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LIKE A VIRGIN

Greta Garbo has been leading critics and reviewers into temptation since 1926—tangling them up in their words, making them gush like fans, forcing them to describe the indescribable. She was beautiful. She was really beautiful. She was really really really … Descriptions have never done her justice.

Yet to talk about Greta Garbo on screen, one must inevitably start with her first impact. What stopped audiences, what made their jaws drop, what made them ask, “Who is that?” was a face on-screen that wasn’t just beautiful but beautiful in a new way. It was a way that made viewers suspect their whole lives had been a farce. It was a way that made the word “beautiful” inadequate, not that Garbo was beyond beautiful, but rather that she seemed like something besides beautiful.

But what?

It was all in the face. Garbo’s face made her body irrelevant. Men lusted for her. Women lusted for her. But mostly from the neck up.

Her beauty was a function of the screen. Garbo in casual snapshots and unretouched portraits looks like a robust Scandinavian girl. In formal studio portraits, she is striking, but no more so than a half-dozen other women of her era. It’s only in motion that she becomes Garbo, a fact that disproves the notion that her on-screen power was an accident of looks. On screen, no one had what she had.

Since the 1980s, video has made Garbo’s image accessible, around the clock, to anyone who owns a video recorder. But before the days of video, seeing a Garbo film in a theater was a singular and rather tense experience. With each close-up, a quiet panic would seize the audience. A whole theater would, all at once, stop breathing and watch, trying to take in as much of that face as it could. It was a face with a riddle to it. It was a face you could never fully know your way around. Garbo’s face was, in a real sense, a special effect, something to be appreciated in and of itself, apart from whatever function it served in the story. Like morphing, fast-moving fireballs, and other special effects, its impact is diminished on television. Garbo needs the big screen.

Spirituality, an aspect of all beauty, is inseparable from Greta Garbo. Filmmakers sensed this from the beginning, and contexts were sought to emphasize that dimension. In the first shot of her first appearance in an American film, The Torrent (1926), Garbo was seen praying in a garden. In her second film, The Temptress (1926), she had a close encounter with Jesus.

Actually, she only thought he was Jesus. It’s the end of the film and Garbo, the temptress, the woman whose beauty has destroyed countless men, is now nearly destroyed herself. Her clothes are threadbare, her mind has turned to mush from syphilis, and she sits in a Paris café. She sees a man with a beard and hallucinates that he is Jesus. She approaches his table and gives him her one cherished possession, a ring that a long-lost lover gave her years before. “In all my useless life—one thing,” she tells him. “A ruby—you will understand—you died for love.”

There, at the start of Garbo’s career, we find the terms laid out for us. Passion is passion. Ecstasy is ecstasy, and love is religion. Sex and romance are matters of the highest consequence, beyond life and death and into realms of the spirit, alongside things like damnation, redemption, salvation.… She was not called the Divine Garbo for nothing.

The high stakes were and are an essential part of Garbo’s appeal. Not everyone buys them, however. For some, the atmosphere around Garbo is too romantic, too ethereal, and, most of all, too serious. As critic Don Herold wrote in the thirties:

Detach yourself from the Garbo spell at any point in almost any Garbo picture, slap yourself back to common sense, listen to her as you might to any woman, and you’ll realize what horsefeathers most of the Garbo technique is. There is too much glum severity or knowing laughter (with head thrown back). It is all too thick, all too, too significant.

Like Maria Callas, whose voice was the aural equivalent of Garbo’s face—absolute beauty with no prettiness—Garbo’s greatness was directly bound up with her lack of irony, self-deprecation, and other deflating human qualities. Though hardly a stern goddess—she often laughed in her films and her public remarks demonstrate a whimsical sense of humor—Garbo was, at heart, dead serious. She was a true believer.

