The Garden of Eden (Feature Productions, United Artists, 1928)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, November 1) my husband Charles and I watched a film on Turner Classic Movies’ “Silent Sunday Nights” program that I’d never heard of before but which turned out to be an utter delight. It was called The Garden of Eden and was made in 1928 by Feature Productions and United Artists. The Garden of Eden began life as a 1926 play called Der Garten Eden: Komödie, written by two Europeans, Rudolph Bernauer and Rudolf Österreicher (that last name just means “Austrian”). It was adapted for Broadway in 1927 by Avery Hopwood, five years after his play The Gold Diggers received its first film adaptation (it would later become the basis for Gold Diggers on Broadway in 1929 and the version you’re most likely to have seen, Gold Diggers of 1933) for a cast including Barbara Barondess, Harlan Briggs, Miriam Hopkins, Douglass Montgomery, and Alison Skipworth. That version ran for only 29 performances but it was good enough for producer John W. Considine, who snagged the movie rights as a vehicle for his star Corinne Griffith. Griffith was nicknamed “The Orchid Lady” because her beauty supposedly resembled that of the exotic flower (though she didn’t seem all that attractive to me). He hired Lewis Milestone to direct the film after his two successes for Howard Hughes, the service comedy Two Arabian Knights and the gangster drama The Racket (both 1927), and to write the movie he hired Hanns Kräly for the scenario and George Marion, Jr. to write the intertitles. Kräly was a quite remarkable writer who came to Hollywood with his frequent collaborator, director Ernst Lubitsch. Indeed, he was to Lubitsch what Dudley Nichols was to John Ford, Robert Riskin to Frank Capra, or Charles Bennett to Alfred Hitchcock: the early collaborator who helped set the style of a major director with an auteur reputation. Unfortunately the Lubitsch/Kräly collaboration broke up in 1930 when Lubitsch caught Kräly having an affair with Helene Krauss, then Mrs. Lubitsch. Rather than react in the detached “oh, what the hell, men will be men and women will be women” way of a character in a Lubitsch movie, Lubitsch got ferociously jealous and never worked with Kräly again, while Kräly’s own wife Elsie divorced him over it. Though Lubitsch didn’t direct The Garden of Eden, the film is full of so many of the so-called “Lubitsch touches” one wonders just how much credit Kräly deserves for that part of Lubitsch’s style.

The plot centers around young Viennese woman Toni Lebrun (Corinne Griffith), who’s just received a correspondence-school degree in opera singing (the idea that you could learn to sing without any evidence that you were recording your lessons and therefore the people running the school wouldn’t know how well you were doing is preposterous enough on its face). Though Vienna was well known as a major operatic center, Toni leaves her aunt and uncle, who raised her and owned a pretzel shop they were hoping she would take over when they were ready to retire, to travel to Budapest to take a job singing at a venue called the “Palais de Paris.” Once she arrives (after she leaves her sandwich behind on the train and, in a typical Kräly touch, the porter who finds it eats it himself), she learns that the “Palais de Paris” isn’t an opera house at all. Instead it’s a high-end cabaret whose butch owner, Madame Bauer (Maude George), hires attractive young women to dance and, it’s hinted, prostitute themselves to the rich men who are the place’s main clientele. Madame Bauer asks Toni to show her legs (“Don’t you want to hear my voice?” Toni naïvely asks) and, for her first number, offers her a super-scanty costume. Toni refuses to wear it and the cabaret’s costume designer, Rosa (Louise Dresser, an appropriate last name considering her character’s occupation), supports her. Instead Madame Bauer dresses Toni in a so-called “Puritan” costume, only the material is so sheer that when the stage lights are shone through it, all of Toni’s womanly charms are instantly exposed. (Remember that the Production Code was not promulgated until 1930 and therefore this is a genuinely “pre-Code” film.) After her performance attracts the attention of young, rakish, slimeball aristocrat Henry D’Avril (Lowell Sherman, who’d got a reputation for playing sexy villains when he seduced and impregnated Lillian Gish in D. W. Griffith’s 1920 film Way Down East), Madame Bauer locks Toni in a room with D’Avril. Thanks to more byplay with lights (this film is full of lights that go on and off rapidly as various characters manipulate switches), we see flashes of the struggle that goes on between them as Toni desperately tries to hold on to her virtue in the face of D’Avril’s assaults. Rosa ultimately rescues Toni, which gets them both fired.

