fabulous estate.
Swenson, Karen.
Greta Garbo: A Life Apart.
New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1997.
This is the first major posthumous biography, and the best to date. Swenson takes an unblinking look at the Swedish Sphinx from life to death and beyond, closely examining rumors regarding her sexual preferences, exploding myths, and casting doubt on cherished portions of her legend, while avoiding the salaciousness and contempt for her subject that usually travel hand in hand with so frank a book.
Uncredited. “Garbo’s Letters Missing.” Press release, December 11, 2005.
Three inches of tantalizing newspaper coverage of the discovery that two letters and two postcards written by Garbo to her friend, Vera Schmiterlöw, had been removed from the Swedish Military Archives and not returned. Despite an alternative development written into this book, the correspondence remains missing and the circumstances of its disappearance are unknown.
**
2. General
Anderson, Brett. Photographed by Phillip Ennis.
Theo Kalomirakis’ Private Theaters.
New York: Abrams, 1997.
A sumptuous picture book, with an extensive text, showcasing the world’s premiere designer of high-end home theaters for the Matthew Rankins among us who can afford them. Exquisite reproductions of Golden Age picture palaces scaled down for the manse (one diminution includes a miniature shopping mall annex complete with a well-stocked jewelry store and a dealership displaying classic cars), these salivary treasures are lovingly presented in full color, closely detailed. (Yes, “Theo Kalomirakis” does look like “Leo Kalishnikov” when you squint.)
Castle, Steven. Photographed by Phillip Ennis.
Great Escapes: New Designs for Home Theaters by Theo Kalomirakis.
New York: Abrams, 2003.
The sequel. If The Oracle winds up looking half as good as the basement haven of best-selling horror novelist Dean Koontz (who furnishes the introduction), Valentino will be ecstatic— and in debt for the rest of his life.
Corey, Melinda, and Ochoa, George.
The Dictionary of Film Quotations.
New York: Three Rivers, 1995.
This is a quick, entertaining celebration of the terse wit and wisdom of movie dialogue, although at 413 pages of text it’s necessarily less extensive than the Nowlands’ 741-page (not counting the index)
“We’ll Always Have Paris,”
about which more anon. The editors’ personal screening of every film cited, as diverting and enjoyable a task as it must have been, spares the harried researcher thousands of hours of time and effort.
Doherty, Thomas.
Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema 1930-1934.
New York: Columbia, 1999.
There was a code of decency prior to 1934, but the enforcers were mostly looking the other way while the first generation of talking-picture artists forged a subversive response to the accepted mores of the Great Depression. This one is a real eye-opener to those who believe the cinema didn’t lose its innocence until the 1960s.
Halliwell, Leslie.
The Filmgoer’s Companion.
New York: Avon, 1977.
Halliwell was a terminal curmudgeon, but his annual film guides were invaluable (Leonard Maltin’s are better known, but he leaves out the names of studios), and remain so under the direction of his successors. This encyclopedic study of movies belongs on the shelf of anyone who considers himself a cineaste. It first appeared in 1965, and by this edition had been updated five times.
LaSalle, Mick.
Complicated Women: Sex and Power in Pre-Code Hollywood.
New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000.
How those jazz babies did carry on. LaSalle makes the point that the 1934 crackdown froze the revolutionary development of film for more than thirty years, and that if it had not taken place, open political dissent, graphic sex, and full nudity would have reached the screen by the end of the 1930s.
LaSalle, Mick.
Dangerous Men: Pre-Code Hollywood and the Birth of the Modern Man.
New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2002.
The inevitable sequel, but freestanding and just as progressive in its vision. Clark Gable’s 1939 Rhett Butler was a wuss compared to the characters he played just as heroically years earlier. LaSalle states that mature males in our time are hesitant to call themselves men, with all that entails, and enforces his claim.
Nowlan, Robert A., and Nowlan, Gwendolyn W.
“We’ll Always Have Paris”: The Definitive Guide to Great Lines from the Movies.
New York: HarperPerennial, 1995.
Unlike more recent books that concentrate on lines from films made since the collapse of the studio system, this monster volume squeezes most of the twentieth century for the best and most memorable passages, and credits them to screenwriters rather than to the actors who spoke them, a revelation to moviegoers who think Bruce Willis is witty.
Casablanca
alone is cited forty-seven times, and each example is superior to Quentin Tarantino’s entire output. (“Burger Royale,” indeed!)
Wilhelm, Elliot.
Videohound’s World Cinema.
Detroit: Visible Ink, 1999.
The
Videohound
franchise is fast overtaking Maltin and Halliwell. Most film guides display native prejudice for the USA and the U.K. Wilhelm provides a balanced view of every civilized (and some not so) country’s contribution to the moving image.
(See “Closing Credits” in
Frames,
the first Valentino novel, for more recommendations of value to this series.)
**
FILMOGRAPHY
1. Greta Garbo
The following is an abridged list of Garbo’s landmark films, all currently available on DVD:
Torrent.
Directed by Monta Bell, starring Ricardo Cortez, Greta Garbo, Gertrude Olmstead, Edward Connelly, Lucien Littlefield, Martha Mattox, Lucy Beaumont, Tully Marshall, Mack Swain, Arthur Edmund Carew, Lillian Leighton, and Mario Carillo. MGM, 1926.
