Happy Birthday, Greta Garbo

My review of Garbo's Queen Christina, reposted in honor of her birthday

The most elusive and enigmatic superstar in movie history, Greta Garbo is also one of the most recognizable, familiar even to those who have never seen one of her movies. Because the beautiful and talented Swedish import rarely granted interviews, retired early and lived the rest of her days in jealously-guarded seclusion, nearly everything we know about her, or think we know, comes down to us in the form of the perfectly-rendered, never-aging images she made iconic on the silver screen. To the extent that acting is a matter of invention, Garbo surely ranks as one of the greatest, since in a very real sense, she is purely a product of her own self-creation.

Of the two dozen Hollywood movies she made in a career that began with great fanfare in the waning days of the silent age and lasted until her sudden retirement in 1941, many movie fans and historians count her performance in Queen Christina as the best of her career. I count it as the best by a dramatic actress in 1932-33.

As Queen Christina opens, Sweden is embroiled in midst of the Thirty Years' War, a destructive 17th century conflict that had its origins in the ongoing battle between Protestants and Catholics for control of central Europe. The country's beloved King Gustavus Adolphus has just fallen on the field of battle leaving his seven year old daughter to ascend to the throne. Raised as a boy and schooled in the arts of war (well, to the extent that a child can be), Christina tosses aside her regent's carefully-worded speech about "wag[ing] war with courage" and instead vows "to win it!"

In the next scene, it's years later and we see the grown up Christina (Garbo) in trousers and a man's hat riding astride a galloping horse through the forests on the palace grounds. To a modern audience, this scene might mean nothing, but in 1933 a woman in trousers riding astride rather than sidesaddle, these are signals that Christina has taken to heart the notion that to rule the country means ruling as a man. And indeed, by the standards of the day's cinema, she dresses like a man, argues like a man, and, it is implied when she kisses her lady-in-waiting on the lips, loves like a man.

Despite Christina's skill and devotion as a leader, all is not well at home. The people clamor for more war, clamor for a royal marriage, clamor for an heir.

"In short," she says, "they clamor."

At the heart of the unrest is the desire that the queen should settle the question of the royal succession by producing an heir of Swedish blood, which of necessity requires her to settle on a mate, be it the handsome schemer Magnus or the aging war hero, cousin Charles. Christina sees marriage as a loss of her hard-earned freedom, a prospect that drives her to distraction.

"But majesty, you cannot die an old maid!"
"I have no intention to, Chancellor. I shall die a bachelor!"

Fed up with demands of power, Christina disguises herself (as a man, always as a man) and spends a few days riding alone in the wintery countryside to clear her head. There, she stumbles across the Spanish ambassador (John Gilbert) and his entourage stranded in the snow. The ambassador, Antonio, mistakes her for an impudent boy—a conceit the filmmakers expect you to roll with since Garbo looks no more like a boy than Jean Harlow looks like Abe Vigoda—and the two wind up sharing a room in a nearby inn.

Not until Christina slips off her outer garments does Antonio finally tumble to the fact that he's in the presence of a beautiful woman.

(To read about Garbo's real-life romance with Gilbert, click here.)

It's the goofiest sequence in the entire movie, one that always has me itching to turn off the player, but it's followed by what is not only the best scene in the movie, but to me, the best scene in Garbo's illustrious career.

Christina and Antonio have fallen into bed, no great surprise, but they've also fallen in love, an event so unexpected and new to both of them, they barely know how to express their joy and wonder. They recline sated before the fire, sharing a bowl of grapes and talking, but their spirits are soaring, and unable to contain herself, Christina finally gets up to wander around the room, as if first love were an out-of-body experience and she is following her soul around the bedchamber.

The scene works because it pays such close attention to the emotion, particularly the melancholy that colors Christina's happiness. She wanders around the room, touching everything that Antonio has touched—a dresser, a candle, a spinning wheel—memorizing by touch and smell and sight every inch of the only room in which she has ever known complete happiness.

"In the future in my memory," she says, "I shall live a great deal in this room."

You don't have to be a monarch to appreciate just how fleeting time is or how rare moments of pure happiness are.

It's telling that, as she tours the room, she watches Antonio's image in the mirror, and his image in turn watches her, as if she is already viewing the moment in her memory, and feeling already the exquisite pain associated with an ideal past we can never revisit.

It seems wholly appropriate to me that Garbo spends so much of the scene in front of both the mirror and, on the other side of the room, a religious triptych. Garbo was as much about images as she was about acting, holding poses that represent emotions rather than embody them from within, a style more akin to kabuki theater or the pantomime of the silent era than the Method approach actors have held to for more than fifty years. In that sense, Garbo's performance, like the triptych on the wall, is literally iconic—a pictorial representation whose form suggests its meaning. It's not "modern," but then when did we buy into the notion that "modern" and "better" were synonymous. In any event, I wouldn't want to throw out Garbo just because I also like Brando, any more than I'd throw out Rembrandt just because I also like Picasso.

In any event, as Christina feared, the moment is all too soon over. Antonio continues his journey to Stockholm, and she leaves by a different route to the same destination. Imagine Antonio's surprise when he discovers the woman he loves is a queen. Imagine the royal court's surprise when it discovers that their queen is in love with envoy of their enemy.

The latter conflict sets in motion the final act of the movie. For the Protestant Christina to pursue a relationship with the Catholic Antonio after thirty years of war between those two faiths would be like Nixon bedding down with Brezhnev at the height of the Cold War. It's not simply xenophobia or self-interest that drives the opposition to the romance, it's a genuine horror at the idea of having to refight, both at home and abroad, an issue that was settled at the price of so much blood and treasure. Christina must choose between love and responsibilities. The way she chooses, and the consequences of her choice, lead to the most famous scene of Garbo's career, that final enigmatic shot that I won't describe except to say every film buff must see it.