Much to Toni’s astonishment, Rosa then announces that the two are taking a two-week vacation in Monte Carlo and staying at the prestigious (and expensive) Garden of Eden hotel. Like us, Toni is wondering how on earth Rosa can pay for all this. When they register at the Garden of Eden, Rosa signs the book as “Baroness von Garten and her daughter Antoinette.” Then Rosa explains that she actually is a baroness, though she lost her husband during World War I and with him went all her money. So she works as a costume dresser 50 weeks per year and saves her money, then splurges on a two-week stint living the life she formerly had year-round when she could still afford it. While they’re staying at the Garden of Eden, Toni attracts the attention of nice rich guy Richard Dupont (Charles Ray, a silent-era star whom writer/director Garson Kanin met in the early 1940’s, when he was reduced to doing extra work to survive; Kanin asked Ray if it were true that during his star years he’d had his teeth polished every day, and Ray said it was, though “not every day – not 365 days a year – just on the days when I was shooting”) and his not-so-nice uncle, Col. Dupont (Edward Martindel). At one point Richard tries to get Toni’s attention by blinking the lights in his room across the street from hers, and Toni tries to respond the same way – only the gimmick is caught by everyone else in Richard’s building and they start blinking their lights, too. Richard insists that he wants to marry Toni, and his uncle the colonel, who’s also attracted to Toni, gives him an ultimatum: get Toni to accept his proposal within the next half-hour or the colonel will swoop in and marry her himself. Just then Rosa gives Toni a dose of sleeping powder, so Richard is frantically trying to wake her up to accept his proposal while his uncle is giving him hand signals indicating that he has just five, then four, minutes left. To make matters even worse, Richard has taken a sleeping powder of his own (was he thinking that if he fell asleep in Toni’s bedroom, his uncle would have to let them marry to avoid a scandal?), though the two of them fortunately wake up enough that Toni accepts Richard’s proposal at long last.

The two set up a wedding for the lobby of the Garden of Eden, but it can’t take place until all Richard’s relatives arrive (there’s a laconic Marion title which says the original Eve was lucky because Adam had no relatives), including his Uncle Henri. “I’ve been to all his weddings; why can’t he come to mine?” Richard complains. Unfortunately, “Uncle Henri” turns out to be the scumbag Henri D’Avril from the Palais de Paris, who immediately “outs” Toni as a poor cabaret girl and not a baroness’s daughter at all. Rosa replies that she’s legally adopted Toni and therefore she is a baroness’s daughter, but Richard’s family is unmoved. They determine to break up the wedding and offer Toni a settlement to leave him alone – Richard doesn’t know his family is trying to buy off Toni, but Toni doesn’t know that he doesn’t know that. She virtuously tears up the check and throws the pieces at Richard’s face, then tears off the elaborate wedding dress he’d bought her and flees the scene in her underwear. Richard chases after her and ultimately they reconcile and get married after all. The Garden of Eden is a marvelous movie, though at least one sequence – involving a song both Richard and his uncle claim to have written for Toni, and both play for her – really cries out for sound. Indeed I found myself wishing that someone would have remade the entire movie as a talkie in the 1930’s, and I know just who should have been in it, too: Carole Lombard as Toni and Cary Grant as Richard. (I’ve long thought Lombard and Grant would have been ideal co-stars for screwball comedy, though the one film they actually made together, 1939’s In Name Only, was a melodramatic tear-jerker instead of a comedy.)

I mention that because the two stars of The Garden of Eden are the weakest links in the film as it stands. Corinne Griffith doesn’t wear that well; she’s attractive but hardly drop-dead gorgeous in the looks department and her acting consists mainly of grimacing and looking queasy whenever something bad happens to her character. Charles Ray is stolid and dependable-looking but hardly the acme of sexiness, either – and it doesn’t help that he and Lowell Sherman look surprisingly similar. One expects more of a visual differentiation between hero and villain, though that may just be a convention of how roles like these were cast in later movies. But the rest of the cast comes through with flying colors – I especially liked Maude George as the butch proprietress of the Palais de Paris, even though the film carefully avoids any hints of her own sexual interest in the dancers there – and Louise Dresser turns in a properly concerned reading of her role. The Garden of Eden, presented here in a 2002 reissue print from Flicker Alley with a soundtrack by Robert Israel, mostly playing organ but with at least two interludes on piano (Toni’s “Puritan” dance at the Palais de Paris, which Israel accompanied with the “Barcarolle” from Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann, and a later scene in which he plays a Chopin nocturne, though I couldn’t identify which one), is actually a delightful film and a welcome rediscovery as well as a Schreiber movie, since though Lewis Milestone was an excellent director its appeal is really much more from the sensibility of writer Kräly.