Meddling parents break up an unsuitable romance between the classes, with results that satisfy no one.
This was Garbo’s first American film, hence her billing beneath Ricardo Cortez (né Jake Krantz). He was recruited in the 1920s in a failed attempt to fill the Latin-lover gap left by the death of Rudolph Valentino. If Cortez is remembered at all today, it’s as the first Sam Spade in the 1931 version of Dashiell Hammett’s
The Maltese Falcon.
He was more effective than Warren William in
Satan Met a Lady,
the 1936 remake, but the role will always belong to Humphrey Bogart in the third adaptation in 1941. Considering how thoroughly he was upstaged, charity demands we single Cortez out as Garbo’s first Hollywood leading man, and one of the few not to sport a silly moustache.
William H. Daniels, whose career spanned
Foolish Wives
(1922) and
The Maltese Bippy
(1969), photographed Garbo here the first of many times, discovering the ineffable quality that projected her far beyond the footlights; none of the studio brass took much notice of her until the rushes. (Daniels also filmed Erich von Stroheim’s notorious
Greed;
see
Frames.)
The Temptress.
Directed by Fred Niblo, starring Greta Garbo, Antonio Moreno, Marc MacDermott, Lionel Barrymore, Armand Kaliz, Roy DArcy, Alys Murrell, Steve Clemento, Roy Coulson, Robert Anderson, Francis MacDonald, Hector V. Sarno, Virginia Brown Faire, and Inez Gomez. MGM, 1926.
Garbo’s vamps were hard on Latin types. Having fallen in love with her at a masquerade ball, and learning she’s married, Moreno flees her charms all the way to Argentina. She follows him there and takes a swipe at Barrymore, who kills a friend in a duel over her. Years later, strolling Paris with Faire, his new fiancée, Moreno encounters Garbo, who’s become a prostitute and cannot recall him from among the many men she’s known.
The Swedish Sphinx was never more luminous, and most of the men who saw the film probably sympathized with Moreno’s tragic attraction to her. Roy DArcy, as the villainous Manos Duras, was extremely effective, and one wonders whether she’d have been able to manipulate him as easily as she had most of the rest of the male cast. It’s a stirring film, brilliantly photographed by Tony Gaudio. This was to be Garbo’s first Hollywood collaboration with Mauritz Stiller, her mentor and presumably her lover, but his inability to work within the strictures of the studio system got him replaced by Niblo, who also directed the stunningly successful
Ben-Hur
in 1925.
Flesh and the Devil.
Directed by Clarence Brown, starring John Gilbert, Greta Garbo, Lars Hanson, Barbara Kent, William Orlamond, George Fawcett, Eugenie Besserer, Marc MacDermott, Marcelle Corday. MGM, 1926.
Married again, Garbo has an affair (again), this time with Gilbert, who is forced to kill her titled husband in a duel. Once again the New World embraces a shattered lover, leaving Garbo to marry Hanson, Gilbert’s best friend. Upon returning to Austria, Garbo sets her cap a second time for Gilbert, who is challenged by Hanson to yet another duel. Garbo sees the error of her ways and sets off across a frozen river to prevent bloodshed; she falls through the ice and drowns. Gilbert wounds Hanson, who recovers, and the friendship is reinstated.
Garbo’s love scenes with Gilbert burned up the screen, as well they might have. They fell in love for real on the set, precipitating the first of many celebrated on-again, off-again affairs that have become as endemic to Hollywood as sports cars and divorce.
This was the last time Garbo received less than top billing. By the time the pair were reunited on screen in
Love
(1927), a bowdlerized adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s
Anna Karenina,
Gilbert’s name had slipped to the second spot.
Anna Christie.
Directed by Clarence Brown, starring Greta Garbo, Charles Bickford, George F. Marion, Marie Dressier, James T. Mack, and Lee Phelps. MGM, 1930.
Garbo, having fled the cruel family in whose care her seaman father left her, quits the life of a prostitute to live with her father. After saving Bickford, a young sailor, from drowning during a storm, she falls in love with him, only to be abandoned by him when he learns of her past. He returns, himself a man far from perfect, to beg for forgiveness and propose marriage. She accepts.
This adaptation of a play by Eugene O’Neill, who had run afoul of the censors in New York during the so-called Roaring Twenties, was a dangerous choice for Garbo’s debut in a talking film. No one could be sure that audiences would accept her in such a sordid role, let alone embrace her deep voice and strong accent. Her entrance, dog-tired in dowdy clothes she might have slept in, is so unglamorous as to draw all the drab details from the seedy waterfront bar where most of the action—such as it is—takes place. No simple drink order was ever anticipated so breathlessly, or celebrated with so much relief; that throaty contralto would eventually pave the way to stardom for Tallulah Bankhead, Lauren Bacall, and Kathleen Turner—and assure the livelihoods of a host of falsetto-challenged female impersonators. Garbo herself preferred the German-language version of the film she starred in later that year, and thought Marie Dressier, cast as father Marion’s slatternly former mistress, stole the one shot in English.
