Torrent (MGM, Cosmopolitan, 1926)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After This Is Spinal Tap Charles and I watched Torrent, the film with which Turner Classic Movies revived its “Silent Sunday Showcase” after the month-long hiatus during which they did their “Summer Under the Stars” feature, highlighting a major actor and showing their films over an entire day. Torrent was the first American feature made by Greta Garbo since MGM signed her ini 1925 without a clear idea what to do with her. After a series of minor parts in films in her native Sweden, Garbo had become a major star in Europe in a 1924 epic called The Saga of Gösta Berling, directed by Mauritz Stiller. MGM studio head Louis B. Mayer actually wanted to put Stiller under contract, but he insisted he’d sign only if the studio took Garbo as well. As they were signing the contracts Mayer told Stiller, “Tell her that in America we don’t like fat women,” and Garbo accordingly went on a diet and lost weight. Accounts differ as to just what sort of relationship Garbo and Stiller had off-screen; it was widely assumed at the time that they were lovers, though later biographers have claimed Stiller was Gay. The two are not mutually exclusive; throughout her life Garbo was known for seducing men who were otherwise Gay, including natural-foods doctor Gayelord Hauser and designer Cecil Beaton.

Torrent was based on a novel by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, who had written the books The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and Blood and Sand, both of which had become huge hits for Rudolph Valentino. In fact, Blasco Ibá∫bez’s “name” was so important a selling point of the film that the main-title credit actually reads, Ibáñez’ TORRENT.” Set in Blasco Ibáñez’s native Spain – particularly Valencia, the orange-growing region (represented by a bilious tint throughout much of the film by a bilious tint that isn’t really yellow, orange, red or pink but a weird combination of the four) – Torrent is about two families, one noble and one common. The commoners are the Morenos, consisting of father Pedro (Edward Connelly), mother Isabella (Lillian Leighton), and their daughter Leonora (Greta Garbo). The nobles are Don Rafael Brull (Ricardo Cortez, top-billed – incidentally his true name was “Jacob Krantz” but the mavens of Hollywood decided to pass him off as an exotic Latin “type” in the Valentino mold) and his imperious mother, Doña Bernarda (Martha Mattox), who’s determined that Rafael run for deputy (essentially a serat in the Spanish legislature), marry well-to-do woman Remedios (Gergrude Olmstead), and live a scandal-free, blameless life. Only Don Rafael has fallen in love with Leonora Moreno, and the two plan to run off to Paris together so Leonora can pursue a career in opera, since she has a magnificent voice. (Obviously, since this is a silent film, we have to take that on faith.)

But when Doña Bernarda talks her son out of going with Leonora, she makes the trip alone, and in the space of one jump-cut she’s the celebrated diva “La Brunna” (“The Brown One,” which seems odd because even though Garbo is dark-haired here, in most of her later films she was the blonde her Swedish genes had made her). The the titular torrent – a storm that makes the river that rons throughout the town overflow its banks and takes out most of the Morenos’ home – happens and Don Rafael is on hand to rescue Leonora and save her life. But once again mom intervenes and keeps Don Rafael from going off with Leonora La Brunna, and the two don’t meet again until years later, when La Brunna is appearing as – guess what? – Carmen. Don Rafael comes backstage to meet her, but in an oddly sophisticated final scene for a silent movie he and she decide that rather than rekindle their relationship, she’s going to send him back to his wife and children (they’ve had two of them and we see them sleeping in the same bed). He notes that she doesn’t look any older, and she says, “It’s part of the job of a prima donna to always look young.” Obviously, it was really part of the job of the MGM makeup department to make Ricardo Cortez look 10 years older than he had in the previous part of the movie and to keep Garbo looking young and sexy. They did such a good job cosmetically aging Cortez that at first I thought he was his family’s aging, decrepit lawyer, Don Andrés (Tully Marshall, who turned in such great, creepy performances as perverts in Erich von Stroheim’s The Merry Widow and Queen Kelly), and only later did I realize it was Ricardo Cortez under all that horrible makeup.

There’s also some comic relief featuring Doña Bernarda negotiating a dowry with Remedios’s father, Don Matias (Mack Swain, an old veteran of Mack Sennett’s Keystone Studio who’d just made a major comeback as Charlie Chaplin’s roommate in The Gold Rush), a hog farmer who’s obviously more interested in his pigs than his daughter. (When the tuitular torrent happens his main concern is saving one pig.) Torrent was directed by hack Monta Bell, though Garbo met with Stiller regularly during the shoot and he essentially ghost-directed the film much the way George Cukor ghost-directed Vivien Leigh and Olivia De Havilland in Gone With the Wind even after he was officially fired from the film and replaced with Victor Fleming and Sam Wood. For the second Garbo film at MGM, The Temptress, Stiller was actually allowed to start the film but was fired in mid-shoot and replaced by Fred Niblo after the non-Swedish actors complained to Mayer that they were having a hard time communicating with him. Stiller would end up at Param,ount, directing the successful Hotel Imperial with Pola Negri, and then he died suddenly and it was Garbo’s task to clear out his apartment in Hollywood and decide which of his things to send back to his family in Sweden. Years later Garbo, a Method actress before Method acting existed, would draw on those memories for the famous scene in the 1933 film Queen Christina in which, having just lost her (heterosexual) virginity to John Gilbert as the Spanish ambassador, she takes stock of all the objects in the bedroom and says that in the future “I shall live much of my life in this room.”