Now, I'm going to be up front with you: Queen Christina is one of the more problematic entrants in the Hollywood film canon. Even TV Guide in its glowing 5 (out of 5) star review describes the script as "great clumps of unleavened bread," which is a charitable way of saying that parts of the movie are preposterous—can anybody, for example, accept on the film's own terms the notion that John Gilbert could mistake Greta Garbo for a man? I don't care how dark that inn is or how mannish Garbo's clothes, unless Gilbert's character has an affinity for Swedish lads with rouged lips and plucked eyebrows, there's no way to watch that scene without thinking that either director Rouben Mamoulian set out deliberately to undermine his own movie or that the makeup man and cinematographer made some pretty grievous errors in professional judgment.

Then again, many critics have suggested that that is the point. Historically, Christina was thought to be bisexual, Garbo was almost certainly bisexual, and Mamoulian was gay; perhaps without being able to say it explicitly during a time when even pre-Code permissiveness didn't permit a frank exploration of such things, Garbo and Mamoulian set out to investigate the limits of sexual orientation and wound up suggesting that, rather than being distinctly straight or gay, we reside on a sliding continuum between the two. And that, thus, in the right moment with the right person, even John Gilbert's Antonio could find himself attracted to a young Swedish lad on a cold, cold night.

Well, maybe.

Or maybe Garbo should have scrubbed off her makeup and cut her hair, ala Katharine Hepburn in Sylvia Scarlett, and really played the part instead of pretending to play it. But given the degree to which Garbo hid behind the mask of her perfect face and her professional mannerisms, asking her to strip all of that away and hang herself out there emotionally naked might have been as impossible as asking her grow wings and fly to the moon.

Besides, did anybody ever argue that Tony Curtis, Milton Berle, Dustin Hoffman or Bugs Bunny should have made greater efforts to look like women when they played such in their movies? God forbid—the lack of illusion was half the joke.

Anyway, I suspect that I'm bringing 21st century expectations of "realism" to a 1933 movie and that an audience of the time, with the conceits of the silent era's cross-dressing comedies still fresh in their minds, wouldn't have expected Garbo to look like a man, but would simply have accepted the comic set-up and moved on.

I don't know.

What I do know is that when Queen Christina works, it works as well as any movie Garbo ever made.

"They usually ask me if it was easy or difficult to direct Garbo," Rouben Mamoulian said years later, "and the answer is that it was either easy or impossible. If she respected you as an artist, and if you gave her something that was better than what she had in mind, she was the easiest, most professional person to work with. In the case of Queen Christina she was simply marvelous."

Queen Christina premiered in New York the day after Christmas, 1933, with a nationwide release on February 9, 1934. Reviews were mixed. Mordaunt Hall of the New York Times wrote that Queen Christina was "a skillful blend of history and fiction" and that Garbo, "alluring as ever, gives a performance which merits nothing but the highest praise." Variety on the other hand, called the movie "slow and ofttimes stilted" and criticized Garbo's performance as "too often apace of the script's lethargy."

It turned out Variety knew American audiences better than Hall did. The film didn't perform well in the U.S. Garbo's sensibilities had always been foreign to American audiences, and while during the silent era that may have suggested a "desirable metropolitan European sophistication" (to quote Marcia Landy and Amy Villarejo writing in the BFI Film Classic study of the movie), by the time of the Great Depression, American audiences had become increasingly hostile to Garbo (and to her German counterpart, Marlene Dietrich).

These same sensibilities, however, be they uniquely European or simply a product of Garbo's own matchless talents, helped make Queen Christina a big hit overseas where it made back twice its budget in Britain alone, establishing a pattern that would hold true for the remainder of Garbo's career. From Queen Christina forward through the end of her career, Garbo's movies made far more money overseas than in America, and more than any particular desire on Garbo's part, it was the outbreak of World War II, which closed off the foreign market, that hastened her early retirement from pictures. (After the war, Garbo sent out tentative feelers, thinking to make a comeback, but found no interest.)

Ironically, despite her waning domestic box-office appeal, with Queen Christina Garbo had hit her stride as an actress and would soon produce the best movies of her career, including Camille and Ninotchka. But we'll talk about those in their own good time.

[For a post on the production of Queen Christina, click here. And click here for my most popular post ever, photos of Garbo as she aged, from 9 to 85.]

Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde (1932)

I'm out of the office for a few days, so as Halloween approaches, I'm reposting some essays about classic horror films, this about Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde from March 29, 2010. I'll catch up on comments early next week.

The title role in Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde is an actor's dream: a dual role playing both a prig and a monster with a dramatic physical and psychic transformation from one to the other requiring the actor to hit a wide range of emotional notes. But the part also presents the actor with a dilemma, too. Ground the performance too firmly in Method realism and the action implodes; play it too broadly, and the horror becomes campy comedy.

John Barrymore, who was without doubt the greatest ham in movie history (sometimes brilliantly so), chewed so much scenery in the 1920 silent version of the story, the performance became the gold standard for over-acting—watch Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.'s imitation in Our Modern Maidens sometime if you don't believe me.

On the other hand, Spencer Tracy, the most empathetic actor ever to grace the screen, never really convinces us in the 1941 version he's either the priggish Jekyll or the brutal Hyde precisely because he can't convince us he's oblivious to the feelings of his fellow beings. (He probably wasn't helped much by a Production Code-era screenplay that dialed down both the violence and the sex.) It's one of the few performances of his great career that doesn't work for me.

It took Fredric March in the 1931 version of Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde to thread the needle between the two extremes and give the definitive performance in the role. The Academy recognized it as the best performance of the year and for once, I agree.

