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.

Chaplin At The AFI Silver

August is Charlie Chaplin month at the AFI Silver Theatre. So is September for that matter. For those of you lucky enough to live near Silver Spring, Maryland, you have a chance to see new 35 mm prints of Chaplin's best work on the big screen—and by that, I mean the big screen (those of you who have been to the AFI Silver know what I mean).

Yesterday, Katie-Bar-The-Door and I saw The Circus (with the 1921 short The Idle Class as an appetizer). The former features some of Chaplin's best bits, including a police chase through a maze of mirrors, and a highwire act with the Tramp and three naughty monkeys (no relation). In the latter, the Tramp plays golf and wanders into a ritzy costume party.

This coming weekend, we get the classic City Lights, which would be my choice as Chaplin's best movie, if I were unfortunate enough to live in a world where such choices were necessary.

Click here for scheduled features and show times.

Tomorrow: More Garbo.

Garbo's 1949 Screen Test

I mentioned that Greta Garbo contemplated a comeback after World War II, a comeback that obviously never happened. She settled on the Balzac novel La Duchess de Langelais, with Walter Wanger producing and James Mason tentatively set to co-star, and the project got as far as three screen tests, one photographed by Joseph Valentine on May 5, 1949, and by James Wong Howe and William Daniels, both on May 25, 1949.

The only problem was, nobody in Hollywood wanted to finance the film. Wanger negotiated a shaky partnership with Italian financier Angelo Rizzoli, but Rizzoli and Garbo did not hit it off and after long delays pushed the project into 1950, Rizzoli finally pulled out. No other investors were forthcoming and Garbo rejected the suggestion that she invest her own money in the film. Garbo's comeback was effectively over.

Long thought lost, a snippet of the test footage turned up in 1989. Here it is for your viewing pleasure:

The Aging Of Greta Garbo

Of all the posts I've worked on over the past year and a half, the most popular turns out to be one I knocked off in about five minutes—a series of photos of John Wayne as he aged in the movies, from the shockingly handsome twenty-three year old of The Big Trail to the grizzled, terminally-ill sixty-nine year old in The Shootist. Echoing that theme, here are a series of photos of Greta Garbo, tracing her career and the lines on her face from childhood to the end of her life and most everything in between. Just between you and me, I'm not sure they really tell you anything other than that there was a woman named Greta Garbo made of flesh and blood who eventually withered and died. For me, she lived on the screen and nowhere else, but census takers would disagree. Now, if you really want photos of Greta Garbo, there are two places to go: Dr. Macro's High Quality Movie Scans and Garbo Forever. The former has hundreds of, yes, high quality scans from her movies; the latter has an exhaustive supply of portraits that covers her entire life. But for the nutshell version, here you go. As always, click on the photo to enlarge it. 1914—age 9 (that's Garbo in the middle) 1920—age 15 1923—age 18 (by Olaf Ekstrand) 1926—age 21 Flesh and the Devil (with John Gilbert) 1929—age 24 The Kiss 1932—age 27 As You Desire Me 1936—age 31 (color—not colorized—photo by Sinclair Bull) 1941—age 36 Two-Faced Woman 1946—age 41 (by Cecil Beaton) 1951—age 46 (by George Hoyningen-Huene) 1965—age 60 (by Cecil Beaton) 1990—age 84

Happy Birthday, Anita Page!

Anita is a nice, round 100 today. Well, she would be if she hadn't died at the age of 98. But like Lon Chaney and Douglas Fairbanks, I'm sure she's still out there somewhere.

Tomorrow, I'll be back on the Greta Garbo kick. In the meantime, here's a repost of an essay I wrote about her some time ago, coupled with my favorite pictures of her.

I have to confess, before I started writing this blog, I had never heard of Anita Page, but now that I've seen half a dozen of her movies and read a bit about her, it's clear that she was just as cute as the proverbial bug's ear and no doubt somebody you would have been lucky to know. Certainly Herschel House must have thought so—the Navy pilot was married to her for fifty-four years, until his death in 1991.

Mostly Page played sweet innocents who found themselves in a melodramatic load of trouble (see, for example, Our Modern Maidens), but her turn in Our Dancing Daughters as a self-absorbed, gold-digging be-yotch who tricks Joan Crawford's millionaire boyfriend into marrying her was unforgettable and should have presaged a longer career. Louis B. Mayer, a warped frustrated old man, saw to it that it didn't.

Well, you take what you can get.

