Starring Greta Garbo, Antonia Moreno, Marc McDermott, Lionel Barrymore, Armand Kaliz.

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 Argentinean 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 The Temptress. Where else but in a silent picture from 1926 could an unfaithful Marquess meet an Argentinean architect at a masked ball in Paris? And who else could play that Marquess but Greta Garbo?

Elena eventually follows Robledo (Antonio Moreno) to the Argentine where he is building a dam and where she wreaks just as much havoc with the 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 in a jealous rage. Two more of Robledo's workers 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. She must have a man to love and she must have a man to love her to the exclusion of everyone and everything else. So, in her mind, she cannot be held accountable for the men who fall in love with her and destroy themselves and each other. Love is so vital to her that it's worth the deaths of several men if each of their graves brings her closer to Robledo. Not because she hates those men - their lives and deaths don't even register with her - but because she loves Robledo.

Taken at face value, The Temptress is a ridiculous melodrama. But the film didn't seem silly while I watched it, only when I tried to summarize the plot above. Elena's actions should be seen as cruel and heartless, but I never felt the least bit of antipathy toward her. And therein lies the Garbo Mystique. I believe in Elena simply because Garbo believes in Elena. She possessed the sort of screen power that is impossible to describe if you've never seen one of her films. My first experience with Garbo was Grand Hotel, but even that glorious film doesn't fully capture her Mystique. Yes, she received top billing, but Grand Hotel was an ensemble effort heavy on MGM's firmament of stars (John Barrymore, Lionel Barrymore, Joan Crawford, Wallace Beery and Lewis Stone also starred) and Garbo's ballerina Grusinskaya is just another (extraordinary) part of the (extraordinary) cast.

I didn't fully appreciate Garbo's mystique until I saw a second film, 1929's silent The Single Standard. And then I got it. I don't remember anything about the film except Garbo. I was completely enraptured by her every move, her every word - and those words were only on title cards. She had an indefinable quality that no one has had on the screen since. No one has ever been able to explain it and I will only sound ridiculous if I continue to try.

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 inevitable dam burst with skill and aplomb. And it certainly didn't hurt matters to have James Basevi & Cedric Gibbons and Tony Gaudio and William H. Daniels on hand for the art direction and cinematography, respectively.

Daniels actually photographed Garbo in 21 of the 24 pictures she made for MGM, including Ninotchka, Queen Christina, Camille and both films of O'Neill's Anna Christie, winning an Academy Award for Clarence Brown's 1930 English-language version (a German-language version, directed by Jacques Feyder, was filmed immediately after its English counterpart - on the same sets!). Their sort of relationship could only have happened during the era of the Hollywood studio system. Daniels's contribution to Garbo's screen image shouldn't be underestimated. Garbo's beauty was as much a part of her mystique as her talent and Daniels was the man photographing her from her 1926 American debut in Torrent through her greatest triumphs.

The Temptress is currently available on the DVD collection, TCM Archives - The Garbo Silents, (with Flesh and the Devil and The Mysterious Lady). 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.

© John Reents, September 11, 2005