Flesh and the Devil (MGM, 1926)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last Sunday, July 2, after I watched the 1980 film Inside Moves on Turner Classic Movies, I had kept the channel on for the “Silent Sunday Showcase” screening of the 1926 film Flesh and the Devil. This was a key film in creating the legend of Greta Garbo, though it has an odd and uncertain place in her filmography. Garbo, under her real name Greta Gustafsson, made her film debut in a short called How Not to Dress (1920), produced as a promo by the Stockholm department store that then employed her (and which for years afterwards sold copies of her employment record which, under “Reason for Leaving,” contained the fateful words: “To enter the films”). She then had a bit part as a maid in the dramatic feature En Lyckoriddare, described on imdb.com as an “[h]istorical drama which features Gösta Ekman as the dashing rogue who steals the heart of the ethereal Mary Johnson,” and her sister Alva Garbo also had a part in it. (Gösta Ekman was a star in the Swedish theatre who was instrumental in launching the career of Sweden’s next international superstar, Ingrid Bergman; as a child she had seen Ekman in a play and been so impressed she decided to make acting her career, and she got to co-star with Ekman in his last film, the original Swedish version of Intermezzo.) In 1924 Garbo got her big break when Swedish director Mauritz Stiller cast her as the female lead in his film The Saga of Gösta Berling, based on a novel by Selma Lagerlöf, and a year later Stiller arranged with German director G. W. Pabst for Garbo to appear in a film called The Joyless Street. When MGM offered Stiller a contract, he demanded that Garbo be signed with him, and as Louis B. Mayer was leaving Sweden he told Stiller to tell Garbo, “In America they don’t like fat women.”

Once they got to Hollywood Stiller and Garbo were separated and she was assigned hack director Monta Bell for her first American film, Torrent, based on a novel by Spanish writer Vicente Blasco Ibañez (two of whose other books, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and Blood and Sand, had become iconic roles for Rudolph Valentino). For her second MGM film, they gave her another Blasco Ibañez story, The Temptress, and actually assigned Stiller to direct – but then fired him after just 10 days of shooting after the other cast members complained they couldn’t communicate with him. Flesh and the Devil was her third American film, though there’s one contemporary poster for it that top-bills the male lead, John Gilbert, and at the bottom it says, “And introducing Greta Garbo.” It was directed by Clarence Brown, and though he’s usually written off as just another MGM hack, this time around I found his work genuinely impressive, full of little subtle touches. Flesh and the Devil takes place in Germany (though for years I misremembered the locale as Spain because Garbo’s character, “Felicitas,” is supposed to be Spanish) and deals with the German army in general and two well-born German junior officers, Leo von Harden (John Gilbert) and Ulrich von Eltz (Lars Hanson, Garbo’s leading man back home in The Saga of Gösta Berling and to my knowledge the only actor who worked with Garbo on both sides of the Atlantic), in particular. Of course Leo, like the actor playing him, is given to drinking, carousing, womanizing and all sorts of other bad habits for which Ulrich continually has to cover for him. In the opening scene the regiment is being called out at dawn and Leo, of course, hasn’t returned to the barracks, though Ulrich somehow makes him presentable and he shows up at roll call just in time.

When he’s not in the Army Leo lives with his mother (Eugenie Besserer, a year before she played Al Jolson’s mother in The Jazz Singer) and Hertha (Barbara Kent), a 16-year-old girl who’s identified as Leo’s sister on the film’s imdb.com page but seemed to me more like the “good girl” mom wants Leo and/or Ulrich to marry. Only mom’s plans for Leo get sidetracked when he meets Felicitas von Rhaden (Greta Garbo) and falls head over heels in love with her. Leo makes plans to run away with her as soon as his army enlistment is up in five months, but what Felicitas hasn’t bothered to tell him is that she already has a husband, Count von Rhaden (Marc MacDermott), who comes home unexpectedly and responds to his wife’s extra-relational activities by challenging him to a duel. That’s a bad move on his part because Leo kills him in the duel. Then the Army punishes Leo by extending his enlistment three more years and sending him to Africa. (Incidentally there’s a bit of uncertainty as to when this movie takes place; the fact that Germany has African colonies dates it as before World War I, when Germany was forced to give up its possessions in Africa as part of the Treaty of Versailles, but the film shows a poster for coloratura soprano Maria Ivogün, whose career began in 1913 and was at its height in the 1920’s when this film was made.) On his way to Africa Leo asks his close friend and blood-brother (we’ve seen them take the blood-brotherhood oath on the so-called “Isle of Friendship” in a flashback showing them as boys, with Philippe de Lacy as Leo and Maurice Murphy as Ulrich) Ulrich to look after Felicitas. Unfortunately Ulrich does a considerably better job of looking after Felicitas than Leo was expecting; when he returns from his three-year stint in Africa Ulrich and Felicitas have married.

Naturally Leo is put out by what he sees as Felicitas’s betrayal, and the situation is obvious enough that the local minister, Pastor Voss (George Fawcett), sees Leo, Ulrich and Felicitas in church one Sunday and tears up the love-thy-neighbor sermon he was going to deliver. Instead he switches to a full-throated denunciation of adultery and compares Leo and Felicitas to David and Bathsheba (though the comparison is far-fetched because Leo has neither the power nor the inclination to order Ulrich on a suicide mission the way David did with Bathsheba’s husband Uriah). Pastor Voss also tells Leo (via an intertitle), “My boy, when the devil cannot reach us through the spirit … he creates a woman beautiful enough to reach us through the flesh.” The climax takes place on the Isle of Friendship, under a statue of two boys swearing eternal friendship that was where Leo and Ulrich made themselves blood-brothers lo those many years ago, where Leo and Ulrich have gone to fight a duel over Felicitas – who has an attack of conscience and goes to the Isle of Friendship to stop them. Alas, Felicitas falls to her death by drowning after falling through a crack in the ice over the lake, and with her conveniently eliminated (ice ex machina) Leo and Ulrich re-swear their eternal friendship.

Written by Benjamin Glazer from a novel called The Undying Past by German writer Hermann Sudermann (1857-1928) – also author of the original stories for F. W. Murnau’s Sunrise (1927) and Rouben Mamoulian’s Song of Songs (1933) – Flesh and the Devil is an excellent movie, subtly directed by Clarence Brown (I especially liked the scene in which the three main characters are toasting each other, only Ulrich’s glass breaks, indicating that he’s the odd man out) and with first-rate acting by the principals even though Garbo gets more than a bit hysterical and overacts towards the end. (Garbo’s fabled restraint came later, when sound came in; in her silents, and her first talkie Anna Christie [1930], she does a surprising amount of scenery-chewing, especially in her Big Moments.) But it shows how well the silent cinema had matured as an art form on the eve of its surprisingly sudden end. Also it’s surprising how Gay a film Flesh and the Devil really is; one gets the impression that the love between Leo and Ulrich is too strong, too powerful, and too lasting for a mere woman to get in its way. Clarence Brown and Benjamin Glazer fill the movie with physical displays of affection between the two men – they’re constantly hugging each other – and one can read this as innocent horseplay or considerably more than that, supporting Steven Zeeland’s comment in his series of books about Gay relationships in the American military that one reason the service leaders fought so hard against allowing Queer folk to serve openly was they felt the whole idea of physical but “innocent horseplay” between servicemen would be somehow tainted by the existence of people in the ranks who really were Gay.