These days we like to pretend we've advanced well beyond notions of moral rectitude, repressed desire and a secret id run wild. As the A.V. Club put it just last month in writing about Stevenson's novel, "Today’s worst impulses run cheek-and-jowl with the best mankind has to offer, and the idea that some saintly seeming public figure might like to drink and whore around in private isn't so much unsurprising as it is a job requirement."

Oh, yeah? Let me just say two words: Tiger Woods.

If the apparently genuine public shock and, in any event, the nonstop tabloid Sturm und Drang over Woods's professed infidelities tell us anything, they tell us we haven't come anywhere close to getting a grip on the notion that a public figure can have a dark side. And as long as fans expect their heroes to be saints, as long as parents expect their children to be perfect, heck, as long as spouses expect their mates to stop banging cocktail waitresses, the story of a man who tries to repress his dark side only to see it destroy him is always going to be relevant.

Thomas Boswell wrote recently in the Washington Post that everyone has a public face and a private face and that "Our interior life, our soul, our truest sense of ourselves, whatever you call it, is too difficult and changing a thing to summarize easily or share widely.

"But," he went on to say, "when the gap between the public face and the private self becomes a vast gulf, people go into crisis. The split inside you becomes intolerable. You feel that are 'living a life of a lie.' You becomes reckless, partly out of self-hatred ..., but also because you want to put the warring sides of yourself back together, even if the cost is huge."

Jekyll suffers from the same intolerable split—"It's the things one can't do that always tempt me," he confesses—but unlike the rest of us, he doesn't want to put the warring sides back together; he wants a permanent split, and not just psychically but physically as well. He works feverishly to perfect a potion that will accomplish this dream, reasoning that once freed of the constraints of conscience and societal norms, the private self will fulfill its dark desires and trouble him no longer.

It's a nutty notion since as we all know (or ought to) once the baser self is allowed to run free, it wants only one thing: to quote Johnny Rocco, "More." Jekyll discovers this truth the hard way and pays the ultimate price for his knowledge.

Director Rouben Mamoulian introduces Jekyll with a tracking shot from Jekyll's viewpoint, starting in Jekyll's laboratory, following his butler through his manor house, and ending with him gazing at himself in a mirror, preening prior to an important speech before his colleagues in the medical profession. Coming from most directors, this point-of-view tracking shot would be a mere film school stunt, but here, it's an inventive way to introduce the main theme of the movie, the two faces of a man, the one people see (i.e., the face in the mirror) and the one we hide away, in Jekyll's case, even from himself.

Tellingly, director Mamoulian has Jekyll return to the mirror when he first drinks the potion and we see his transformation into Hyde in reflection—the handsome public face becoming the hideous private one. (As a side note, listen for Mamoulian's imaginative use of sound in this sequence, typically cutting-edge. The heartbeat on the soundtrack, by the way, is his own, recorded after running up and down a flight of stairs.)

A key to the movie's success is, of course, how well it shows the transformation from Jekyll to Hyde. The special effects work of Wally Westmore is very good, astounding really considering the movie will be eighty years old next year. Westmore created Jekyll's transformation to Hyde using layers of makeup, each a different color, each revealed with a different filtered camera lens, so that without clumsy cut-aways or overlapping dissolves, Jekyll's face changes before your eyes.

Well, and then they put in some big teeth and a Neanderthal's nose. But it's impressive work.

Still, if clever effects, no matter how good, are all a movie has to offer, within a few years of its release, you wind up with something akin to, say, Tron, a special effects extravaganza from 1982 that made lots of money, inspired an arcade game, and is now remembered, if at all, as an insufferably stupid movie with dated special effects. Something to keep in mind as you champion this year's special effects wonder, Avatar.

That Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde continues to speak to an audience nearly eighty years on is a testament to the screenplay by Samuel Hoffenstein and Percy Heath which takes the original Stevenson tale and adds depth and action; to Miriam Hopkins terrific supporting performance; to Mamoulian's inventive direction—the only horror movie he ever directed, and one he was justly proud of—and above all, to the skill with which March convinces us he is both the pompous, repressed Jekyll and the gleefully brutal Hyde.

"One aspect that amazes me about March's performance," Bill Cooke said as part of a roundtable discussion at Video Watchdog, "is that I don't at any point feel it's the same actor playing both roles. That certainly can't be said of every other version I've seen featuring one actor in the part."

And at the same discussion, Richard Harlan Smith argued, "March remains unmatched as the definitive Victorian throwback. His performance ("I'll show you what horror means!") still unnerves, almost 80 years later."

I agree with both assessments.

It was director Mamoulian who insisted on casting March. The studio was pushing Irving Pichel, who had earlier that year played the key role of district attorney Orville Mason in An American Tragedy, and who had a wonderful voice—he later narrated She Wore A Yellow Ribbon (he also became a director)—but who didn't fit Mamoulian's conception of the role.

"[M]y concept all along for the character of Hyde," Mamoulian later said, "was that of a Neanderthal man, not a monster, because it is the animal side of human nature that attracted me to the piece. At the time I was offered Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, I had seen Freddie March in some comedy, and I knew he would be perfect. Now I had never met this actor before in my life, but I took a risk and told Paramount that I would not make the film without Fredric March. And he gave an inspired and dazzling performance!"

If you know where to look, you'll discover that March gave a number of great performances throughout a career that stretched across fifty years, from the silent era to the Seventies. He was nominated for five Academy Awards, winning two, for Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde, of course, and for the classic film about the difficulties of coming home from war, The Best Years Of Our Lives. He played comedy and drama equally well, for example, starring with Gary Cooper and Miriam Hopkins in Ernst Lubitsch's ode to the menage-a-trois, Design For Living, and with Carole Lombard in the screwball classic Nothing Sacred; but also in 1937's super-soaper A Star Is Born (later remade with James Mason and Judy Garland) and the Rod Serling-scripted political thriller, Seven Days In May.

