La tentatrice

he Temptress (1926) is a standard little romantic melodrama, the kind of silent film that you find on any silver screen in any town in 1926. It's packed with super stars – directed by Fred Niblo, co-starring Antonio Moreno, Lionel Barrymore, Roy D'Arcy – and it possesses one thing that your standard romantic melodrama of 1926 did not – Greta Garbo. To say that The Temptress, only her second American film outing, stars Greta Garbo is an understatement. This movie exists solely for Garbo, to give us all the opportunity to indiscriminately stare at her for 106 minutes.

The plot of The Temptress is a bit convoluted. Manuel Robeldo (Antonio Moreno) spies Elena (Garbo) at a Parisian masquerade ball and the two pass an idyllic night in a garden where they fall madly in love, Hollywood style. So you can imagine Robeldo's surprise when he drops by the house of his pal Marques De Torre Bianca (Armand Kaliz) and meet's Bianca's wife – Elena! Next, a seriously ticked off Robeldo attends a dinner party thrown by Parisian banker Fontenoy (Marc MacDermott). It's a delightful affair until Fontenoy proclaims that he has been bankrupted and ruined by his terrible she-vixen of a mistress – Elena!

Now a super seriously ticked off Robeldo, disgusted by Elena (yet still secretly lustful) blows town and returns to the Argentine where he works as a brilliant engineer on a mega-dam building project. But wouldn't ya know it – Elena trails him to the Argentine and sets about destroying every man in sight. Canterac (Lionel Barrymore) & Pirovani (Robert Anderson) bicker over her, leading to a tragic shooting. Badman bandito Manos Duras wants her too, and Robeldo has to beat him in a whip fight. When Manos returns to shoot Robeldo he shoots Bianca instead. Then Manos assuages his seriously damaged ego by blowing up the dam and flooding the village. So that's one suicide, one whip fight, two murders, and a catastrophic dam failure laid at the feet of one temptress. Which brings me full circle to the point that Greta Garbo is The Temptress. You can drive a truck through the holes in this most unlikely plot, but because the temptress in question is the ethereal and beautiful Greta Garbo, it's still believable. As I was watching this story unfold I was running every actress of the day through my head, trying to think who else could have pulled off this role, and I came up empty. Cause the thing is, and this is important, Elena is pretty much a cipher in this movie. She doesn't really do anything. She just is. And no other actress I can think could be remotely plausible in provoking suicides, murders, and village floods just by showing up

As a title card in The Temptress informs us, "God makes men and women make fools." Being of the gender in question, I happen to think men do a fine job of making fools of themselves – but I digress. Simply put, Elena is beautiful and elegant and tragic. She's not a Theda Bara kind of vamp, nor a Mary Pickford kind of innocent, but rather some weird blend of the two. Her eyes may be mysterious pools in which men drown, but as Ringo Starr said, "It's just me face." In the ultimate showdown between Elena and Robeldo, she tells him that men desire her "Not for my happiness, but for theirs." Yes, Elena is painfully aware of the destructive effect she has, and so, after Robeldo finally submits to his love for her, she steals away in the night. Get it – she sacrifices her happiness for his. Elena and Robeldo do meet again, many years later in the streets of Paris. Elena is broken, shabby and homeless. She pretends to not know him and sacrifices yet again. In 1926, this ending was way too harsh for MGM studio execs. An alternate happier ending was supplied and theater owners were offered the choice of ending to screen, depending on audience tastes. Turns out American cinemas mostly went for the upbeat end to the tale, while European audiences were just fine with doom and gloom. Which pretty much confirms everything we know about the divergent developments of US and European cinema.

In short, The Temptress is a pretty okay movie, but starring an amazing icon of silent (and beyond) cinema. Greta Garbo alone is worth the price of admission, though Fred Niblo brings solid direction to the table too. There's little that's innovative in the presentation, but the Fontenoy suicide party does feature a remarkable shot of the overlong party table that elegant demonstrates the excess and debauchery that broke the man. It's followed up by an equally remarkable examination of the seedy sexual underbelly of the party, demonstrated by multiple examples of under-table footsy. As a matter of fact, the Parisian scenes – the masquerade, the dinner party – are far more visually arresting, but far briefer as well, than the Argentine sequences.

This is a very good silent film, though I had just watched two other Greta Garbo films that were incredibly similar to this one--as she plays the vamp in all three! I can't blame Ms. Garbo for this, as MGM definitely type-cast her despite her objections. In fact, she was so irritated by this theme that she went on strike to try to force the studio to give her different roles. But, considering that the public loved the films and they were all very successful, MGM wasn't about to mess with a tried-and-true formula.

This film is at least a little different in that much of the time men were destroyed when they fell for Garbo in this film, but she was never directly responsible for their downfall. She was more like the old "Typhoid Mary" character--someone who just seems to have bad things follow her where ever she goes! The problem with this is that no matter how sultry and alluring Ms. Garbo might have been, no one is THAT seductive that man after man after man destroy themselves in order to try to get her! However, the story does have a few new elements and the overall production values are exceptional. So, if you view this film WITHOUT considering how derivative it is, then it's an awfully good film.

By the way, the TCM DVD includes an alternative ending that was apparently used when the film was shown in rural settings. Instead of the marvelous original but sad ending (that, in my opinion is perfect), there is an upbeat and sappy one that just doesn't ring true.

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.

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.

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.