Torrent

The film Torrent was a first and a last for Greta Garbo. It was her first American made film at MGM, the only studio in the USA that she would ever work at. It was also the last time that someone else was billed above her in the credits, that being her leading man her Ricardo Cortez.

Torrent is based on the popular Spanish writer's Vicente Blasco Ibanez's work Entre Naranjos. It concerns a pair of mismatched lovers, Garbo and Cortez, who can't quite get together, mostly due to the machinations of Cortez's mother Marta Mattox.

Mattox is a wicked woman who has some set ideas about who her son should be marrying. Remember this is Spain and such arranged marriages were still even in those times quite proper. Mattox has Gertrude Olmstead in mind as a daughter-in-law, she's the offspring of Mack Swain a man grown rich in hog raising. Swain provides a few moments of comic relief with his tender concern for the piglets before they grow into big old hogs to be butchered.

Blasco Ibanez had previous novels The Four Horseman Of The Apocalypse and Blood And Sand previously filmed with Rudolph Valentino in the lead. It might have been interesting if Valentino had done this one with Garbo, but he might have been beyond film making when this was done. In any event, one of the Valentino wannabes Ricardo Cortez fills in with the male lead.

One reason Valentino might not have wanted this film is because clearly the lead character is Garbo's unlike the other two works previously mentioned. When she gets done dirt by Cortez who is doing what Mattox and her 'adviser' banker Tully Marshall tell her, she leaves Spain and goes to France where she becomes a great opera star. And leads quite the scandalous life there.

When she returns to Spain and tries to rekindle things, Mattox is even more outraged. She has a political career in mind for her son. Cortez is now running for the Spanish Parliament which curiously enough is called the Cortes.

The title refers to a flood and a dam breaking causing all kinds of havoc in the countryside. Cortez in fact braves the Torrent in a row boat trying to rescue Garbo from harm's way. When they do get together they have a brutally frank discussion, the brutality coming from Garbo.

The special effects here, primitive though they seem now are quite remarkable for their time. They look very similar to the shots used in 20th Century Fox's The Rains Came that came out in 1939 and that won an Oscar for Special Effects. Unfortunately for Torrent it came out one year before Oscar made his debut.

I'm not going to give any endings away so you'll have to see the film to find out if Cortez and Garbo get together in the end. Garbo rightly won rave reviews for her performance and in an age when exaggerated gestures was the norm in silent screen acting, she was remarkably subtle in her role. So she would be the rest of her career, she had a remarkable face for closeups.

Although Greta Garbo would go on to do far better work than Torrent, this film is still a fitting debut for her on the American big screen and holds up very well for today's audience.

I have to preface the review by saying that I have been a very big Garbo fan ever since I saw her in ANNA KARENINA in which she gives one of the finest and most gripping performances ever captured onscreen. In certain films like GRAND HOTEL she veers too much towards an artificial and contrived style of acting, when she plays certain types of characters like the ballerina there (overdoing and overstating the "prima donna" aspect), but still overall I have always included her in my Top 10 list of Classic Hollywood Actresses.

In this film however - the very first she made in America - she is QUITE DISAPPOINTING on the whole, and no her "beauty" alone cannot save her AT ALL here despite what some apparently think. Her facial expressions are sometimes really bizarre, and as the story progresses, she keeps "breaking out" into the SAME quasi-disdainful, quasi-sardonic kind of LAUGH (during her scenes with one particular central character) which becomes SO REPETITIVE AND INSINCERE as to seem both *AMATEURISH* and *BORING*. Surely either she or the director Monta Bell could have come up with different ways to convey her psychological reactions in all those scenes. It might have worked if this was a farcical kind of comedy PERHAPS, but it is NOT that kind of film.

It is also painfully obvious that she is not really singing AT ALL, especially towards the very beginning, but merely moving her lips with ZERO engagement of her body (which is a vital plot point here considering the fact that her character has operatic aspirations). This was a silent film, so she could have just sung something for real, without worrying about what it would "sound" like. Even Audrey Hepburn looks like she's really singing in MY FAIR LADY, and had clearly observed Marni Nixon closely for some physical verisimilitude.

In fact, for much of the film, Garbo looks like she is JUST FAKING IT. There are of course a few scenes where we see glimpses of what would become a terrific actress IN THE YEARS TO COME, but overall she is shockingly GREEN AND RAW and kind of wrong here. Her hand movements look almost laughable in a few scenes that are supposed to be emotionally climactic, completely undercutting the pathos or poignancy meant to be conveyed in those moments. And in the scenes where she keeps laughing that fake He-Man and Skeletor type of laugh from the old Filmation animations, her character comes across as VERY UNLIKEABLE and UNSYMPATHETIC - to the point where the character that we are SUPPOSED to be against emerges in a much more sympathetic and genuinely human light.

