Film Diary 2024: Greta Garbo, Gene Tierney, Sabrina Carpenter
She’s wisecracking like Mae West; she’s vamping like Marlene Dietrich. She is essentially Sabrina Carpenter in that her give-a-fucks are on vacation.
Camille/George Cukor/1936. 35mm, Christine Cinema Club
Watching this made me realize that Greta Garbo is a bit of a blind spot for me. When I wrote about Black Narcissus, I mentioned that my first trip to Paris, I fell asleep trying to watch Queen Christina. Looking at her filmography, I have to admit that I think the same thing happened on a different trip, when jet lag got the best of me in a screening of Mata Hari. I feel that I have a strong sense of what her silent films are like, particularly the ones with John Gilbert, but when I look at the second half of her career, the sound half, the sad truth is that the only films that I know well are Grand Hotel (snooze) and Ninotchka — which is, you know, great, but has always been sold as an anomaly for Garbo.
But watching Camille made me wonder if I even really understand what Garbo’s baseline was, that Ninotchka was such a departure from. Based on the Dumas novel/play “The Lady of the Camelias” (also the basis for the opera La Traviata), Camille gives this mid-19th century story an update for the mores of he early 20th century. When we are introduced to Garbo’s camillia-coveting courtesan Marguerite, she feels like a character of the 1920s of Fitzgerald or Hemingway, as articulated by an eroticized star of the early 1930s (so, a couple of years before this movie was actually made). She’s wisecracking like Mae West; she’s vamping like Marlene Dietrich. In Marguerite’s first-act incarnation, she is essentially Sabrina Carpenter in that her give-a-fucks are on vacation (Marguerite is also working late, but not because she is a singer). And when Marguerite learns that foxy but cash-poor Duval (played by 25 year-old Robert Taylor, a beautiful boy who had yet to become an actor) has been keeping vigil outside her apartment while she’s been ill, her response is basically, “Is that sweet? I guess so.”
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