Where Greta Garbo's films came from, 1930-1941

Today's blog post continues a series on Greta Garbo's films. 

In the video clip above, which features Robert Montgomery and Greta Garbo in "Inspiration" (1931), Garbo's accent reminds me of the Russian Mafia voice Kate Mulgrew used for Red Reznikov in "Orange Is the New Black."

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This week we're continuing with a blog series on Greta Garbo's movies. Last time we looked at the sources for the silent films that Garbo made in the 1920s. This week we've moved on to the talkies, starting with "Anna Christie," which began as a play by Eugene O'Neill. 

Positive reception of "Anna Christie" signaled how smoothly Garbo had moved from silent pictures to sound films. This 1930 movie is famous for the ad campaign "Garbo Talks," a phrase which became the title of a 1984 cult comedy.

The 1984 comedy "Garbo Talks" starred Ron Silver, Carrie Fisher, Harvey Fierstein, and (in one of my favorites of her many roles), Anne Bancroft. 

The next Garbo film to be released was "Romance," which came from a play by Edward Sheldon. I don't know about you, but from this close-up of Sheldon's smirking face, I would not have left him alone with my teenage daughter or my checkbook. 

I doubt that "Inspiration" makes the list of anybody's favorite Garbo films, but personally, I think she's pretty good in it. The script came from a 19th century play by French author Alphonse Daudet. Daudet was an interesting person -- doesn't he look interesting?   I'm including three images of Daudet here -- two photographs and a painted portrait. The proportions of the  painting make it look as though Daudet was a Little Person or as though this was meant to be a caricature, but I don't think it was meant that way. 

Daudet's novel was titled Sappho (Sapho in French). However,  it's not lesbian-themed. Daudet was going for the Greek muse/poet concept, with the main character drifting from one love affair to the next, one art gallery or literary salon to the next. 

The movie poster below shows us that the Hollywood version of Daudet's Sappho is now "Inspiration," and also that it's now focused on a romance between a young man and a slightly older, worldly woman. Garbo's hair doesn't look like that in the actual film, though. 

Next up, we have "Susan Lenox, Her Fall and Rise," based on the novel of the same name by David Graham Phillips. Phillips was a journalist as well as a novelist; his investigative journalism into the doings of Standard Oil inspired the term "muckraking." In this photo, I think the writer looks a bit like Matt Damon, only with center-parted hair.  

[In a future post, I'll be writing more about Phillips, who died directly because of some fiction he wrote (not Susan Lenox).  The short version is that a crazed concert violionist harbored the delusion that a character in the book was based on his sister, and he killed Phillips.]

Next film! The photogenic woman below is Vicki Baum, the German author of Grand Hotel. The success of the movie made Baum a well-known public figure in Europe, and her image was in magazine ads for cigarettes and other products. 

In preparation for this post, this week I discovered that Baum also wrote a memoir, It Was All Quite Different. I also discovered that second-hand copies of the book start at fifty bucks. Mercifully I was able to request a copy from the library's statewide network. 

"Grand Hotel" is an MGM showpiece, filled with the studio's biggest stars. Garbo plays a world-famous ballerina who is going through a bad patch. While she never said "I vant to be alone" in a sepulchral tone,  in "Grand Hotel," her character, weary of public life, does say "I just want to be alone."

The next Garbo movie, and where it came from. . .

Here's Italian novelist and playwright Luigi Pirandello (below). He looks a bit like Jean-Luc Picard's evil twin, right? What's that? And a bit like Satan's grandfather, you say? I agree. His family ran a sulfur mine and Luigi supported the Fascists in Italy so make what you will of his character and life.

Piranello's play  "Come Tu Mi Vuoi" ("How You Love Me") was adapted for the screen with the new title "As You Desire Me." And then of course his publishers went back and re-titled the play itself as a movie tie-in. 

Ahh. . .   It's wonderful to get, at last, to one of Greta Garbo's best-loved films, "Queen Christina." This flick dresses up our star in a lot of costumes. 

