An Enigma Above the Fray

Greta Garbo was one of the most complex movie stars embraced by Hollywood--a town she loathed. In many ways she was ahead of her time, a thoroughly modern woman who refused to buy into the Hollywood star system. During her 16 years at MGM, Garbo looked upon the studio and the industry with disdain. After her last film failed, she left Hollywood and never looked back.

Although she made her last film, “Two-Faced Woman,” 61 years ago, Garbo’s legacy has endured. Her indelible performances in “Anna Christie,” “Flesh and the Devil,” “Anna Karenina,” “Camille” and “Ninotchka” are as vibrant today as they were seven decades ago.

Tonight, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art film department begins a four-week festival, “Garbo Rules!,” which kicks off with one of her greatest films, 1933’s “Queen Christina” and the campy but entertaining 1931 melodrama “Mata Hari.”

Jan-Chris Horak, a UCLA film professor and curator of the Hollywood Entertainment Museum, said Garbo was most popular from 1925 to 1935. “I think after that she turned into this mythical creature,” Horak said. “She has always been known as this aloof person who stood above the Hollywood fray. All of that contributed to the mythology around Greta Garbo.”

Although she lived until 1990 in New York, where she was often spotted on her daily walks on the Upper East Side, movie audiences never saw her grow old on screen. “I think we are dealing here with the Marilyn [Monroe] factor,” Horak says. “It is as if she died young.”

Rick Jewell, associate dean of USC’s School of Cinema-Television, says the Swedish-born actress was the “ultimate contrarian”: She refused to do what the studio wanted her to do in “terms of their whole machinery of publicizing stars.”

Garbo’s refusal to play the game, Jewell says, was probably the smartest thing she could have done “because it made her special. It made her different from all the other stars and positioned her as this woman of mystery.”

From Store in Sweden to Hollywood Stardom

Garbo was born Greta Lovisa Gustafsson on Sept. 18, 1905, in Stockholm. Her parents were from peasant stock that had recently moved to the big city. The young Greta was discovered working at a department store and was cast in a publicity film in 1921 called “How Not to Dress.”

Tall, lanky and possessing one of the screen’s greatest faces, Garbo started appearing in silent features directed by the great Mauritz Stiller. When Stiller went to work for MGM in Hollywood, so did Garbo. She made her first film, “The Torrent,” in 1926. That year, Garbo also made the erotic melodrama “Flesh and the Devil”--the first of four films she made with John Gilbert, who became her lover.

Their realistic lovemaking and passionate performances put Garbo on the map. Although many foreign film stars of the silent era found their careers sputter in America when sound arrived, Garbo had no problem making the transition. Her first talkie was 1930’s “Anna Christie,” in which she uttered the famous line in her smoky, accented voice: “Gimme a whiskey with a ginger ale on the side. And don’t be stingy baby.”

Although she made 16 films for MGM, the studio kept trying to reinvent her image over the years. “At first they felt she was going to be this kind of reigning sex goddess, the femme fatale figured they developed with her in her silent films,” Jewell says. “But then at some point they kind of lost the compass as far as what she could do for them. Probably the film where it happened [was the historical drama] ‘Conquest’ [1937]. That was her first huge failure as a movie star. Once they started scrambling to reinvent her with ‘Ninotchka’ and ‘Two-Faced Woman,’ I think she just felt, ‘I am not going to go through this.’”

Another problem after 1935 was that she was more popular internationally, especially in Europe, than in America. When war clouds began looming over Europe, the market closed to U.S. movies. “She was never that big of a star in the heartland,” Horak says.

Garbo was not wiling to compromise and move to another studio or do an independent production for less money, Horak says. “That is another interesting thing about her allure. She made it very clear from [the time] she stepped on American soil that she did not want Hollywood. She was doing them a favor, so she was perfectly happy not to make any movies after that.”

She Projected an Image of Independence

Horak hopes that younger audiences who rediscover Garbo through the festival will realize what a strong woman she was “given the Hollywood mores of the time. She often had to play these fallen women or women who were not quite acceptable in polite society, but at the same time she always projected this image of being totally independent.”

“For feminists of the 1970s looking for role models, when her films were shown in retrospectives, people would zero in on what a strong figure she was,” Horak adds. “They were always love stories [she appeared in] but somehow she never needed a man. A film like ‘Queen Christina’ especially is very clear in that regard. The men are fashion accessories, so to speak, and all the kind of erotic tension is focused on her.”

Jewell’s favorite Garbo film is “Queen Christina,” directed by Rouben Mamoulian. “It is a story she very much wanted to do,” he says. “From everything you read, she kind of forced MGM to make it. It’s about a Swedish queen--a woman who is incredibly strong-willed and defiant just as she was.... She brought back her lover [Gilbert] and tried to revive his career. She basically got Laurence Olivier kicked off the picture and put John Gilbert in his place.”

The final shot--a close-up of her expressionless face as she sails off to meet her destiny--is one of the more memorable scenes in cinema. Rumor has it that someone once asked Garbo what she was thinking about during the filming of the finale. Hollywood lore has it that she simply replied: “Lunch.”

“Garbo Rules!,” Fridays and Saturdays through March 22 at the Leo S. Bing Theater, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd. Screenings begin at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $7 for general admission; $5 for museum and AFI members, seniors (62 and older) and students with valid ID. Information: (323) 932-5831.

Schedule for “Garbo Rules!”

Today: “Queen Christina” and “Mata Hari”

Saturday: “Grand Hotel” and “Susan Lenox, Her Fall and Rise”

March 8: “Flesh and the Devil” and “The Kiss”

March 9: “Camille” and “Anna Christie”

March 15: “As You Desire Me” and “The Painted Veil”

March 16: “Anna Karenina” and “Love”

March 22: “Ninotchka” and “Two-Faced Woman”