Where Greta Garbo's Films Came From, Part One (1925-1929)

In 2021, movies are often in streaming format, and as vaccination's e letting people escape their houses, it's not clear whether movie theaters will come back. 

Before the pandemic, mostly what we viewers got were remakes and franchise films based on comics. During Hollywood's 20th century heyday, script-writing teams built masterpieces of intrigue, drama, comedy, and memorable dialogue. Now it's marketing teams and advertising people adding as much product placement as the audience will tolerate. Fortunately, we have other opions. There are tens of thousands of great movies in digital format, more than any of us could watch in a lifetime even if we never left the sofa again.  But as we look for something really worth watching, we never consider a silent film, right?

The very earliest silent films were short and often driven by a single idea, so that the scenes and dialogue were created as the camera operator cranked the handle to keep the reel of film moving. By 1925, when Greta Garbo starred in her first notable film, scripts needed more depth. This was a new idea. 

Where could producers find stories to tell? By the mid-1920s movies were sourced from novels, from history (if loosely), and from magazine stories. Often scripts were written by two-person teams, not unlike those who wrote Broadway shows, with one person creating the story and the other writing the dialogue. 

What got me thinking about all this? Well, recently I watched a Garbo film from the silent era, and this movie's way-dramatic ending had me wondering where the plot came from. So I did some research. 

 In this week's post, I'll look at the sources for Garbo's silent movie career. I know that the phrase "silent movie" brings up visions of silly people doing slapstick, or highly emotive drama scenes  in which the heroine raises an arm to press her fevered brow with the back of her forearm. This of course is followed by a white-text-on-black-background dialogue card reading something like "No, John! You mustn't! You know it is wrong!"

It was the same in the silent era as it is now, in terms of movie quality. Lotsa bad ones but some really good ones are there if you look a little.  Check out some of these pre-soundie films; you might be surprised at how interesting and well-made they are. 

Garbo's first real film was based on this novel, The Saga of Gosta Berling.

It's by the Swedish author Selma Lagerlof (below). The hat's very Neville Longbottom's gran, but look at her eyes!

became this Greta Garbo movie.

According to writer Monica Nolan, "When [Dorothy] Farnum turned Vicente Blasco Ibáñez’s potboiler The Torrent into a vehicle for Greta Garbo in 1926, the press called it 'the first picture with an unhappy ending to win a box-office success.'"

Author Ibanez:

Here's the movie poster:

Screenwriter Dorothy Farnum:

 After "The Torrent," Farnum did her script magic with another of Ibanez's novels, The Temptress. 

, 

For Greta Garbo, the downside of being "The Temptress" was that her many suitors got top billing on the movie poster. 

Garbo's next film was also based on a novel, though by another author. One look at author Hugo Bettauer (below) and you won't be surprised to know that he wrote a novel called Joyless Street. He looks like Raymond Burr finding out that someone's done a hit-and-run on his parked car. 

Here's a reprint version of the novel, which obviously got a new cover design after the film version came out. 

In the film, Garbo didn't have much trouble looking joyless. I assume she was thinking about hours spent in the studio hairdresser's chair. 

Garbo's next film was based on the novel The Undying Past by Hermann Sodermann.

Here's Hermann:

Hollywood gave the film version a title with a little more zing:

Silent films, as mentioned earlier in this post, were sometimes made from literary works. Garbo starred in two films based on the same tragic novel by Leo Tolstoy. 

The book was Anna Karenina. 

The silent version, released in 1927, was called "Love." (The sound version, titled after Tolstoy's novel, came out in 1935 and will be featured in next week's post.)

Next came Garbo's "lost film," which was mostly destroyed in a famous studio warehouse fire. We do have partial footage of "The Divine Woman." The film is adapted from the 1925 Broadway play "Starlight" by Gladys Unger,

Unger (above) is best known for adapting Compton Mackenzie's The Early Life and Adventures of Sylvia Scarlett into a beloved cult film starring Katharine Hepburn. 

 The plot of "Starlight" is loosely based on stories of the early life of the French actress Sarah Bernhardt.

I couldn't find a theatre program cover for "Starlight," so here's a photo of the Broadhurst Theater, where the play debuted, as it used to look when Bob Fosse was the biggest name on Broadway. 

"Starlight" became "The Divine Woman." We may not have the complete film but at least we have the poster. 

Garbo's next silent film was, once again, sourced from a novel. This book, War in the Dark was by German screenwriter and novelist  Ludwig Wolff. 

 (A while back, I tried searching the internet for a photo of  Wolff, but all I ever found were photos of a famous military general with the same name. I wrote about this fruitless search in my blog post "Who Disappears From Hiastory".)

Another re-titling happened to a play which was adapted into a novel: The Green Hat by Michael Arlen. 

Arlen had the author-photo thing totally together, didn't he?

Hollywood called its version of Arlen's tale "A Woman of Affairs."

The Green Hat/"A Woman of Affairs" was scandalous in its day for (among other scandals) references to homosexuality. The script for Garbo's next film, was  by John Colton, and Colton was scandalous both for being openly gay and also for   adapting W. Somerset maugham's story "Miss Thompson" (about a sex worker)  into various forms titled "Rain" / "Sadie Thompson."

Colton, in the photo below with Dorothy Parker and other literary types who'd moved to Hollywood, is at the top left. 

In the movie poster for the Colton story "Wild Orchids" (below), Garbo seems to be strangling her love interest, but I believe the illustration is supposed to suggest that she is tending to him after he's been wounded. 

 On to the next film. . .  Hey, look! A female author's work is being used as the basis of a Greta Garbo movie! In this case, it's The Single Standard by Adela Rogers St. Johns. 

St. Johns was a "girl reporter" for the Hearst newspapers. She got the job because her father knew Hearst socially, but St. Johns quickly made a reputation for herself, writing about crime, politics, and sports. She was later wooed into writing about Hollywood for Photoplay magazine. The movie version of St.Johns' novel kept the title:

"The Kiss," the last silent Garbo film, was based on a story written by a mysterious figure, George M. Saville. When I did a Gioogle image search, I got a picture of a top-hatted villain who looked like Simon LeGree who used "George M. Saville" as one of his many aliases. He lived in California. Could he be the same person? If anyone ever finds out, please tell me!

Note: Adela Rogers St. Johns will be the subject of a blog post in the near future. In addition to The Single Standard and other works, St. Johns wrote a Hollywood-based memoir about her time as a confidante to stars of the 1920s and 1930s. 

Next week: Sources for Garbo's films from 1930 to 1941

Garbo