"Queen Christina" is of course a bio-pic, based on a historic ruler of Greta Garbo's birthplace, Sweden. Here's one portrait of the historic queen:

"Queen Christina" is the movie that showed people in show business that Garbo had become a true Hollywood star. The best screenwriting talent was now gathered in teams to work on her film scripts. One of the talented writers was this woman. 

Salka Viertal and Garbo had been friends (gossips tried to make it more, but it wasn't)  since they appeared in the German-language version of "Anna Christie," the sound film at the top of the list in today's post. 

In the English-language version, it was Canadian character actress Marie Dressler (later an Academy Award winner!) who played Marthy, who Anna meets in the famous bar-room scene at the beginning of the story. 

Here's Salka Viertal in the role of Marthy in the German-language version of "Anna Christie."

As we'll see later in this post, "Queen Christina" was not the only Garbo film to which Viertal made contributions to the script. Viertal (who incidentally was Deborah Kerr's mother-in-law) is the subject of a biography centering on the actress/screenwriter's role in building a community for European exiles in Hollywood.

Salka Viartal shared the "Queen Christina" story credit with a screenwriter named Margaret P. Levino, about whom I could find out little besides that Levino was also credited with the screenplay for the Kay Francis film "Confession."

In addition to Viertal and Levino, there are a few other writers who are credited for work on "Queen Christina." One is Ben Hecht, perhaps best known for co-writing "His Girl Friday."

And some of the dialogue for "Queen Christina" was by the talented screenwriter  S. N. Behrman, whose name we'll see later in this post. 

And last, we have one more writer, or possibly two more writers. 

H. M. Harwood (Harold Marsh Duke) was a playwright with other screenwriting credits, including the 1934 motion picture "The Iron Duke."

Poster for "The Iron Duke"

Harwood often wrote in tandem with his wife, F. Tennyson Jesse, author of many works of nonfiction and fiction, including Moonraker, or A Female Pirate and Her Friends. 

I'm not sure whether Jesse contributed specifically to "Queen Christina." I do know that she wrote mysteries under a charming pen name derived from her unusual first name, Wynifried: Fryniwyd Tennyson Jesse, aka F. Tennyson Jesse, aka Fryn.  

With all these writers, one would expect "Queen Christina" to be a great picture, and oh, it is. 

And now, we're back to films which came from novels. In this case, The Painted Veil by W. Sopmerset Maugham. This is my personal copy. 

The next Garbo release was one of two movies named for characters with "Anna" as a first name. We looked at "Anna Christie" at the beginning of this week's post, and now we are ready for "Anna Karenina," which we actually sourced last week. It's from a novel by Tolstoy, and we talked about it previously because  Garbo had made a silent version, with some story changes, called "Love."

So we'll move on to Camille," a romance pairing Garbo with Robert Taylor. The film is based on a novel by Alexandre Duman, who wrote The Three Musketeers. Here he is. 

That was fun. Hee hee. All right, that's the photo of Garbo is her swashbuckler outfit from "Queen Christina." Now, for real, here's Alexandre Dumas. 

Hollywood turned The Lady of the Camellias into "Camille."  No matter the title, when the main character has consumption (tuberculosis), things aren't going to end well. 

While we're thinking about "Camille":  One of my favorite movie-tribute-to-another-movie characterizations is Geraldine Chaplin's role in Robert Altman's 1970s film "Welcome to L.A."  Chaplin plays an unhappy woman who expresses her sadness by hiring a car and then sitting in the back, coughing in a ladylike fashion into a lace handkerchief like Greta Garbo in "Camille."

After "Camille," came another one-word movie title: "Conquest" (1937).  The film offers one of Garbo's biographical roles,  this time playing Maria Walewska, a Polish Countess who allows herself to be maneuvered into Napoleon's life in order to protect her nation from the conqueror's army. 

The costumes, makeup, and hair in this motion picture are pretty bad. Charles Boyer, who plays Napoleon, has a large pointed forelock of hair. Garbo's role calls for her to have ringlets around her face. Do we need to say more about "Conquest"? No? Then we'll look at the film poster and move on. 

And here we are at what Google tells me is Greta Garbo's most popular film. I believe this, as "Ninotchka" is my favorite Garbo role (though I hold "Grand Hotel," taken as a whole, closest to my heart). 