Christian metaphor and imagery followed Garbo throughout her career. Some actresses make two dozen movies without ever making the sign of the cross. Not Garbo. In Flesh and the Devil (1927), she receives communion. In Love (1927), a future lover accosts her during Easter services. In A Woman of Affairs (1929), she recovers from either a miscarriage or an abortion, surrounded by the loving attention of nuns. In Anna Christie (1930), she swears her love on a crucifix. In Romance (1930), she falls in love with a protestant clergyman. In Mata Hari (1931), she makes her lover put out the flame burning in front of a Madonna’s shrine. In Queen Christina (1933), she enjoys three days of passion in a room with a religious tapestry on the wall. In The Painted Veil (1934), she volunteers to work with Catholic nuns in a mission hospital. In Anna Karenina (1935), her estranged husband reproaches her for the sin of adultery. In Camille (1936), on her deathbed, she tells a friend, “Send for the priest.”

It’s as if there was something so otherworldly about Garbo’s beauty that it had to be balanced and accounted for in her movies by introducing supernatural or spiritual elements. This connection between the alluring and the otherworldly should come as no surprise when we remember Garbo’s origins. She first became famous in America playing a stock female type whose seductive power was understood to be superhuman. She played the vamp.

In the seventy-five years leading up to Greta Garbo, vamps were everywhere. They were in literature, in painting, on stage and, ultimately, on screen. Today the word “vamp” connotes seduction, with a touch of camp. But the vamps that led up to Garbo weren’t merely sexy. They were willfully evil. In fact, they didn’t necessarily enjoy sex. They enjoyed turning men into slaves. They enjoyed stealing a man’s power—socially, morally, and physically.

The word itself, a slang expression for femme fatale that entered the language in the late nineteenth century, conveys the idea. The word implied a comparison between sexually voracious women and vampires, who suck the vital juices from their victims. It was a comparison made in earnest. Throughout the nineteenth century and up through the 1920s, medical doctors insisted on the bone-building, brain-nourishing, strength-making function of semen. If men wanted to stay healthy, the idea went, they needed to guard their vital juices from skirt-wearing, essence-craving man-eaters.

Dr. William J. Robinson of Bronx Hospital put it this way in 1922:

There is the … type of woman, who is a great danger to the health and even the very life of her husband. I refer to the hypersensual woman, to the wife with an excessive sexuality.… Just as the vampire sucks the blood of its victims while they are alive, so does the woman vampire suck the life and exhaust the vitality of her male partner—or victim.

The vamp was a nightmare woman, preternaturally beautiful and utterly evil, who could not be resisted and would not stop until the man was a drained, slavish wreck.

Vamps first became popular in the second half of the nineteenth century. Evil women had, of course, existed in literature and legend before this, but the middle and late nineteenth century saw the femme fatale emerge as a specific type. Social conditions helped bring her about. The industrial revolution had taken men out of the home, consigning women to lives of lonely domesticity. Few options were available to women who strayed from the narrow path. The growing prevalence of prostitution, the attendant dangers of venereal disease, and the conceptual gulf between good women and bad women all contributed to the paranoid fantasy of the femme fatale. So did men’s fears at the prospect of women’s independence, occasioned by feminist movements and urban opportunities. Male poets, novelists, and painters on both sides of the Atlantic reacted with fear and fascination at the prospect of a new woman.

As early as 1852, in Herman Melville’s Pierre, or the Ambiguities, we find the dangerous woman popping up in American literature. Walking in the woods, Pierre sees Isabel, and Melville’s description of her face reads like the rhapsodic notices Garbo would get seventy-five years later:

In natural guise, but lit by a supernatural light; palpable to the senses, but inscrutable to the soul;… ever-hovering between Tartarean misery and Paradisiac beauty; such faces … make us wondering children in this world again.

From there, passion leads them into incest, murder, and finally to double suicide. The final tableau is of their two bodies wrapped together, Isabel’s long hair running over him. It’s the image of a man subsumed by the passion of a woman.

Melville’s Isabel wasn’t evil. But as the type emerged, willful evil became a key component. In the story “One of Cleopatra’s Nights” (1845) by Theophile Gautier, Cleopatra takes a young lover—then disposes of him the next day by making him drink poison. In Baudelaire’s collection The Flowers of Evil (1857), virtually every poem deals with evil women, some of whom are vampires. The femme fatale became a fetishistic figure in Algernon Charles Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads (1866), as in this excerpt from “Dolores”:

I could hurt thee, but pain would delight thee;

Or caress thee—but love would repel,

And the lovers whose lips would excite thee

Are serpents in hell.