In 1960, March and fellow Jekyll, Spencer Tracy, squared off in a fiction- alized account of the Scopes' Monkey Trial, Inherit The Wind. That movie proved to be a showcase for the two actors contrasting styles, with the naturalistic Tracy and the more formal March playing off each other to great effect. If the Academy Awards are any judge, Tracy won that battle, garnering an Academy Award nomination for best actor. But when it came to the dual roles of Jekyll and Hyde, March was the hands-down winner.

The Pre-Code Miriam Hopkins

Adapted from three previous posts on the occasion of Miriam Hopkins's 109th birthday.

Largely forgotten now, Miriam Hopkins was one of the sauciest actresses of the pre-Code age, excelling in light comedies and lurid melodramas alike and nabbing an Oscar nomination along the way. Her early sound movies are some of the best of the era, yet often proved too scandalous to be re-issued once censors began taking scissors to Hollywood's past. Coupled with the years lost while she languished on the McCarthy-era blacklist, and even film fanatics can admit to having rarely seen her work.

Hopkins was born in Savannah, Georgia, and grew up in a small town on the Alabama border, but she was acting on the Broadway stage by the age of eighteen with her turn in the stage adaptation of Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy in 1926 really making audiences sit up and take notice. She made her feature-film debut in the 1930 comedy Fast and Loose, and within a year turned in two of her best film performances, in Ernst Lubitsch's musical comedy The Smiling Lieutenant and Rouben Mamoulian's adaptation of the Robert Louis Stevenson horror classic, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

In the first of these, Maurice Chevalier plays a randy lieutenant in the Austrian army who beds down with an equally randy violinist played by Claudette Colbert. (Her band's name? "The Viennese Swallows." Ahem.) The two make beautiful music together, literally and figuratively, until by accident, Chevalier finds himself mistakenly flirting with a visiting princess—the prim, virginal Hopkins—instead of Colbert, threatening an international incident.

"When you winked at my daughter," asks the king, "were your intentions honorable?"
"They were," says the lieutenant.
"Well, then naturally you'll marry her."
"My intentions were dishonorable!" the lieutenant says quickly.
"Then you'll have to marry her!"

Variety in a contemporary review praised Hopkins as the more experienced Colbert's equal, while eighty years later Dan Callahan noted, "Hopkins gives an expertly timed comic performance as plain-Jane royalty with Princess Leia buns on her ears who makes a play for Chevalier."

A movie fan of today who knows Hopkins's pre-Code work waits a little impatiently for the princess to bust out—knowing that when she does, it'll be worth it. But an audience of the time, not knowing Hopkins and what she was capable of, must have found her transformation from a prudish virgin to a cigarette-smoking, jazz-playing temptress just as shocking as Chevalier's lieutenant does.

It's a fun movie, loaded with double entendres and sexy situations, served up with the director's typically light, frothy style. I tell you, it's as bracing and intoxicating as cold champagne.

Hopkins followed up her success in The Smiling Lieutenant with Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, a movie that is the polar opposite of Lubitsch's comedy in every sense but quality. Both pictures received Oscar nominations, the former for best picture, the latter for actor, cinematography and screenplay.

The basic outline of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is familiar to us all—a scientist drinks a potion that turns him into a murdering beast with hairy hands and bad teeth. What tends to be forgotten is the why. Dr. Jekyll (here pronounced with a long "e," as in "gee whiz" rather than the familiar rhyme with "heckle") is striving for the perfectability of man, using science to distill out our bestial dark side, freeing the angels of our better nature to pursue more virtuous callings.

As in the other great horror picture of 1931, Frankenstein, the hubris of playing God leads to disaster.

Here, Hopkins plays Ivy Pearson, saloon singer, prostitute, and physical embodiment of Jekyll's base desires. The character is not in the novel, but is so perfect, you wonder why not. Taking full advantage of the pre-Code era's permissiveness, there's no question that Ivy is a prostitute and Hopkins doesn't try to soften her. Her Ivy is both lovely and—what is the word?—skanky at the same time. Her play for Jekyll is coarse and obvious, pulling up her skirts to show her legs, offering to be his slave. Even the priggish and pompous Jekyll feels the pull of the animal, and his shame is what drives him to try to cleanse himself of his base nature, resulting in the experiments that divide him.

That's the flaw, by the way, in the great Ingrid Bergman's performance as the same character in the 1941 remake. Her Ivy may live in low economic circumstances, but Bergman can't convince us that even on her worst day she was ever low or common, and thus Jekyll's revulsion at himself for wanting her makes no sense. But Hopkins? Well, she's very convincing as someone who'd inspire you to both sleep with her and then scrub yourself with lye soap and a wire brush afterwards, so different from the prim and proper princess of The Smiling Lieutenant you wonder that it's the same actress.

After the triumphs of 1931, Hopkins would top herself in two more Lubitsch comedies, Trouble in Paradise, in which she plays a con artist who teams up romantically and professionally with Herbert Marshall's master thief, and Design For Living, in which she scandalously resolves a love triangle with Fredric March and Gary Cooper by living with them both.

Trouble In Paradise is the story of a pair of sophisticated lovers, Gaston and Lily—Herbert Marshall and Hopkins—who romance and thieve their way across Europe, only to find their happiness threatened by a beautiful young widow who also happens to be the target of their latest scam.

The widow, who may well know she's being taken but is still eager for the ride, is played with sympathy and sex appeal by Kay Francis. Her polished, dark beauty contrasts nicely with Hopkins's earthy blonde charms and no doubt was a factor in her casting, as was her performance earlier that year in Jewel Robbery, in which she plays a willing victim to William Powell's elegant jewel thief. Although her career would later take a nose-dive after a bitter contract dispute at Warner Brothers, in 1932, she was at the peak of her popularity.

