The Temptress

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.

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.

"The Temptress" has a lot going for it, but it begins so sloooowly, and contains far too many intertitles.

I couldn't help thinking how much better it could have been with, maybe, Ernst Lubitsch or D.W. Griffith directing. This is supposedly a MOTION PICTURE, not a novel.

Still the directors gave us some wonderful shots and angles.

One particular sequence is told with a shadow! Superb.

And some running shots, with horses and a wagon, are worthy of the best of John Ford.

Then one particular action scene, a duel, is as exciting, and surprisingly graphic, especially for 1926, as one could hope for.

Still, overall, the story is somewhat dull and it's told often dully.

If it weren't for the chance to watch movie history, including early Garbo, and the action scenes, and the often interesting direction and photography, it might not be worth watching.

But it is, especially the new version at Turner Classic Movies, with a new score by young Michael Picton. Maestro Picton might well turn out to be a new Elmer Bernstein, who has -- it pains me to say -- passed on, but who was one of the greatest composers of the last 100 years.

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.

"The Temptress has now been shown here—terrible. The story, Garbo, everything is extremely bad. It is no exaggeration to say that I was dreadful. I was tired, I couldn't sleep and everything went wrong..." (Greta Garbo)

The roaring twenties...not a very enthusiastic quotation, particularly when we consider the fact its author is Garbo herself, the Garbo people flock to see as a vamp, as a femme fatale who wins and ruins men, as a beauty on the screen, an object of dreams and desires. And so has the driving force been for all these years - I doubt whether THE TEMPTRESS would be watched by anyone nowadays ... if it were not for GARBO.

However, she detested it and no wonder why...For most people who know Garbo's psyche a bit, her melancholy her moments of peace, moments of being 'let alone' and, moreover, what a period it was (the mid 1920s) in her career are close to understand how she must have felt: director Mauritz Stiller, her tutor and a person who taught her skills, who directed her in Swedish GOSTA BERLING SAGA (1923) and brought her to America, is fired just a few days after the production begins; she still does not understand/speak English so well and intuitively learns whom to consider 'familiar soul' among many 'foreigners' in the glossy and tremendous studio that MGM was at the time. What is more, her sister Alva dies in the faraway Sweden. And no wonder she writes the aforementioned bitter words to her friend in Stockholm Lars Saxon. But, the test of time shows something more optimistic and within the variety of opinions and MGM targets of the 1920s, THE TEMPTRESS is overall not that bad as a movie... The CONTENT...

Marked by spiritual/religious references at the beginning and at the end (from Rabindranath Tagore, the first non-European Nobel laureate to Jesus Christ, the Saviour of the world who died for love and manifests his presence in the people in need), the content is visibly the product of MGM studio system and its methods: goodness vs evil clash that uprights the hearts: love that conquers hatred and reconciliation that overcomes vengeance. As it is quite a common theme for films of the time, I would highlight more the technical aspects of the movie some of which appear to be more convincing and more appropriate in this relation. The TECHNICAL MERITS appear, of course, thanks to the people Garbo liked and worked with.

The direction by Fred Niblo, famous for his silent BEN HUR but also for a later Garbo film, THE MYSTERIOUS LADY, is a subtle work filled with stylish moments and delicate as well as thrilling handling of scenes. Although he replaced Stiller, her "sole tutor and companion," (whose style was quite remarkable but different from what they did and understood in Hollywood), she must have felt pretty comfortable under Niblo's direction as she left him a touching note after the work had finished. The lighting by William Daniels, a crucial name of all Hollywood Garbo films, boasts of truly remarkable moments. The effect is no lesser than in greater films, in particular when filming Garbo's face. Consider the scene at the mirror, for instance...indeed, most of what we see of Garbo and her acclaimed "performance for the camera" we owe to Daniels. He captured that essence of her sensitivity to light and shadow as portrait photographer Sinclair said: "Garbo 'feels' the light." And...production by Irving Thalberg, perhaps he did not play that role as in later cooperation with Garbo, but, undeniably, prompted the energy and unbelievable possibilities from the inside of the Swedish Sphynx. As a result, Garbo's portrayal of intriguing Elena is worth appreciation.

And here arises a tricky but a logical question: So why isn't THE TEMPTRESS considered to be a significant GARBO SILENT FILM?

First, Garbo is the best vamp in FLESH AND THE DEVIL; second, her best leading man is John Gilbert (one of the most famous pairing the screen has ever seen); third, the most 'exotic' and arousing locations are in WILD ORCHIDS; fourth, Garbo's most magical moments are in A WOMAN OF AFFAIRS; fifth, the lighting pearls are in THE MYSTERIOUS LADY (particularly its 'candle sequence'; sixth, THE TEMPTRESS was not viewers' first fascination with Garbo because her Hollywood debut is not THE TEMPTRESS but THE TORRENT. So... this film has been bound for years to negligence (nothing special for many). However, it occurs to be undeserved and unfair...

Antonio Moreno is not bad as her leading man...has his moments at least; some of the supporting cast do fine jobs, including Lionel Barrymore as Canterac who appears, years later, in a specific talkie with Garbo, GRAND HOTEL; some scenes can boast of brilliant camera-work (just to mention the witty and visual banquet at Fontenoy's or the presentation of the Argentine); many moments can boast of thrill, including the Argentine fight between Robledo (Antonio Moreno) and the wicked Manos Duras. Except for many clichés noticeable in the film, which, certainly, lower its value, it is important to consider such atmospheric scenes like the masquerade.

Although detested by the main STAR of the film, by the leading lady who was unique and brilliant at multiple levels, THE TEMPTRESS is not so bad. Garbo alone helps us get rid of some sophisticated expectations from the content. As a matter of fact, more of her films do not boast of particularly clever content...yet, EVERY Garbo film is worth seeing because of her tremendous presence on the screen, the unforgettable magic and something really special which she offered the cinema of her time and the cinema of all periods.

See this silent film AFTER you have seen hyper-sensual FLESH AND THE DEVIL, subtle A WOMAN OF AFFAIRS, refreshing THE SINGLE STANDARD, innovative THE KISS, stunning THE MYSTERIOUS LADY but allow yourself at least a single viewing of its beautifully restored DVD version. You will not be disappointed.