Likewise, the paintings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Gustave Moreau, Sir Edward Burne-Jones, and many lesser artists abounded with images of mysterious and evil women. Old myths were recast to serve a new misogyny. Moreau’s The Young Man and Death took the legend of Death and the Maiden and reversed the sexes.

In the 1880s, cameos were sold in Europe depicting legendary femme fatales. By 1894, Oscar Wilde in Salome could indulge in repeated hints that his pale and bloodthirsty heroine was a vampire, knowing that his audience would understand. The vamp had crossed over into popular culture. By the end of the century she was seen on ashtrays, inkwells, advertisements, and in magazine cartoons.

She was easy to spot. She was always dark-haired. She was cold and disdainful. Her head was often thrown back in a swoon of lust. When she smiled, it was knowing, unfriendly. Her face was pale; her lips, blood-red. She was melancholic, self-absorbed, queen-like, yet sensual. As the type entered the twentieth century, she was invariably associated with illicit sex, and sex with her meant danger. She was cryptic and ageless, and men who got involved with her had a way of ending up dead or seriously damaged. So prevalent became the metaphor of the femme fatale that the old Life magazine rang in New Year’s 1906 with a cartoon depicting the world as a merry widow, who stands on the grave of 1905 and welcomes, with a seductive leer, a young man representing 1906.

Though the vamp was a creation of male misogyny, women apparently got a kick out of her, too. It is not hard to understand why. She was one of the few images of female strength and independence available at the time. From the beginning of the century, the vamp seemed to herald a new kind of woman, and within a few years, the feminist implications became quite overt. In 1907, the Russian-born actress Nazimova emerged as an important vamp of the Broadway stage. In The Comet, she seduced the son of a former lover and deliberately drove the younger man to suicide. The New York Times described a scene: “She tells … how she has battled in ‘the world of men’—all of whom ‘make women pay’—and now she lives for vengeance.” If the old vamps destroyed men for the fun of it, the new vamps had a social agenda.

Small wonder such a fraught symbol soon found her way onto the screen. In 1913, Bert Finch and Alice Eis performed “The Vampire Dance” on film, which culminated in the woman putting the bite on her partner. In 1915, the vamp became a popular trend with the release of A Fool There Was, starring a twenty-four-year-old unknown, Theda Bara.

With A Fool There Was, the lineage from nineteenth-century art to Hollywood movies was made complete. The movie was an adaptation of a hit play about a middle-aged businessman who loses everything over a sneering vamp. The play, in turn, was inspired by Rudyard Kipling’s poem, “The Vampire”; the poem was inspired by a painting of the same name by Philip Burne-Jones, which showed at the New Gallery in London in 1897. A smiling woman was depicted as leaning over the bloodless, lifeless body of a young man sprawled on a bed.

As the first vamp star, Theda Bara (real name: Theodosia Goodman) became a sensation. The Fox publicity machine promoted the Ohio-born Bara as an exotic and had her give interviews in darkened rooms, with incense burning. The vamp’s line, “Kiss me, my fool”—invariably repeated by women as “Kiss me, you fool”—became a catchphrase, the “Go ahead, make my day” or “Show me the money” of 1915.

Before Bara, there had only been one type of heroine in American movies. Now there were two kinds. A Fool There Was spawned a rash of vamp films and vamp actresses. Unfortunately, most of them today are just names in yellowed news clippings. Their movies are lost. Of the many vamp films Bara made, only A Fool There Was remains, and it is, to modern eyes, nearly unwatchable. Bara is badly lit, and the film is without close-ups. It’s primitive even by 1915 standards.

The vamp trend in movies declined by the early twenties. One sure indication the vamp was losing her hold on the public imagination was that she was beginning to get respect. Theater Magazine ran a pro-vamp column in 1921:

Where is there a successful play without the vamp?… Instead of destroying the career of the Vampire, let’s encourage her to preach her doctrine of equal enfranchisement for women, till we, weak men, learn the lesson forever, that the modern woman is not accountable to anyone for her actions but herself.

