La tentatrice

Greta Garbo's second Hollywood feature is an irresistible meller, done to a turn by director Fred Niblo at his finest. (Dig those parallel tracking shots; first over a formal dining table laden w/ service & delicacies, and then under the same table, now heavy w/ service & delicacies of a rather different nature.) At this point in her career, Garbo was still playing femme fatale types (watch how she cups her lover's face in her hands) and in this adaptation of a rum Blasco-Ibanez novel, she drives four men to their ruin without lifting a finger. The plot takes us from Parisian highlife (a superb masked ball, a suicide at a banquet, overnight love in a park) down to the Argentine for dam building, a duel of honor played out with whips, sabotage & floods (with remarkable effects), and then back to Paris for our moral. When he's at his best, co-star Antonio Moreno is a bit like Brian Donleavy, alas he usually just looks vaguely surprised. But Roy D'Arcy & Lionel Barrymore get to whoop things up splendidly. Note that Garbo's regular lenser Wm Daniels shares credit with Tony Gaudio. But everyone deserves a prize, including one for the fine newly commissioned score.

This silent drama provides an interesting role for Greta Garbo, who was still rather young at the time. It also has some good set pieces created by directors Fred Niblo and/or Mauritz Stiller, which liven up the story considerably. The supporting cast also features a couple of good performances, and all of the strengths help to make up for a rather downbeat story.

As "The Temptress", Garbo is certainly believable as a woman who attracts the attention of every man around. What makes it more interesting than most such scenarios is that both the script and Garbo's performance leave some ambiguity about what the character is really like inside, and in any case she has a lot more depth than the male characters. The best supporting performances come from Lionel Barrymore and Marc McDermott, as two of the many men who desire her.

Several sequences are filmed very nicely. Fontenoy's dinner party is an effective display of the hollow lifestyle it depicts, and there is some real danger and menace in the fight scene between Robledo and Manos Duras. The pace overall is uneven, and it does have some slow stretches that add unnecessarily to the running time, but the good parts make up for this. At least one DVD version includes a variant ending that changes the tone considerably, so there must have been some uncertainty about how it should close.

Garbo's talent and screen presence are both easy to see, and in later features her characters would give her better opportunities to show them. She does a very good job here, and makes her character much more interesting than it would have been with a lesser performer in the role. Overall, it's a movie worth seeing for silent film fans, with some real highlights that make up for the occasional shortcomings.

I've always thought, when you see scenes of masquerade balls, how silly it is that those little carnival masks that only cover the space round the eyes are implied to genuinely disguise the wearer, and that whole plot turns have even been based on the premise. Of course, it's a different case when the scene is in The Temptress and the wearer is Greta Garbo.

The Temptress, Garbo's first top-billed Hollywood role, opens at a masquerade. A big deal is made of the moment in which she unmasks before Antonio Moreno. Now, anyone who knows Garbo will have recognised her already, but it is only when that small piece of felt is removed that we are stunned by the full force of her astonishing beauty. This tiny instant alone guaranteed her stardom.

But Garbo was not just a pretty face. Far from it; she was also one of the finest actresses of her generation, and one of the first truly great naturalistic performers of the silent era. For someone who was famed for her introverted and solitary nature offscreen, Garbo certainly knows how to kiss with authentic-looking passion. Throughout, it is not simply her looks which captivate us, it is her commanding screen presence. Her role in The Temptress is a perfect demonstration of her abilities, simply because she is a fairly passive player in most scenes, often in the background while others talk (or fight) over her. And yet, with this limited scope she conveys so much realism and intensity.

The Temptress was directed by Fred Niblo, a veteran filmmaker who was even older than DW Griffith. Despite his age, Niblo's work never looked old-fashioned, and The Temptress displays his competent handling of the more fluid style of the late-silent period. He has a great sense of atmosphere and rhythm, and gives each segment of the picture a consistent feel. The opening scenes in Paris are surreal and dreamlike, with lots of slow dissolves (in those days an effect done in-camera, so definitely the work of Niblo and not the post-production team) and soft-focus. By carefully controlling background movement, he makes the shots by turns nightmarish and heavenly. The later scenes in the Argentine are characterised by stark realism, with a good standard of naturalism from the extras, and lots of neat little shots that add nothing to the plot but plenty to the tone, such as the dog snatching a corncob out of a boy's hands.

