Greta Garbo on TCM: Titles include the silent A Woman of Affairs, the personal showcases Queen Christina and Anna Karenina
Find out who Greta Garbo was on Turner Classic Movies.
Thursday–Saturday, Aug. 7–9, highlights on Turner Classic Movies:
Thursday is Greta Garbo Day:
Sometimes splendid, sometimes godawful, Garbo was invariably great to look at. TCM will be showing some of the reclusive star’s best films and performances, among them Camille, Ninotchka, and Queen Christina, but nothing one might call unique. (Say, The Atonement of Gosta Berling, or Peter the Tramp, or the restored Street of Sorrows.)
For those who haven’t seen the much-maligned Two-Faced Woman, Garbo’s swan song, it’s actually an amusing comedy, with Garbo delivering a humorous performance as a woman pretending to be her worldly sister so as to keep husband Melvyn Douglas. As The Other Woman, Constance Bennett nearly steals both the husband and the show.
The original (silent) version of the story, Her Sister from Paris, starring Constance Talmadge at her best (a pre-superstardom Ronald Colman plays the husband), is even better than Two-Faced Woman – though it’s hardly ever screened anywhere.
In the early 1930s, Louis B. Mayer’s Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer boasted more bona fide stars than any other studio. “More stars than there are in heaven” was MGM’s presumptuous but, in all fairness, only marginally exaggerated motto. So it should have come as no surprise that the Culver City studio would be the one pioneering the all-star “genre.”
Justifying both the big names and the big budget ($700,000), MGM’s second-in-command Irving G. Thalberg selected a weighty project: An adaptation of William A. Drake’s play Grand Hotel, itself based on Vicki Baum’s 1929 Berlin-set novel Menschen im Hotel (“People in the Hotel”) and which ran for 459 performances at Broadway’s National Theatre.
Strangely, Grand Hotel doesn’t have a screenplay credit. Among the names mentioned in connection with the adaptation are Drake himself, frequent Ernst Lubitsch collaborator Hanns Kräly, and, erroneously, Hungarian film critic Béla Balázs.
An uncredited Paul Bern, Jean Harlow’s husband at the time, supervised the production. A few years later, his position would have earned him a producer credit, but Bern didn’t live long enough for that. Living Harlow a widow, he committed suicide at age 42 in September 1932.
An aside: The Broadway production of Grand Hotel, one of Garbo’s biggest hits, starred Eugenie Leontovich, Albert Dekker, Hortense Alden, Sig Ruman (apparently before he became Hollywood’s favorite Central European caricature), and Sam Jaffe in the roles played by Garbo, John Barrymore, Joan Crawford, Wallace Beery, and Lionel Barrymore on screen.
Anna Karenina Oscar ‘snub’
Something else worth mentioning about another TCM movie, Clarence Brown’s 1935 version of Anna Karenina, with Garbo as the titular Russian heroine/adulteress.
Garbo was named the New York Film Critics Circle’s Best Actress of 1935. Yet she failed to be shortlisted for the Academy Awards. That was particularly odd because that year there were six nominees as a result of ties after the Academy membership dwindled following a series of labor disputes.
For the record, they were:
- Elisabeth Bergner – Escape Me Never
- Claudette Colbert – Private Worlds
- Katharine Hepburn – Alice Adams
- Miriam Hopkins – Becky Sharp
- Merle Oberon – The Dark Angel
- Eventual winner Bette Davis – Dangerous
Greta Garbo movies: TCM schedule (PDT) on Aug. 7
3:00 AM The Temptress (1926)
Director: Fred Niblo.
Cast: Greta Garbo, Antonio Moreno, Lionel Barrymore, Marc McDermott, Armand Kaliz, Roy D’Arcy, Robert Anderson, Francis McDonald, Hector Sarno, Virginia Brown Faire.
106m5:00 AM Flesh and the Devil (1926)
Director: Clarence Brown.
Cast: John Gilbert, Greta Garbo, Lars Hanson, Barbara Kent, William Orlamond, George Fawcett, Eugenie Besserer, Marc McDermott, Marcelle Corday, Philippe De Lacy, Polly Moran.
97m7:00 AM The Mysterious Lady (1928)
Director: Fred Niblo.
Cast: Greta Garbo, Conrad Nagel, Gustav von Seyffertitz, Albert Pollet, Edward Connelly, Richard Alexander.
90m8:31 AM The Divine Woman (Lost Greta Garbo Footage) (1928)
9m8:45 AM A Woman of Affairs (1928)
Director: Clarence Brown.
Cast: Greta Garbo, John Gilbert, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Johnny Mack Brown, Dorothy Sebastian.
91m10:25 AM Garbo Festival (2000)
3m10:30 AM Mata Hari (1931)
Director: George Fitzmaurice.
Cast: Greta Garbo, Ramon Novarro, Lionel Barrymore, Lewis Stone, Karen Morley.
89m12:00 PM Queen Christina (1933)
Director: Rouben Mamoulian.
Cast: Greta Garbo, John Gilbert, Lewis Stone, Ian Keith, C. Aubrey Smith.
99m1:45 PM Anna Karenina (1935)
Director: Clarence Brown.
Cast: Greta Garbo, Fredric March, Basil Rathbone, Maureen O’Sullivan, Freddie Bartholomew.
93m3:30 PM Garbo (2005)
Documentary that explores the life and career of screen legend Greta Garbo.
86m5:00 PM Camille (1937)
Director: George Cukor.
Cast: Greta Garbo, Robert Taylor, Lionel Barrymore, Elizabeth Allan, Jessie Ralph, Henry Daniell, Lenore Ulric, Laura Hope Crews, Rex O’Malley, Joan Leslie.
109m7:00 PM Ninotchka (1939)
Director: Ernst Lubitsch.
Cast: Greta Garbo, Melvyn Douglas, Ina Claire, Bela Lugosi, Sig Ruman, Felix Bressart, Alexander Granach.
111m9:00 PM Grand Hotel (1932)
Director: Edmund Goulding.
Cast: Greta Garbo, John Barrymore, Joan Crawford, Wallace Beery, Lionel Barrymore, Lewis Stone, Jean Hersholt, Purnell Pratt, Rafaela Ottiano, Tully Marshall.
113m11:00 PM Two Faced Woman (1941)
Director: George Cukor.
Cast: Greta Garbo, Melvyn Douglas, Constance Bennett, Richard Long, Ruth Gordon.
90m12:45 AM The Kiss (1929)
Director: Jacques Feyder.
Cast: Greta Garbo, Conrad Nagel, Holmes Herbert, Lew Ayres, Anders Randolf, George Davis.
62m2:00 AM The Divine Greta Garbo (1990)
Glenn Close hosts this documentary featuring film clips and rare behind-the-scenes footage that reveal how Greta Garbo’s film career reflected her life.
46m
notes
Turner Classic Movies website.