The image of the vamp embodies two fantasies, one paranoid, one romantic. The paranoid fantasy is that sex can kill you. The romantic fantasy is that it just might be worth it. But as the social climate of the twenties got more liberal, the atmosphere of danger that the vamp required for her existence had disappeared. The figure of the sexual, independent woman might have been controversial, but it was no longer terrifying. MGM was, in a sense, taking a step backward when it revived the vamp trend with Garbo in 1926. But Garbo soon transmuted the type into a vehicle for her own lofty imagination.

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MGM PLAYER GRETA GARBO arrived in the United States in the summer of 1925, and no sooner had she learned English than she was complaining about her roles. “Always the vamp, I am; always the woman of no heart,” she said.

Even before she’d learned English, she was telling the press, through a translator on the set of The Temptress, that she hoped for a chance to play “good girls.” When MGM cast her again as a vamp (in Flesh and the Devil) she walked off the lot and stayed home for a few days. Following that film, the studio gave her yet another vamp assignment, and she went on a full-fledged strike. She informed the studio she wanted to play “no more bad womens.”

Garbo had not played “bad womens” in Europe. In Sweden, under the direction of her mentor, Mauritz Stiller, she had played an ingenue in The Saga of Gosta Berling (1924), and in Germany, in G. W. Pabst’s The Joyless Street (1925), she had played an impoverished homebody, who almost gets conned into working in a brothel.

Norma Shearer’s ascendancy had been the result of unflagging drive, determination, and charm. Garbo’s was a triumph of natural talent and amazing luck. She was born into relative poverty in Stockholm on September 18, 1905. When her father died in June, 1920, she had to go to work. She was a lather girl in a barber shop and a clerk in a department store. The young Garbo—then Greta Gustafsson—was cheerful, chubby, and stagestruck, and she dreamed of becoming an actress. So did a lot of teenagers.

Unlike most, Garbo found chances to get in front of a camera. She made a pair of advertising shorts and got a role as a bathing beauty in a no-budget Swedish comedy, Peter the Tramp (1922). These barely mattered, but two subsequent breaks changed her life. She was accepted on a full scholarship to Sweden’s Royal Dramatic Theatre. And the following year, the school sent her to audition for Mauritz Stiller, who cast her in Gosta Berling and changed her last name to Garbo. While still a teenager, Garbo became the protégée of the most powerful man in Swedish filmmaking.

When Louis B. Mayer offered an MGM contract to Stiller, the director insisted that Mayer also sign Garbo. So it happened that Greta Garbo, a poor girl from the other side of the world, rather passively stumbled into the dream position of contract player at the most glamorous studio in Hollywood.

Typical of its corporate philosophy, MGM separated Garbo from Stiller for her first movie, but The Torrent was better than most pictures, and it had the advantage of Monta Bell as director. Garbo played Leonora, a girl from a poor farming family, who is in love with the landlord’s son (Ricardo Cortez). His mother prevents their marriage, and so Leonora leaves town to become a great operatic soprano. Garbo was much more believable as a soprano in the days before the public got to hear her contralto voice.

Read anything about Garbo at this stage of her life and one learns of her homesickness, her fears, her terrible insecurity. None of that seeps through to the screen. Indeed, the most striking thing about Garbo in The Torrent is how relaxed she is. At the end of the film, Leonora is an internationally acclaimed prima donna, a poised and worldly woman of about thirty-five. Garbo, twenty years old, separated from family and friends in a strange new country, acting in Swedish while her costar acts in English, brings it off. As Leonora, she meets up with her former lover and finds him graying, paunchy, and prematurely old. Garbo’s reaction is perfect: ruefulness mixed with genuine amusement, as well as relief to find she’s no longer interested in him.

The Torrent was not a vamp movie, though in early film histories, it is sometimes dismissed as such. It was The Temptress—about a woman wreaking havoc on a South American construction crew—that had the distinction of introducing the Garbo vamp to the public. Garbo’s vamp was different from those of other actresses. She was not evil, but dull and reactive. She was not motivated by a desire to do harm but by one thing only—lust. “She is portrayed as a woman with an icy contempt for men,” critic Robert Payne wrote of the film. “But every movement of her body and glance suggest otherwise.” It was Garbo doing the moving, and Garbo doing the glancing. It was Garbo who chose to play the vamp as a victim of her own impulses.