As with "Queen Christina," the much-beloved movie "Ninotchka" (later remade with Cyd Charisse and Fred Astaire as the musical "Silk Stockings") is the product of a team of talented screenwriters.  Melchior Lengyel, who got lead credit, did some other wonderful flicks, including the original "To Be or Not To Be" starring Jack Benny and Carole Lombard. 

Langyel wrote the original story for "Ninotcha," and then three other people collaborated on the screenplay. The best-known of the three is star Hollywood director Billy Wilder. If you've seen the scenes in "Ninotchka" with the three Soviet representatives in the hotel suite, you know Billy Wilder, who directed both "Some Like It Hot" and "The Seven-Year Itch," had a hand in creating those comedic  moments. 

Charles Brackett, a frequent collaborator with Billy Wilder, wrote the charming Barbara Stanwyck made with Gary Cooper, "Ball of Fire." I'm sure some of the best lines in "Ninotchka" came from Brackett's typewriter. He continued writing scripts till 1959's "Journey to the Center of the Earth," then he moved into the role of film producer. 

The second of the three was Walter Reisch, and this is him. All I really know about Reisch is that he was from Vienna, and that he wrote the script for "Gaslight." That's plenty right there, isn't it?

The talented writing team of Lengyel plus Wilder plus Brackett plus Reisch brought us. . .

"The Picture That Kids the Commissars!"

And here we are at the last movie Greta Garbo made before she retired, the critical and box office failture "Two-Faced Woman." Just to start with, the concept of one actress playing two very different sisters can work (Bette Davis did it) but perhaps not in a comedy where the concept gets old fast. 

Speaking of getting old, The Men Who Made Movies were worried that Great Garbo seemed too old and too serious for a yonger movie-going audience. (This after a film in which Garbo is famous for breaking into peals of laughter when her love interest falls off a chair.) But "Two-Faced Woman" came out in 1941, and Garbo was born in 1905. She was 36, which in Hollywood Actress Years is 56, if not 66. 

So Garbo's hair was wwept back and had little white flowers pinned on either side of it, and she was filmed doing the rhumba. The producers wanted the Swedish movie star to seem less foreign, less serious, and less old.

S. N. Behrman and Salka Viertel, who had helped write "Queen Christina" (You remember them, right?), were recruited to write "Two-Faced Woman," along with veteran screenwriter George Oppenheimer. Here he is. 

Alas, no amount of screenwriting talent could save this studio misfire, which was also plagued by censorship issues with the Catholic Church, over Garbo's "unwifely" attitude and her film husband's willingness to flirt with his wife, who he knows is pretending to be her own sister.  And it's possible that the censors knew that co-writer George Oppenheimer was gay and had had a romance with future gay-rights pioneer Harry Hay, who would go on to found the Mattachine Society. So the censors hated the film, and so did the critics, and there were lots of empty seats in movie theaters. 

This is the tagline for the "Two-Faced Woman" trailer. It appears just after Garbo's character declares, through clenched teeth and a weird forced smile, "I love men!!"

It would have been nice to have had Garbo's film career end on the high note of "Ninotchka," but on the other hand, in her last movie we do get to see Garbo do all the active stuff she loved, including swim and ski. 

Notes:  

1.  Gene Markey, a screenwriter who also had a distinguished military career in both world wars, contributed dialogue to a few Garbo films, including "Inspiration" "Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise" (uncredited), and "As You Desire Me." Here he is with actress   Betty Lawford,  on the set of  "Lucky in Love" (1929). Was Markey lucky in love? You judge for yourself; he was married four times -- to actresses Myrna Loy, Hedy Lamarr and Joan Bennett, and also to Lucille Parker Wright, whose thoroughbred horses were Derby winners. 

2. There's a good biography of  F. Tennyson Jesse called Portrait of Fryn.  It was published in 1984. 

3. In 1935, author Margaret Goldsmith wrote a "psychological"  in-depth study  of the historic Queen Christina. I lucked into a copy last year.  I love the gilt crown on the spine. 

Next week:  TV Guide style plot summaries for Garbo's films

Garbo