The Kiss (MGM, 1929)

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

Last night (Sunday, May 19) Turner Classic Movies showed on their “Silent Sunday Showcase” series a double bill of two MGM silents featuring Greta Garbo: her last one, The Kiss (1929); and Love (1927). The Kiss was not only Garbo’s last silent film but also the last one MGM made; by 1929 both the studio and Garbo herself were worried about whether American audiences would want to see and hear her in a film, and in particular what kinds of roles would showcase her and how big a problem her Swedish accent would be. The Kiss was based on a story by George M. Saville (though I’m not sure whether it was a previously published work or written especially for the film; the Wikipedia page on the movie indicates that the story was published before the movie but doesn’t give a history of its previous appearance). It was adapted for the screen by former Ernst Lubitsch collaborator Hanns Kräly (whose collaboration ended when Lubitsch caught Kräly having an affair with Mrs. Lubitsch, and rather than react in the what-the-hell way of a Lubitsch character he had a jealous hissy-fit and broke off their professional relationship) and was directed by French expatriate Jacques Feyder. Feyder’s career at MGM seems to have been pretty much limited to making the alternate foreign-language versions of movies featuring MGM’s biggest stars – he worked with Garbo again on the German-language version of Anna Christie (1930), Garbo’s first talkie, and largely because of him Garbo liked that film better than the English-language one directed by Clarence Brown.

In a 1932 article Dwight Macdonald proclaimed Feyder as the only truly talented director Garbo had worked with (later in the sound era she’d get better directors, including Rouben Mamoulian, George Cukor and Lubitsch), but The Kiss is an estimable movie but hardly a great one. It does seem to have been cranked out on the assembly line, and by this time Garbo was getting so bored with roles casting her as a faithless wife she’d actually gone to Louis B. Mayer to complain, “Always the vamp I am, always the woman with no heart.” In this one, set in France in 1929, Garbo plays Irene Guarry, unhappy wife of businessman Charles Guarry (Anders Randolf). She’s carrying on an affair with attorney André Dubail (Conrad Nagel, on the eve of a short-lived stint at superstardom simply because he was the first major actor who established he had a recordable voice; producers casting a male lead kept saying, “Get Nagel – he can talk,” and Nagel himself complained that he and his wife could no longer go to the movies for their own entertainment because they couldn’t find anything playing that he wasn’t in), though it doesn’t appear as if their affair has got anywhere near consummation. Charles is not only having his wife investigated to see if he can dredge up evidence that she’s having an affair, he’s also about to go bankrupt. Lassalle (Holmes Herbert), an attorney friend of his, offers to bail him out, and Charles decides to visit him that night and work out the details. But while driving to Lassalle’s place Charles feels poorly and decides to abandon the trip and go home. By coincidence (or authorial fiat), he catches Irene fending off the annoying advances of Lassalle’s son Pierre (Lew Ayres in his first major role; in his interview for the book The Celluloid Muse Lewis Milestone, who directed Ayres in his star-making role as Paul in All Quiet on the Western Front, made it seem as if Ayres had been an unknown before then, but he’d been big enough to land a role opposite Garbo the year before).

Charles sees Irene and the 18-year-old Pierre kissing (hence the title) and he freaks out. There’s a tense confrontation between the three of them which we don’t get to see until the very end in a flashback. What we know is that Pierre emerges from the room, his face bloodied from the struggle between them, and announces that Charles is dead. Irene is arrested for Charles’s murder, and her lawyer and sort-of boyfriend André agrees to defend her at trial. (Remember that this is taking place under French law, under which you’re assumed guilty and have to prove your innocence.) André manages to get the judge and jury to believe that Charles actually committed suicide over the threat of his impending bankruptcy, but we finally get a flashback showing us what really happened in that room: Charles was threatening to kill Pierre and Irene shot him to defend Pierre from her husband’s assault. Since we can now see it was justifiable homicide, Irene and André get together at the end. The Kiss was actually released with a synchronized soundtrack – not only is there a musical accompaniment adapted by Dr. William Axt mostly from themes by Tchaikovsky (including the Romeo and Juliet overture and the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies) but we hear a thump from the back room as the body falls and shortly after that we hear a telephone ring as Irene remains uncertain for several rings before she finally answers it. So The Kiss counts as a “sound film” in Sergei Eisenstein’s definition rather than either a silent or a talkie – an in-between status that had several chapters of the Better Business Bureau warning moviegoers, “‘Sound’ Doesn’t Always Mean ‘Talk.’” The Kiss is a well-made movie but it’s also the sort of film that has an air of the same-old same-old about it. Garbo was clearly tired of playing unhappily married women involved in extra-relational activities, and ironically, instead of wrecking her career, sound would actually broaden the kinds of roles she could play and make her an even bigger star.