The Temptress was a silly picture, and Garbo’s performance—all quivering nostrils and shallow breathing—was little better than that. But at least she stayed true to her vision. Presented with a vamp role, Garbo had two unattractive choices as an actress. She could play the evil caricature that anyone else would have played. Or she could play the vamp as completely out of control and lacking in self-awareness. Garbo didn’t want to play bad women, so she chose the marginally more interesting second path of playing the vamp as a cipher.

Seeing this beautiful cipher, the critics and public went crazy. Life magazine critic, Robert E. Sherwood, the future Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, cast off all inhibition:

Greta Garbo in The Temptress knocked me for a loop. I had seen Miss Garbo … in The Torrent and had been mildly impressed by her visual effectiveness. In The Temptress, however, this effectiveness proves positively devastating … I am powerless to formulate an opinion on her dramatic technique—but there is no room for argument as to the efficacy of her allure.

Great review, but now Garbo was stuck playing vamps. Under threat of suspension, she took on the role of Felicitas in Flesh and the Devil, a vamp who was more evil than the one in The Temptress. How evil was she? She drives a wedge between best friends. When she hears someone praying, she goes into a raving fit. And when she dies, by falling through ice in a frozen lake, the moment of her death is presented like the lifting of a pestilence. If Felicitas was not the devil incarnate, she was certainly meant to be seen as Satan’s instrument. Yet once again, Garbo didn’t play it that way. She played Felicitas as empty-headed, single-minded, and weak, weak, weak. She played her, essentially, as a sex-crazed numskull.

Actors who refuse to play evil characters and instead insist on remaining sympathetic have a way of wrecking movies. What kept Garbo from rendering Flesh and the Devil pointless was that she consistently came up with approaches that were more bizarre and absorbing than the cliché she was hired to play.

Take the communion scene, a monumental moment of on-screen perversity. Kneeling at the altar, Felicitas turns the communion chalice around in order to drink from the spot her lover’s mouth has just touched. Any other actress in 1926 would have played that with a leer that said, “Look how bad I am, I’m communicating my illicit passion while taking communion.” But Garbo played Felicitas as so overcome with passion that she is oblivious. His mouth was there, so she drinks voluptuously from the same spot. Period. As a result, the moment works in the way it was intended, the connection between eucharistic wine and blood calling to mind the bloodthirsty vamps of the nineteenth century. But it’s Garbo who adds the genuinely twisted note, turning religious rapture into a metaphor for physical rapture.

She plays the whole film as if inflamed by lust. Early in the movie, she seduces Leo, a young soldier, in the garden during a ball. The subsequent love scenes made the film notorious. They were horizontal, for one thing, and the kisses were open-mouthed. They were also, to an extent, real, and the public knew it: Garbo fell in love with her costar, matinee idol John Gilbert, during the making of the film, and the picture caught them in the first heat of romance. Garbo crawls on top of him, kissing him, rubbing her face against his, like a cat on a catnip mouse.

Garbo never shied away from saying how much she hated vamps. When assigned a vamp role, she complained to Mayer. She complained to Thalberg. She complained to friends and occasionally to the press. Unlike Theda Bara, who tried to play up the feminist aspects of the vamp, Garbo distanced herself from the role at every opportunity. “I am not vamp. I do not know why they think I am,” she brooded. “In Germany, I play sweet, innocent girls … Never am I wicked type. Here they say, yes, I am … I will not always play the bad woman. They cannot force me, maybe I will rather do nothing at all?” On another occasion, some time later, she made a typically whimsical pronouncement on the subject: “Screen vamps make me laugh tremendously. The fact that I am considered one makes me laugh even more.”

