Love (MGM, 1927)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Afterwards Turner Classic Movies showed Love, made two years before The Kiss and MGM’s immediate follow-up to the mega-hit Flesh and the Devil, a melodrama in which (though the story is set in Germany) Garbo plays the Spanish dancer Felicitas, who does her level best to wreck the lives of the two men who love her, Leo von Harden (John Gilbert) and Ulrich von Eltz (Lars Hanson, who’d also been her leading man in her biggest Swedish film, The Saga of Gösta Berling, and was I believe the only actor who worked with her on both sides of the Atlantic). Audiences had so thrilled to the love scenes between Garbo and Gilbert (they fell in love – or at least lust – with each other for real, too), and MGM’s production chiefs, Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg, looked hard for a suitable property for the next Garbo-Gilbert vehicle. They found it in, of all places, Leo Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina, which they assigned to screenwriter Lorna Moon to adapt and reshape into a big movie for their big stars. The plot of the movie is basically that of the book – unhappily married Anna Karenina (Greta Garbo) meets dashing, handsome Russian army officer Captain Count Andrei Vronsky (John Gilbert) when her carriage is stranded in a snowstorm on the way to St. Petersburg. He takes her to an inn, where apparently he’s well known already because the innkeeper automatically puts his belongings in her room, figuring they’re there for some hanky-panky. Only he virtuously refuses the invitation and takes his stuff back to his own room.

Anna is unhappily married to Senator Karenin (Brandon Hurst), though they’ve had a son, Serezha (Philippe de Lacey), whom Anna dotes on. Anna and Vronsky do a lot of heavy petting and necking – most of it while they’re both standing up – but Karenin catches them and worries about what the scandal will do to his political career. Vronsky gets threatened with discharge from his regiment – it seems that for generations Vronskys have served in that regiment and if the current Vronsky washes out over his affair with Anna, that will disgrace the family forever. (At this point my husband Charles started calling out, “October!,” reflecting his hope that the Russian Revolution would happen already and free these people from their ridiculous social expectations.) Anna is ready to leave Karenin and flee with Vronsky, but Karenin makes it clear that if she does so she’ll never get to see her son Serezha again. Like The Kiss, Love gets stronger emotionally and dramatically as it progresses, and Garbo’s acting – though more overwrought and openly emotional than what we’re familiar with once sound had made it possible for her to be more reserved and subtle – expertly delineates the impossible dilemma she’s been put in: your lover or your son? Gilbert is also relatively restrained for him – director Edmund Goulding (who two years later would publish an article proclaiming the innate superiority of sound over silent films, and would go on to direct Gloria Swanson in her first talkie, The Trespasser, and give her the biggest hit of her career) is able to calm him down enough to make him a figure of romantic mystery instead of an appallingly over-energetic character. (Gilbert’s best films were made back-to-back in 1925 by strong directors who got him to calm down: King Vidor in The Big Parade and Erich von Stroheim in The Merry Widow.)

In The Shattered Silents, his book on the silent-to-sound transition, Alexander Walker said that the difference between Gilbert and Rudolph Valentino was that Valentino always seemed to be holding something in reserve whereas “Gilbert gave all of himself, utterly” – which is why Valentino seems more watchable and more “modern” today. Gilbert’s quick descent into career oblivion once sound came in has had a lot of nonsense written about it; my own conclusion, based on the Gilbert talkies I’ve seen, is there was nothing wrong with his voice per se but he never learned how to act with it, how to vary his inflections to convey emotions. A contemporary reviewer of Gilbert’s first talkie, His Glorious Night, seemed to have the same idea when he said Gilbert’s line deliveries had all the passion of one assistant director asking another to lunch. Love – at least in the version released in the U.S. – had an unexpectedly happy ending in which, three years after the main action, Senator Karenin dies and Anna and Vronsky are able to get together and presumably live happily ever after. Charles reacted quite strongly to this – it startled him completely – and right after that TCM showed the European ending, in which Anna commits suicide by throwing herself under a train the way she did in Tolstoy’s novel. After the showing, TCM host Jacqueline Stewart explained that MGM shot both endings and allowed their exhibitors to pick which one to use.

Fortunately, Garbo get to remake this story as a talkie in 1935, under Tolstoy’s original title, with David O. Selznick producing, Clarence Brown directing, and Garbo’s friend (and sometimes girlfriend) Salka Viertel and Clemence Dane as writers. This time Selznick laid down the law to the “suits” at MGM and insisted that the film would end with Anna’s suicide. He also cast it considerably better, with Fredric March as Vronsky and Basil Rathbone as Karenin – and Rathbone was good-looking enough that the unworkability of the Karenins’ marriage was depicted by his cold-fish mannerisms rather than physical repulsiveness. Rathbone was also a victim of Garbo’s attitude; he showed up on set one day with a photo of Garbo and asked her to autograph it for him. She refused. For years Rathbone was stung by her decision; it wasn’t, he’d tell friends, like he was just some crazed fan waving a photo and a pen in her face. He was actually her colleague, and her willful rudeness to a fellow actor, especially one who was working with her, probably got replicated a lot in her dealings with the rest of Hollywood and I suspect explained why, though she was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress three times (for Anna Christie, Camille and Ninotchka), she never won. What’s more, her first two defeats were at the hands of other MGM stars: Norma Shearer (Mrs. Irving Thalberg) for The Divorcée and the abysmal Luise Rainer for The Good Earth.