I know Garbo was not exactly a very "human" kind of star/actress, but what we see here is not a Sphinx but rather someone who seems almost MISCAST! I swear that Joan Crawford could have done a vastly better job here, or even Norma Shearer for that matter......Constance Bennett, or most other stars-in-the-making that MGM had. Once again, Garbo's mere "look" CANNOT salvage an epic story like this. I wanted so much to fall in love with her from the time she first appeared onscreen as a peasant girl praying in the garden, but she kept making it ever more difficult. I don't want to give away any spoilers, but by the end of it all, I thought she DESERVED her emotional fate (because of the way she played the role) although that's arguably not what the audience is supposed to feel.

By stark contrast, in ANNA KARENINA almost a decade later, she MADE my heart go out to her even though she was playing a selfish adultereress who walked out on her son. I guess she really really needed TIME and a more genius type of director to bring out the kind of performances that would make her an enduring legend.

All this being said, the REST of the cast is PRACTICALLY PITCH PERFECT!!!!! Everyone else is 1000% committed to their characters, and brings out all the psychological and emotional dimensions of their roles to such a degree that Garbo looks like they cast her ONLY for the way she "looked" and not for any acting capabilities she had at the time. The actress who plays Dona Bernarda acts with a superlative degree of NATURALISM for instance, which makes you feel like you're watching something made decades into the future!!!!! That's just one example. The entire supporting cast WORKS WONDERS to make the story come to life and make you believe the illusion that this is really a Spanish village and not just an MGM production!!

The special effects and the torrent sequence are also *ABSOLUTELY BRILLIANT*. I imagine it must have struck the 1926 audience as the TITANIC OF ITS TIME.

Hats off to MGM who did not always do this kind of film.......it really does hold up even a century later EVEN THOUGH the leading lady here shockingly turned out to be the WEAK LINK. I don't blindly "worship" any star, however much I may like and admire them overall, and so I will repeat that Garbo is A DISAPPOINTMENT here as an actress. Doesn't matter what she looked like. I don't watch films to see models on display after all!

But it's a MUST SEE film for all classic film buffs. I had to deduct 4 stars for Garbo's performance but it's a REALLY SOLID film in and of itself.......if it was made today it would doubtless be 2 hours or even 2 and a half hours long because of the story's SHEER SCOPE, but for a silent film, it leaves you wanting more which is actually a good thing. Most silent films of the time spanned 60-70 minutes, and even though this is 90 minutes long, it really does leave you yearning for more story. :) It will make you think a lot about the decisions human beings make, and the way we navigate through the vicissitudes of life.

It's a pretty simple story, but so touching, and with such purity and depth of emotion. Garbo is lovely, and so much more expressive here than I'm used to seeing from her. The love scene she has with Ricardo Cortez in the orange grove is wonderful, with that fantastic music from Arthur Barrow and the intertitle "If time lets slip a little, perfect hour, Oh, take it - for it will not come again." Barrow's score might be my favorite from any silent film I've seen, and was such an integral part of my enjoyment of that it's hard to imagine it not having always been part of the film (the original had no score, and Barrow composed his in 1997). We also get bits like a flood scene with pretty good effects for the period (though clearly done with miniatures), and Garbo watching an entertaining dance sequence in Paris. The film tells of the choices we make in life, passion which never fades, and what defines "happiness" - all of which make it so relatable, and swell the emotions.

Favorite intertitle: "Thank God for tragedy! It forces us to go forward."

This mediocre fare would no doubt be forgotten now but for its marking the American debut of an actress who was to become one of MGM's greatest stars and one of Cinema's most consummate artistes. Behind the camera was William Daniels who was to be her favoured cinematographer.

Greta Garbo had hoped that she would be directed by her 'Svengali' and fellow Swede Mauritz Stiller but the film was already earmarked for Monta Bell who had, to his credit, insisted on casting Garbo after chancing to see her film test. Her leading man had very wisely changed his name from Jacob Krantz to Ricardo Cortez and although he acknowledged her 'strange quality' he made it quite clear from the outset that he was a Somebody and she a Nobody. Time of course would prove otherwise.

He is adequate in the role, the character is a drip and there is absolutely no chemistry whatsoever between them. As for Garbo, she is far from being the finished article but it's all there and she is adored by the camera.

She attended the premiere(the first and last time she was to do so) and remarked: "If I can't learn to act, they'll soon tire of me". The rest as they say, is history!

Stiller had coached his protégé privately but considered the film itself poor and although assigned to direct her next picture he was eventually replaced by the talented Fred Niblo. As Garbo's star rose, Stiller's fell. She was again lumbered with Cortez but next stop was 'Flesh and the Devil' opposite John Gilbert. Now there's CHEMISTRY!

Greta Garbo's first American movie dealt with a torrential rainstorm. In her Hollywood February 1926 debut, "Torrent," based on a Vicente Ibanez story, Garbo's a Spanish peasant woman who becomes a popular opera singer in Paris. She returns home to rekindle a relationship with an old flame, only to experience a massive flood in her native town. Under Monta Bell's direction, Garbo, who was initially disappointed in not acting under her friend Mauritz Stiller's guidance, was introduced favorably to American audiences. Not as warmly received by the critics as "The Temptress," Garbo attracted a sizable fan-base to turn a tidy profit for MGM. The two movies combined assured the studio it had a new star under its tent. Garbo would go on to appear in eight more silent films before her first speaking role in 1930.