Just the plot I've described so far would provide the makings of a good comedy (or spun in a different direction, suspense thriller), but Lubitsch ups the ante by creating genuine chemistry between Gaston and the widow. Suddenly Trouble In Paradise is no longer a simple story about the theft of money, but the theft of Gaston's affections as well, which realistically can't end well for somebody. The inevitable heartbreak adds what Andrew Sarris called "a counterpoint of poignant sadness during a film's gayest moments," and is what, I think, lifts this sparkling comedy to the level of pure genius.

And that's without even addressing the numerous examples of Lubitsch's mastery of the technical end of his craft, which not only keeps the story moving but gives this confection its airy, art Deco style. "I think I have done nothing better or as good," he wrote of the film shortly before his death.

If Trouble In Paradise, with its depictions of thieves living happily ever after, had pushed the limits of pre-Code permissiveness, Hopkins's next picture, Design For Living, blew right past them.

The story of a woman who loves two men and makes them like it, Design For Living was based on Noel Coward's play about his own tangled relationship with Broadway's most famous acting couple, Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, a triangle marked by professional and romantic jealousy, and self-destructive egotism.

As the movie opens, George (Gary Cooper) and Tom (Fredric March) are, respectively, an unsuccessful painter and an unsuccessful playwright—deservedly so judging by samples of their work. On a train to Paris, they meet Gilda (Miriam Hopkins), a commercial artist not the least bit embarrassed to earn a living painting advertisements of Napoleon in long underwear. She immediately recognizes the innate quality of both men and is determined to give George and Tom the pointers they need to become great artists while taking advantage of their soon-proven talents as lovers.

"A thing happened to me that usually happens to men," she says. "You see, a man can meet two, three or even four women and fall in love with all of them, and then, by a process of, uh, interesting elimination, he is able to decide which one he prefers. But a woman must decide purely on instinct, guesswork, if she wants to be considered nice. Oh, it's alright for her to try on a hundred hats before she picks one out, but—"

"That's very fine," says Tom, "but which chapeau do you want, madame?"

"Both."

Hopkins is perfect in the part, never veering too far into either smug certainty or guilt-wracked introspection. Lubitsch always wrote interesting female characters, and Gilda is one of his best. We think of feminism and the sexual revolution as primarily modern movements, a product of baby boomer discontent, but in fact, many movies in the pre-Code era were about strong women insisting on sexual and economic freedom. Barbara Stanwyck's Lily Powers, who sleeps her way to the top in 1933's Baby Face, was the most ruthless incarnation of the pre-Code feminist, but Lubitsch's Gilda may well have been the strongest.

Even more scandalous was 1933's The Story of Temple Drake. Based on William Faulkner's novel Sanctuary, the story of a flighty debutante's rape proved so shocking, it was banned in many states; Joseph Breen, who succeeded Will Hays as the head of the Production Code Office, later ordered it withdrawn from circulation and it remained unseen for decades. (Click here for Erik Beck's review.)

In 1935, Hopkins received her only Oscar nomination, for playing the conniving title character in Becky Sharp. Being a fellow Georgian, she was Margaret Mitchell's choice to play Scarlett O'Hara in Gone With The Wind, but of course it was David O. Selznick's opinion that mattered.

Despite her success on screen, Hopkins was not well-liked by her Hollywood peers and she bounced around several studios in a short number of years. She had several well-publicized battles with Bette Davis on the sets of The Old Maid and Old Acquaintance, Davis later declaring, "Miriam Hopkins was a bitch!" (That Davis was having an affair with Hopkins's husband, Anatole Litvak, was no doubt a primary cause of the friction.)

Hopkins also disdained Hollywood society, preferring the company of writers such as William Faulkner, Theodore Dreiser and William Saroyan. And even her sympathetic biographer Allan Ellenberger admits she had a volatile temper, waging on-set and behind-the-scenes battles with producers, directors and co-stars alike. She was also well-known for her eccentricities, for example, always consulting a psychic before accepting a new role, leading her to turn down the lead role in Frank Capra's It Happened One Night, a part that won Claudette Colbert an Oscar, proving once and for all that the stars may control our fates but they don't know a damn thing about the movies.

Hopkins grew in- creasingly unpopular as the decade wore on—in 1940, the Harvard Lampoon dubbed her "the least desirable companion on a desert island"—and she retired in 1943. She didn't appear in another movie for six years, then made her comeback in The Heiress as Olivia de Havilland's aunt, a performance the Golden Globe awards recognized with a nomination for best supporting actress. In 1952, however, Hopkins was accused of being a Communist sympathizer and again she was out of the movies, this time for nine years.

In all, Hopkins made only thirty-three movies in her career, twenty-two of them by 1937.

Hopkins launched yet another comeback in the 1961 film, The Children's Hour, playing Shirley MacLaine's ditsy aunt to good reviews. (Coincidentally, Hopkins had played the MacLaine role in the first film version of Lillian Hellman's play in 1936 when it was produced under the title These Three.)

Hopkins also did a lot of television back when that meant appearances in live theater productions on shows such as Studio One and Lux Video Theater. She continued to work almost up to her death of a heart attack in 1972.

Random Production Notes From Queen Christina

Just in case 2800 words about Greta Garbo and Queen Christina wasn't enough for you, here's the stuff I left out!