Among Niblo's real feats of genius are the ways he introduces characters. Garbo gets no less than three startling entrances. First, in the aforementioned unmasking scene, Garbo removes her mask in an over-the-shoulder shot, so we see Moreno's reaction before we get to see her face for ourselves. Later, when Moreno finds out she is actually his friend's wife, she appears in the distance, so we can't be certain it's her. Then, as realisation dawns, she is suddenly right before us in close-up. And later still, when she arrives in Argentina, our first glimpse is of her feet descending from the carriage – again a tentative, teasing entrance – before slowly panning up to reveal her face. Another character treated to a neat introduction is the bandit Manos Duras, played by Roy D'Arcy, who appears first as a shadow on the door.

This mention of Roy D'Arcy brings me onto my next point – it's not all about the Garbo (or the Niblo). There are some pretty impressive performances all round. D'Arcy himself is one of the few slightly hammy actors in The Temptress, but this is acceptable because we can believe that a character like Manos Duras would deliberately project this exaggerated persona. He gives the very unsettling impression of a man who tends to win, not because he is particularly powerful but because he has no fear, and is very much aware that he inspires fear in others. Antonio Moreno is one of many mediocre lead men of the silent era who went on to become an unheralded supporting player in the sound era. This is among the best of his lead performances, although for a great example of his later work check him out as the old Mexican in The Searchers. Honourable mentions also go to Robert Anderson, who plays Pirovani with great warmth, and Lionel Barrymore, who for once plays it with some subtlety.

The only real trouble with The Temptress is its story, being a misogynist melodrama based on a Vincente Blasco Ibanez novel. Ibanez seems to have been a popular plot source in the 1920s, especially at Metro (he was also the original author of Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Blood and Sand, Mare Nostrum and Torrent), but his appeal is somewhat hard to fathom these days. And from here on, Garbo ended up getting typecast as the self-centred gold-digger, over whom men shoot themselves and each other. At the very least though, Garbo's beauty and allure makes her appearance as that kind of woman plausible. And while the chauvinism of the times presented such stories as retellings of the original sin myth, with the beautiful woman ruining the world, Garbo is able to give dignity to the character and paint her as a deeply tragic figure. With Garbo, this temptress is a victim not a villain.

This movie played on Turner Classic Movies on (I think) Sunday night, 30 July 2000. I started viewing it near the mid-way point. I first stayed with it to see and wonder who this very attractive actress was. The movie was a find story of love lost. The overall acting was excellent - truly more than I expected from an old movie. The body language, the facial expressions and timing from the leading male are what one only hopes to see. That said, the music, which can add so much to a silent movie, was beautiful. Beautiful. To me, it was the highlight of the movie. The music was so clear (no noise) that I question if it was as old as the movie (reprocessed perhaps?). The Temptress is worth viewing and hearing.

For Greta Garbo's second film under her new MGM contract the studio went back to the same source that they got for her first film with them Torrent. Vicente Blasco Ibanez offered up another of his novels for Garbo, The Temptress. Greta's got a whole lot of the men panting after her in this one.

Blasco Ibanez also gave us the slightly more familiar Four Horsemen Of The Apocalypse and Blood And Sand which served Rudolph Valentino well during the silent era. Garbo's character of Elena has a lot of similarity with Dona Sol in Blood And Sand. It ends a lot worse for Elena than for Dona Sol.

Garbo is married to Armand Kaliz who is not above peddling his wife's charms to get ahead. Right now she's got the wealthiest banker in Paris Marc McDermott in tow, but he means nothing to here but a cash cow for the husband. Who she really likes after meeting him at a costume party is Antonio Moreno, an engineer from Argentina who is looking for investors in a dam he wants to build.

After McDermott commits suicide when he's facing ruin and names Garbo as the one responsible, to escape until the notoriety dies down Garbo and Kaliz go to the Argentine Pampas and visit with Moreno. The local bully and bandit leader Roy D'Arcy takes one look at her and likes her and knows she's available in the right conditions. That sets up all the action for the remainder of the film.

Garbo's performance in The Temptress certainly assured her of a long career which was only briefly interrupted by the coming of sound where MGM took superb care to see that their investment transitioned smoothly. She is seductive and alluring in The Temptress like she was never before or since, even in her torrid film with John Gilbert Flesh And The Devil or in Mata Hari which calls for seductive and alluring like it calls for breathing.

Moreno was one of the first players to be known as Latin Lovers and he was about ending his career in those roles and would be transitioning to character parts. Roy D'Arcy as the bandit chief registers the best after Garbo. He had that Snidely Whiplash thing down pat and the silent screen certainly called for those overacted gestures. His career would continue in sound, but not as successfully. His duel with the whips with Moreno is as savage an encounter between hero and villain as you'll ever see on film.

The Temptress after over 80 years holds up well. For Garbo fans everywhere.