La tentatrice

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 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.

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.

At 117 minutes this is way too long and ought to have been cut by half an hour. It was Garbo's second MGM film, and like the first, was derived from an Ibanez novel. Ibanez, as a source, proved beneficial for Valentino (THE FOUR HORSEMEN OF THE APPOCALYPSE), but not for Garbo. For most of the film, she just stands around and does what she is good at, enticing men to make fools of themselves over her - and wouldn't you know it, they then blame her! Her weakling husband sells her to a banker, who ruins himself for her and commits suicide. The husband is shot by a bandit. Two friends of the main character vie for her and one kills the other. Our hero keeps vascillating, he loves her but hates her for ruining men's lives.

She, like most women of her type, lived as best they could - in a man's world, a plaything, she survived as a courtesan, securing jewelry for her support. Yes, she is weak, but she is not to blame.

The second half of the film is set in the Argentine where our hero has gone to build a dam, which the villain blows up, but which our hero rebuilds.

Garbo does have one stunning outfit - a slinky black thing, edged in white ermine with an orchid pinned over her right breast.

Garbo DOES get to act but only in the last sequence. Back in Paris, a successful architect, Antonio Moreno encounters the fallen Garbo, who drunkenly does not remember him -"I meet so many men." It is of course a lie, but one to make him forget her. Mistaking a fellow drunk for Christ, she gives him a ruby and wanders off into the sunset. Garbo is quite fine in this sequence but it is the only thing of value in the film, which is turgidly and boringly directed by her mentor, Mauritz Stiller (who was fired from the project part way through) and Fred Niblo (who completed it and got sole credit).

The cinematography contains two interesting silhouette shots, an amusing "under the table" sequence at a dinner party where men and women's legs and feet engage in some risque flirting - and the ubiquitous MGM long banquet table tracking shot (we'll see it again in ANNA KARENINA, not to mention a number of other MGM films.)

This one plays on Turner Classic Movies occasionally and is worth catching for Garbo alone. It has never been released commercially on video (one of only three Garbo silents which have not - we wonder why).

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.