● For the first time, Garbo consented to rehearsals and extra takes—although not without some fuss. Director Rouben Mamoulian described the process to George Stevens, Jr., a conversation recounted in Conversations with the Great Moviemakers of Hollywood's Golden Age:

"Garbo said to me, 'Oh, I don't rehearse. If I rehearse I become stale. If I do more than one take, I become empty inside.' So I said, 'Miss Garbo, this is incredible. Let's make a deal. I'll do it your way. If that works out it will be marvelous, because I will earn the reputation of being the fastest-shooting director in Hollywood. I'll get through the picture in four weeks instead of eight. But if it doesn't work out you will try to do it my way.

"So I rehearsed the two men for an hour and a half. Then she came in and I told her, 'You start here, you do this, you go there, you do this.' 'Fine.' So we made a first take. Afterwards, I said, 'Well, how do you feel about it?' And she said, 'Fine! Fine!' As she was about to walk past me, she stopped and said, 'Well, how do you feel about it?' I said, 'No good. It's all wrong. Let's rehearse.' She said, 'Believe me. I'll get worse.' I rehearsed the three of them for over an hour, and with each rehearsal she said, 'I'm getting worse. I am completely empty. There is nothing there at all.' Then we shot eight more takes, and I said, 'Print take eight, and print take one also Now, Miss Garbo, tomorrow morning, take one, yours, and take eight, the one I like, will be in projection room. You go in there alone. You see these two takes and then you tell me which I should use in the picture, and I promise to abide by your judgment.' She started walking out and leaned close to my ear, whispering, 'Please do not print take one.' From then on it was wonderful."

And which directors had a good working relationship with Garbo? Clarence Brown, Mamoulian, George Cukor and Ernst Lubitsch, who directed, respectively, Flesh and the Devil, Queen Christina, Camille and Ninotchka, which also happen to be the best movies Garbo ever made.

● Of Garbo's acting technique, Mamoulian said, "There are actors who are intuitive and actors who reason. Sometimes they are a combination of both, but that's rare. The greatest thing is intuition. For instance with Garbo, I would say to her, 'This mood is like the purple sunset, when the leaves turn their shadows, and now and then a yellow falls down.' She would say, "Oh, I know.'"

● The studio offered Leslie Howard, Franchot Tone, Nils Asther and Bruce Cabot as leading men. Garbo settled on Laurence Olivier based on his performance in Westward Passage. But after a disastrous rehearsal made it clear Garbo would never warm up to Olivier, she insisted on her old co-star John Gilbert in the role. Despite the fact that his career was in eclipse, Garbo's contract gave her complete control over all aspects of the production; she was comfortable with him and also felt she owed him a shot at commercial redemption given his role in promoting her early career; so over Louis B. Mayer's strenuous objections, Gilbert wound up playing the Spanish envoy, Antonio.

Contrary to Louis Mayer's slander, Gilbert had a fine voice, but by 1933 audiences were no longer willing to give him a chance. He made only one more picture then died of a heart attack in 1936.

King Vidor, who directed Gilbert in The Big Parade, speculated (again to George Steven, Jr.), "What I believe happened was that he was the image of the aggressive lover, and they thought he could just speak the same words he did when doing silent scenes that nobody actually heard. He would arouse himself by saying things like 'I love you, I adore you, I worship you. I can't wait to get you alone tonight,' the kind of things that were funny when you heard them. So I think it wasn't his high voice but that you couldn't just take an image and suddenly change it by putting a lot of words on the soundtrack. The words destroyed the image. You'll see that a lot in life—somebody will look like something and then they'll start to talk with maybe a deep Texas accent and it changes the image."

● The scene where Garbo wanders around the bedroom, touching everything and commenting "In the future in my memory, I shall live a great deal in this room," was choreographed like a dance and performed to a metronome.

● The famous last close-up which begins as a medium shot then zooms in and holds on Garbo's face was shot with a 48mm lens, a lens which would typically, as GarboForever.com puts it, make the pores of her face look like the craters of the moon. In order to achieve the sharp focus of the medium shot but the soft focus of the close-up, director Mamoulian held a long strip of glass, clear on one end, gradually becoming more diffuse at the other, in front of the lens and as the camera dollied in moved the glass across it.

Best Actress Of 1932-33 (Drama): Greta Garbo (Queen Christina)

The most elusive and enigmatic superstar in movie history, Greta Garbo is also one of the most recognizable, familiar even to those who have never seen one of her movies. Because the beautiful and talented Swedish import rarely granted interviews, retired early and lived the rest of her days in jealously-guarded seclusion, nearly everything we know about her, or think we know, comes down to us in the form of the perfectly-rendered, never-aging images she made iconic on the silver screen. To the extent that acting is a matter of invention, Garbo surely ranks as one of the greatest, since in a very real sense, she is purely a product of her own self-creation.

Of the two dozen Hollywood movies she made in a career that began with great fanfare in the waning days of the silent age and lasted until her sudden retirement in 1941, many movie fans and historians count her performance in Queen Christina as the best of her career. I count it as the best by a dramatic actress in 1932-33.

The Contenders
Queen Christina may have been Garbo's best performance—to my mind, it was at the very least her first great performance after the introduction of sound—but the choice of Garbo as best dramatic actress of 1932-33 was hardly a clear-cut one.

Like Garbo, Barbara Stanwyck and Katharine Hepburn consistently turn up on lists of the ten best actresses in Hollywood history, and Kay Francis, though little remembered now outside a small but devoted band of followers, was at the peak of her career in 1932.

Why, even Fay Wray, who isn't generally regarded as a great actress, made a vital contribution to the field, teaching a generation of damsels in distress how to scream—and scream she did. She screamed with her whole body, she screamed from her toes, and the horror genre has never been the same. Think about it: before 1927, it wasn't even possible to hear an actress scream in a movie, and before Fay Wray, it wasn't clear we were supposed to. Afterwards, we knew that the only proper response to being scared out of our wits was to scream, and nobody would ever do it better. So before we move on to talk about greater actresses in greater roles, let's stop to salute her contribution to movie history.

