Review of The Temptress (1926) by Rachel N — 10 Sep 2005

A masked ball in Paris. A nameless man asks a woman to marry him. She refuses - she doesn't love him. She leaves the ballroom for the courtyard and meets Manuel Robledo. They fall in love under the moonlight. They part without him having learned her name, but with her promise that she is unattached and that they will meet again tomorrow.... The next day, Robledo, an Argentinian architect, arrives at the home of the Marquis de Torre Bianca to conduct some business. "You must meet the Marquess," says the Marquis. And down the stairs comes Elena, the woman Robledo met at the masked ball.... Later that night, the Marquis and Marquess attend a dinner party where the host denounces the mistress whose extravagances have cost him his fortune...and then promptly commits suicide. The mistress is, of course, Elena.

And that summarizes the first 23 minutes of [i]The Temptress[/i]. Where else but in a silent picture from 1926 could an unfaithful Marquess meet an Argentinian architect at a maked ball in Paris? And who else could play that Marquess but Greta Garbo?

Elena eventually follows Robledo (Antonio Moreno) to the Argentine where she wreaks just as much havoc with them men (including Lionel Barrymore) as she did in Paris. The Marquis follows her to the Argentine and is shot and killed, another man (Barrymore) mortally stabs his best friend and two more actually get into a whip-fight because of her.

Garbo is terrific throughout. It's almost impossible to feel any kind of sympathy for Elena, but I got the feeling that sympathy isn't important to her. Nothing is important to Elena except love. Not sex, love. Love. [b][i][u]LOVE!!![/u][/i][/b] She must have a man to love and she must have a man to love her to the exclusion of everyone and everything else. Therefore, in her mind, she cannot be held accountable for the men who fall in love with her and destroy themselves and each other. And therein lies the Garbo Mystique.

Taken at face value, [i]The Temptress[/i] is a ridiculous melodrama. But the film didn't seem silly until I tried to summarize it above. That's because Garbo believes in Elena. So we believe in Elena. It's really as simple as that. That sort of screen power is hard to describe unless you've seen one of Garbo's films. My first experience with Garbo was [i]Grand Hotel[/i], but even that glorious film doesn't fully capture her Mystique. Even though she received top billing, [i]Grand Hotel[/i] was ensemble effort heavy on MGM's firmament of stars (John Barrymore, Lionel Barrymore, La Crawford, Wallace Beery and Lewis Stone also star) and Garbo's ballerina Grusinskaya is just another part of the (extraordinary) cast.

I didn't fully appreciate her mystique until I saw a second film, 1929's silent [i]The Single Standard[/i]. And then I got it. I don't remember anything about it except Garbo. I was utterly enraptured by her every move, her every word - and those words were only on title cards. I've read that the only way to truly understand the Garbo Mystique is to see her on the big screen, something I've yet to experience.*.

But back to the film at hand. Director Fred Niblo keeps everything moving along nicely, handling such disparate plot elements as the opening ball in Paris, the whip fight and the damn burst (that happens later) with skill and aplomb. And it certainly didn't hurt matters to have James Basevi & Cedirc Gibbons and Tony Gaudio and William Daniels on hand for the art direction and cinematography, respectively.

[i]The Temptress[/i] is currently available on the DVD collection, TCM Archives - The Garbo Silents, with [i]Flesh and the Devil[/i] and [i]The Mysterious Lady[/i]. The digital transfer is outstanding - the movie is close to 80 years old and the print is pristine. it's also been outfitted with a damn good new score by Michael Picton, winner of the Turner Classic Movies' 2005 Young Film Composers Competition.

The Garbo Silents itself is part of the Greta Garbo Signature Collection, which (finally) arrived in my mailbox on Friday.** I've decided to watch all of the films in chronilogical order for a couple of reasons. I'd kind of like to see how she develops as an actress and an icon over the years. I've also decided to review all of them, in the interest of developing some scholarly-time movie-kritiquin' skills in case I ever actually make it to grad school. Those are legitimate enough reasons, but I'm not going to pretend I'm not a very idiosynchratic kind of guy and would probably count OCD among my disorders, if the Bipolar II wasn't so distracting.

[size=1]*I hate you two.[/size].

[size=1]**The Garbo Celebration Dance was really a sight to behold.[/size].