When, in the fall of 1926, Garbo went on strike against MGM, she demanded two things: more money, and no more vamp roles. Garbo wanted a lot more money—a raise from six hundred to five thousand dollars a week. But her concern over roles was just as central. Mauritz Stiller, now at Paramount, wrote on her behalf to Mayer:

The reason that Miss Garbo has been so unhappy here, notwithstanding her success, is simply the number of vamp roles which she has been forced to play and which, she keenly feels, are outside her sphere. You saw her in Gosta Berling and you know it was because of her great success in this production that you gave her a contract. In this picture she was an entirely different type—an innocent girl—not a vamp …

Garbo’s strike lasted almost eight months, and in the end MGM caved in and gave her most of what she wanted. Under the new contract, Garbo had no direct say about her projects, but by now Mayer and Thalberg knew who they were dealing with. Out of that push and pull between Garbo and MGM came a new type, the virtuous vamp, the good-bad woman, the glorious, notorious woman that Garbo would play for the rest of her career.

Garbo’s first film under her new contract was Love, a modern-dress adaptation of Anna Karenina. Unlike in her vamp films, she played a sympathetic and intelligent woman in love. But many associations of the vamp, conventions reaching back deep into the nineteenth century, remained.

This was the new Garbo character, a femme fatale, but with a key difference. The Garbo woman was ultimately good. The Garbo woman was capable of love, though not just any love. The love of the Garbo woman was love on the scale of the all-powerful vamp. It was a love deeper and more consuming than anything on earth. Yet it was not destructive but restorative. It was love with intimations of the divine about it, love as the source of salvation.

Certain elements of the femme fatale in the Garbo persona simply had to do with her essence on screen, which resembled the nineteenth-century femme fatale in its languor, self-absorption, and agelessness. Garbo was very young, but her aura said mid-thirties. In Love, she was twenty-one, playing the mother of an eleven-year-old boy.

Other vamp resemblances had to do with theme. Garbo’s vamp films were about illicit sex. So was just about every Garbo film that followed. The sex was premarital in The Mysterious Lady (1928), A Woman of Affairs (1929), The Single Standard (1929), Romance (1930), Inspiration (1931), Mata Hari (1931), Grand Hotel (1932), and Queen Christina (1933). It was extramarital in Love, The Kiss (1929), The Painted Veil (1934), Anna Karenina (1935), and Conquest (1937). In Anna Christie (1930), Garbo would play a prostitute. In Susan Lenox (1931), As You Desire Me (1932), and Camille (1936), a kept woman.

What remains? Wild Orchids (1929), which she spends contemplating adultery with a handsome prince (Nils Asther). And Ninotchka (1939) and Two-Faced Woman (1941), the two change-of-pace comedies that came at the end of her career.

Sex was dangerous in the vamp films. It would remain dangerous in Love, A Woman of Affairs, The Single Standard, The Kiss, Mata Hari, Grand Hotel, Queen Christina, and Anna Karenina and other Garbo vehicles. The difference now was that though sex could kill, love could save—often through sacrifice on the part of the woman.

Garbo loved depicting sacrifice. The roles she chose late in her career, when a new contract gave her power to choose, demonstrate that: Queen Christina, Anna Karenina, Camille. As early as 1925, she wanted to play the sacrificial heroine in Michael Arlen’s The Green Hat. In 1929, she expressed hope that MGM would cast her as Joan of Arc. Garbo soon found that the sacrificial femme fatale was not only a role congenial to her but a useful vehicle for expressing her romantic nature.

All this sacrifice, as well as the recurrent religious imagery, was balanced by a carnal element in her silent days. The young Garbo was a great screen lover, and her love scenes still have impact today. Take the exquisitely shot interlude with Conrad Nagel, in the early moments of The Mysterious Lady. She is lying back on a couch as Nagel kisses her. In a tight close-up, we see just her eyes, which she opens, and then closes. Critical dissection cannot reveal why that moment is so moving. We can only observe that in those seconds something temporal seems to become ideal. In such moments Garbo is literally a sex goddess, or more accurately, a saint of sex, assuring us that there are moments of physical ecstasy so profound that they take on a spiritual dimension.