Done? Okay, let's keep moving.

Barbara Stanwyck would have been a good choice for the top acting prize this year. The Bitter Tea Of General Yen and Baby Face are terrific movies, better than any movie at issue here aside from King Kong. The former, one of director Frank Capra's best, is the story of an American missionary (Stanwyck) who falls in love with a Chinese warlord (Nils Asther) and in the process confronts her own racism and hypocrisy. The latter, about a woman who sleep her way to the top, is the most deliciously cynical movie of the pre-Code era and helped usher in tighter studio censorship.

But while Stanwyck did some terrific work in the 1930s—these two pictures, The Miracle Worker, Stella Dallas—it's really her work in the 1940s that made her a legend and since she's a lock for two best actress awards, in 1941 (The Lady Eve, Ball Of Fire and Meet John Doe) and in 1944 (Double Indemnity), I'm going to risk the wrath of her loyal fans and bypass her this year.

Likewise, Katharine Hepburn is one of the greatest actresses of all time—maybe the greatest—but I can think of at least five performances from the 1930s alone (Alice Adams, Stage Door, Bringing Up Baby, Holiday and even Sylvia Scarlett) that are more assured than the one she gave in Little Women. She's going to win two, three, maybe even four awards before we're done (assuming I live to be 140). I'm going to wait to recognize her accomplishments for a movie I really want to talk about.

Finally, we have Kay Francis who in the space of a little over two months starred in three of the best movies of her career, Jewel Robbery, One Way Passage and Trouble In Paradise, a phenomenal run. In particular, One Way Passage is a splendid showcase of her abilities. The story of two people (Francis as a cancer patient, William Powell as a condemned criminal) who fall in love on an ocean voyage not knowing the other has little time to live, it's one of those magnificently stylish weepers that once upon a time Hollywood cranked out in its sleep. If you haven't seen it, get cracking—I highly recommend it.

That said, though, it's was Greta Garbo who gave the most moving performance of the year, and in many ways, the most iconic of her career. The vote may have been close, but when the final tally was read, it was Garbo's name at the top of the list.

Queen Christina: Great Performance, Flawed Movie
As Queen Christina opens, Sweden is embroiled in midst of the Thirty Years' War, a destructive 17th century conflict that had its origins in the ongoing battle between Protestants and Catholics for control of central Europe. The country's beloved King Gustavus Adolphus has just fallen on the field of battle leaving his seven year old daughter to ascend to the throne. Raised as a boy and schooled in the arts of war (well, to the extent that a child can be), Christina tosses aside her regent's carefully-worded speech about "wag[ing] war with courage" and instead vows "to win it!"

In the next scene, it's years later and we see the grown up Christina (Garbo) in trousers and a man's hat riding astride a galloping horse through the forests on the palace grounds. To a modern audience, this scene might mean nothing, but in 1933 a woman in trousers riding astride rather than sidesaddle, these are signals that Christina has taken to heart the notion that to rule the country means ruling as a man. And indeed, by the standards of the day's cinema, she dresses like a man, argues like a man, and, it is implied when she kisses her lady-in-waiting on the lips, loves like a man.

Despite Christina's skill and devotion as a leader, all is not well at home. The people clamor for more war, clamor for a royal marriage, clamor for an heir.

"In short," she says, "they clamor."

At the heart of the unrest is the desire that the queen should settle the question of the royal succession by producing an heir of Swedish blood, which of necessity requires her to settle on a mate, be it the handsome schemer Magnus or the aging war hero, cousin Charles. Christina sees marriage as a loss of her hard-earned freedom, a prospect that drives her to distraction.

"But majesty, you cannot die an old maid!"
"I have no intention to, Chancellor. I shall die a bachelor!"

Fed up with demands of power, Christina disguises herself (as a man, always as a man) and spends a few days riding alone in the wintery countryside to clear her head. There, she stumbles across the Spanish ambassador (John Gilbert) and his entourage stranded in the snow. The ambassador, Antonio, mistakes her for an impudent boy—a conceit the filmmakers expect you to roll with since Garbo looks no more like a boy than Jean Harlow looks like Abe Vigoda—and the two wind up sharing a room in a nearby inn.

Not until Christina slips off her outer garments does Antonio finally tumble to the fact that he's in the presence of a beautiful woman.

(To read about Garbo's real-life romance with Gilbert, click here.)

It's the goofiest sequence in the entire movie, one that always has me itching to turn off the player, but it's followed by what is not only the best scene in the movie, but to me, the best scene in Garbo's illustrious career.

Christina and Antonio have fallen into bed, no great surprise, but they've also fallen in love, an event so unexpected and new to both of them, they barely know how to express their joy and wonder. They recline sated before the fire, sharing a bowl of grapes and talking, but their spirits are soaring, and unable to contain herself, Christina finally gets up to wander around the room, as if first love were an out-of-body experience and she is following her soul around the bedchamber.

The scene works because it pays such close attention to the emotion, particularly the melancholy that colors Christina's happiness. She wanders around the room, touching everything that Antonio has touched—a dresser, a candle, a spinning wheel—memorizing by touch and smell and sight every inch of the only room in which she has ever known complete happiness.

"In the future in my memory," she says, "I shall live a great deal in this room."

You don't have to be a monarch to appreciate just how fleeting time is or how rare moments of pure happiness are.

It's telling that, as she tours the room, she watches Antonio's image in the mirror, and his image in turn watches her, as if she is already viewing the moment in her memory, and feeling already the exquisite pain associated with an ideal past we can never revisit.