Our Dancing Daughters was the first movie written specifically for Joan Crawford and it made her a star. It's the story of a rich, wild girl (Crawford) with an addiction to short dresses and the Charleston who loses the love of her life to an even richer, wilder girl (Page, also in a star-making role), all while soaking up Jazz and bootleg booze in fabulous art Deco palaces that could only have existed on the set of an MGM movie. None of this is meant to be taken seriously—just another Hollywood studio clucking its tongue at girls gone wild even as it exploited the phenomenon to rake in box office bucks.

What's not to like?

Although she had only just celebrated her eighteenth birthday when the movie hit the theaters, Page is absolutely convincing in her ruthless pursuit of the man, first putting on an act of virginal innocence to entice him then exploiting him to the hilt after she lands him.

In the movie's penultimate scene, Page is drunk, evil and standing at the top of a staircase. No prizes for guessing what happens next.

"Our Dancing Daughters was my picture," she said years later. "I say that because I did the acting. Joan Crawford danced her way through it. I acted my way through it."

Our Dancing Daughters was one of a series of Hollywood movies seeking to both exploit and condemn the Jazz Age flapper phenomenon. The script called for an undercurrent of tension between Page and Crawford and, boy, is there ever. Years later, Page claimed Crawford physically assaulted her on the set but the mutual hatred didn't hurt their on-screen chemistry any. In fact, despite their mutual loathing, Page and Crawford made two more movies together, Our Modern Maidens and Our Blushing Brides, trading the good girl/bad girl roles back and forth, to great commercial, if not artistic, effect.

Page also starred in the year's Oscar winner for best picture, The Broadway Melody, and received over ten thousand fan letters a week, including nearly a hundred from fascist dictator Benito Mussolini who was infatuated with the young actress.

"Are you starting to believe your own pub- licity?" director Harry Beaumont asked Page during the filming of one of their six pictures together.

"Of course," she said, "Aren't you?"

Our Dancing Daughters is one of those odd silent-sound hybrids of the very early sound era. Made not long after The Jazz Singer, the film has a soundtrack, including several prominently featured songs, but no dialogue, only title cards. I actually find this approach preferable to early talkies such as The Broadway Melody where, for example, Anita Page's dialogue competes with the rustling of her own dress.

Fortunately, sound technology improved rapidly over the course of a year.

MGM's The Broadway Melody, billed as the first "all-talking, all-singing, all-dancing" musical, was the top grossing movie of 1929 as well as the first sound picture to win the Academy Award for best picture, and further cemented sound's commercial future. The Broadway Melody was the top box office movie of 1929 and also featured "You Were Meant For Me" and "Give My Regards To Broadway."

Douglas Shearer out of necessity invented the concept of the "playback"—pre-recording a song that performers would then dance and lip-synch to—when the choreography on a huge dance number that had already been performed and recorded was deemed unsuitable. Rather than bring the orchestra back to the sound stage, Shearer figured out how to reuse the sound from the previous take, and the cast performed the dance number with its new choreography to a playback of the song. This technique became the industry standard for decades.

"I thought Our Dancing Daughters was my picture," she said later, "but Broadway Melody was Bessie Love's. I love good English, and I hated saying things like, 'Gee, ain't it elegant?' In my opinion, silents were much better than talkies. One thing you could have was mood music, which you could have playing throughout your scene to inspire you. The trouble with talkies was, they let you have the music, but they'd stop it when you had to talk, and that was always a let-down for me."

After The Broadway Melody, Page made two more movies with Joan Crawford, and appeared in films with Lon Chaney, Buster Keaton and Clark Gable.

Her final movie for MGM was 1932's Prosperity, starring Marie Dressler and Polly Moran. On the outs with studio head Louis B. Mayer after twice refusing to sleep with him (the second proposition made in the presence of Page's mother), Page served out the remaining years of her MGM contract on loan to poverty row studios, making such low-budget bombs as Jungle Bride and Hitch Hike To Heaven. It was an ignominious end for an actress who just a couple of years before had been second only to Greta Garbo as the studio's top draw.

Page left Hollywood and married Navy flyer Herschel House in January 1937. After his death, she began to make films again, mostly low-budget fare such as The Crawling Brain and Witchcraft XI. On the 75th anniversary of the founding of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Page received a standing ovation at a special screening of The Broadway Melody. She was the last surviving attendee of the first Oscar ceremony and died in 2008 at the age of ninety-eight.

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.