Garbo’s best and worst films are her talkies, and the worst of those are unwatchable, save for Garbo. But Garbo’s silents all have something to recommend them. Their dreamy, gauzy unreality is the perfect showcase for Garbo’s unreal beauty. Wild Orchids was beautifully lit. The Single Standard had the advantage of Garbo’s playing opposite Nils Asther’s Hemingway parody. (He plays a strapping young painter with a dark mustache who loves sailing, boxing, and safaris.) The Kiss, as trivial a story as one could make involving a shooting and a murder trial, had Jacques Feyder’s witty direction. Best of all, there was A Woman of Affairs, which gave audiences the Garbo heroine in a fully distilled form.

The picture was an adaptation of The Green Hat, which Garbo had wanted to do since seeing Katharine Cornell in the role on Broadway. She played Diana, a rich, fun-loving Englishwoman, who, after being separated from her true love (John Gilbert), goes ahead and marries her second choice, a worshipful fellow named David. Unfortunately this David turns out to be an embezzler, who kills himself on their wedding night in order to avoid arrest. Diana never reveals the cause of David’s suicide. To keep his name clear, she says that he killed himself “for decency.” Everyone takes that to mean that David found out something so disgusting about Diana’s past that he threw himself out the window on their wedding night.

At this point, the scenario of A Woman of Affairs looks very like those Gloria Swanson films of the early twenties: A woman is scorned as loose, but she isn’t, really. The difference is that now Diana goes out and makes the gossip true. She goes to the Continent, where in old Hollywood movies no one ever goes except to consult with a specialist or have lots of sex—and Diana isn’t sick. Over the course of the next six years, she takes up with a succession of men and becomes a “woman of affairs,” but she still dreams of her first love. She is, an intertitle tells us, “a gallant lady trying to forget.”

In The Temptress, Garbo had told her lover, “I told you I love you. I have never said that to any man.” In A Woman of Affairs, she tells her lover, “I have never said I love you to any man—but you!” By now, the confession is more than a flattering tidbit. It defines a new standard of virtue. “Thank you for never having been in love,” Robert Taylor will tell Garbo in Camille. Never having been in love is Garbo’s version of virginity.

We understand. Once Garbo declares her love, it wipes the slate clean of any past relationship. It does more than that. It also wipes away the stigma of any future fling, as well. In Susan Lenox, as in A Woman of Affairs, Garbo will be separated from her lover and have a series of relationships with other men. But it is always understood that she is not frivolous; that she remains virtuous and in no further need of redemption. In what besides Garbo movies does a sincere profession of faith absolve the believer of past and future transgression? In Christianity, and nothing else. For Garbo, declaring her love is like becoming saved. Once saved, nothing can unsave her—not even her own reckless behavior.

Depending on one’s point of view, the bulk of Garbo’s films can be seen either as touching Christian allegories or acts of sub-version that use the metaphor of Christianity to assert the divinity and soul-enriching power of erotic love. I think they’re both. To be sure, there is something audacious about a 1929 movie appropriating Christian metaphor to justify sexual adventure. But there is also something warm and open-hearted about Garbo’s films that feels more genuinely Christian in spirit than the pronouncements of those censors who would soon inflict their biases.

Indeed, if there is a secret to Garbo’s power, it may very well be that she combined religion and sexuality as forcefully as did the Renaissance painters. They hid the sexual content in a religious context, while Garbo wrapped religion in sex drama. The Christian metaphor may not have been consciously noted in Garbo’s time, but it was there and may, in part, account for the almost religious fervor of her following.

The end of A Woman of Affairs finds Garbo committing the ultimate sacrifice. She sends her lover back to his grief-stricken wife and commits suicide by crashing her car into a tree. Two years removed from her career as a screen vamp, Garbo was not the whore with a heart of gold—or a pathetic woman of the streets—or any other sentimental figure. She had become her own creation. She had turned the embodiment of misogynistic fantasy from a devil to a saint, without dimming the power of her personality or allure.

The film’s last shot shows her old enemy, the man who prevented her marriage to his son, kneeling down, lifting her hand and kissing it like a pilgrim at a shrine. Two and a half years after playing a hallucinating whore that sees Jesus in a café, Garbo had transformed her screen image into that of Jesus and Mary Magdalene combined.