It seems wholly appropriate to me that Garbo spends so much of the scene in front of both the mirror and, on the other side of the room, a religious triptych. Garbo was as much about images as she was about acting, holding poses that represent emotions rather than embody them from within, a style more akin to kabuki theater or the pantomime of the silent era than the Method approach actors have held to for more than fifty years. In that sense, Garbo's performance, like the triptych on the wall, is literally iconic—a pictorial representation whose form suggests its meaning. It's not "modern," but then when did we buy into the notion that "modern" and "better" were synonymous. In any event, I wouldn't want to throw out Garbo just because I also like Brando, any more than I'd throw out Rembrandt just because I also like Picasso.

In any event, as Christina feared, the moment is all too soon over. Antonio continues his journey to Stockholm, and she leaves by a different route to the same destination. Imagine Antonio's surprise when he discovers the woman he loves is a queen. Imagine the royal court's surprise when it discovers that their queen is in love with envoy of their enemy.

The latter conflict sets in motion the final act of the movie. For the Protestant Christina to pursue a relationship with the Catholic Antonio after thirty years of war between those two faiths would be like Nixon bedding down with Brezhnev at the height of the Cold War. It's not simply xenophobia or self-interest that drives the opposition to the romance, it's a genuine horror at the idea of having to refight, both at home and abroad, an issue that was settled at the price of so much blood and treasure. Christina must choose between love and responsibilities. The way she chooses, and the consequences of her choice, lead to the most famous scene of Garbo's career, that final enigmatic shot that I won't describe except to say every film buff must see it.

Now, I'm going to be up front with you: Queen Christina is one of the more problematic entrants in the Hollywood film canon. Even TV Guide in its glowing 5 (out of 5) star review describes the script as "great clumps of unleavened bread," which is a charitable way of saying that parts of the movie are preposterous—can anybody, for example, accept on the film's own terms the notion that John Gilbert could mistake Greta Garbo for a man? I don't care how dark that inn is or how mannish Garbo's clothes, unless Gilbert's character has an affinity for Swedish lads with rouged lips and plucked eyebrows, there's no way to watch that scene without thinking that either director Rouben Mamoulian set out deliberately to undermine his own movie or that the makeup man and cinematographer made some pretty grievous errors in professional judgment.

Then again, many critics have suggested that that is the point. Historically, Christina was thought to be bisexual, Garbo was almost certainly bisexual, and Mamoulian was gay; perhaps without being able to say it explicitly during a time when even pre-Code permissiveness didn't permit a frank exploration of such things, Garbo and Mamoulian set out to investigate the limits of sexual orientation and wound up suggesting that, rather than being distinctly straight or gay, we reside on a sliding continuum between the two. And that, thus, in the right moment with the right person, even John Gilbert's Antonio could find himself attracted to a young Swedish lad on a cold, cold night.

Well, maybe.

Or maybe Garbo should have scrubbed off her makeup and cut her hair, ala Katharine Hepburn in Sylvia Scarlett, and really played the part instead of pretending to play it. But given the degree to which Garbo hid behind the mask of her perfect face and her professional mannerisms, asking her to strip all of that away and hang herself out there emotionally naked might have been as impossible as asking her grow wings and fly to the moon.

Besides, did anybody ever argue that Tony Curtis, Milton Berle, Dustin Hoffman or Bugs Bunny should have made greater efforts to look like women when they played such in their movies? God forbid—the lack of illusion was half the joke.

Anyway, I suspect that I'm bringing 21st century expectations of "realism" to a 1933 movie and that an audience of the time, with the conceits of the silent era's cross-dressing comedies still fresh in their minds, wouldn't have expected Garbo to look like a man, but would simply have accepted the comic set-up and moved on.

I don't know.

What I do know is that when Queen Christina works, it works as well as any movie Garbo ever made.

"They usually ask me if it was easy or difficult to direct Garbo," Rouben Mamoulian said years later, "and the answer is that it was either easy or impossible. If she respected you as an artist, and if you gave her something that was better than what she had in mind, she was the easiest, most professional person to work with. In the case of Queen Christina she was simply marvelous."

A Troubling Pattern: Garbo In Eclipse
Queen Christina premiered in New York the day after Christmas, 1933, with a nationwide release on February 9, 1934. Reviews were mixed. Mordaunt Hall of the New York Times wrote that Queen Christina was "a skillful blend of history and fiction" and that Garbo, "alluring as ever, gives a performance which merits nothing but the highest praise." Variety on the other hand, called the movie "slow and ofttimes stilted" and criticized Garbo's performance as "too often apace of the script's lethargy."

It turned out Variety knew American audiences better than Hall did. The film didn't perform well in the U.S. Garbo's sensibilities had always been foreign to American audiences, and while during the silent era that may have suggested a "desirable metropolitan European sophistication" (to quote Marcia Landy and Amy Villarejo writing in the BFI Film Classic study of the movie), by the time of the Great Depression, American audiences had become increasingly hostile to Garbo (and to her German counterpart, Marlene Dietrich).

These same sensibilities, however, be they uniquely European or simply a product of Garbo's own matchless talents, helped make Queen Christina a big hit overseas where it made back twice its budget in Britain alone, establishing a pattern that would hold true for the remainder of Garbo's career. From Queen Christina forward through the end of her career, Garbo's movies made far more money overseas than in America, and more than any particular desire on Garbo's part, it was the outbreak of World War II, which closed off the foreign market, that hastened her early retirement from pictures. (After the war, Garbo sent out tentative feelers, thinking to make a comeback, but found no interest.)

Ironically, despite her waning domestic box-office appeal, with Queen Christina Garbo had hit her stride as an actress and would soon produce the best movies of her career, including Camille and Ninotchka. But we'll talk about those in their own good time.

[For a post on the production of Queen Christina, click here.]

Programming Note: Tuesday, August 24 is John Gilbert day on TCM and on the schedule is a showing of Queen Christina. Check your local listings and mark your calendar.