The Temptress (MGM, Cosmopolitan, 1926)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Afterwards on April 27 my husband Charles and I stayed on Turner Classic Movies for a showing of The Temptress (1926), Greta Garbo’s second film in Hollywood for MGM. Like the first, Torrent (also 1926), The Temptress was based on a novel by Spanish writer Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, whose books The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and Blood and Sand had become iconic roles for Rudolph Valentino. Blasco Ibáñez was considered enough of a “draw” for moviegoers that his name is billed above the title while all the mere actors are listed below it. Oddly, both Torrent and The Temptress had their titles radically changed for the film versions: Torrent was published as Entre Naranjos (“Between Orange Trees”) and The Temptress was originally La Tierra de Todos (“Everyone’s Land”). Garbo had been brought to the U.S. in 1925 as part of a package deal by which MGM was eager to hire Swedish director Mauritz Stiller, who’d just directed Garbo in The Saga of Gösta Berling (1924). Stiller insisted that the studio sign Garbo as well, but much to their mutual disappointment MGM assigned Torrent to a hack contract director named Monta Bell. Stiller continued to meet with Garbo privately and coach her in her role in Torrent (much the way George Cukor continued to meet with Vivien Leigh and Olivia de Havilland on their roles in Gone With the Wind even after he was fired from the film and Victor Fleming replaced him). Then Stiller and Garbo got the good news that MGM would allow him to direct The Temptress – MGM had had a success with their first film under that name, He Who Gets Slapped (1924), directed by another Swede, Victor Sjöstrom (though they’d “Anglicized” his name to “Seastrom”) and were hoping another Swedish director would bring them more hits. Alas, after 10 days Stiller was fired from The Temptress and from MGM itself, and Fred Niblo – who’d replaced Charles Brabin on MGM’s monumental production Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1925) and earlier had been hired instead of Valentino’s choice, George Fitzmaurice, to direct Blood and Sand – replaced him.

Most of the Garbo biographies dismiss Torrent and The Temptress as meaningless melodramas and claim she didn’t start getting good roles at MGM until her third film for them, Flesh and the Devil (1927), but they’re both quite good movies. All too often, especially in her silent films, Garbo was cast as an amoral femme fatale, and so she is here. At one point Garbo demanded a meeting with Louis B. Mayer, MGM’s studio head, to complain about her roles: “Always the vamp I am, always the woman with no heart.” The film begins in Paris, with Elena (Garbo) being romanced at a garden party by a rising young Argentinian engineer, Manuel Robledo (Antonio Moreno). She tells him, “I belong to no other man,” but that’s a lie (or else Elena is a liberated woman who believes that just because she’s married doesn’t mean she can’t have sex with whomever she wants). She’s really the wife of the Marquis de Torre Blanca (Armand Kaliz), though the Marquis has essentially pimped her out to yet a third man, the banker M. Fontenoy (Marc McDermott). Fontenoy has lavished so many expensive jewels on her that he’s gone broke, and at another dinner party he announces that this is the last one he’ll ever have because he’s about to go bankrupt. Then he pours poison powder into his own wine glass and uses it to commit suicide in front of his dinner guests. Elena gives the jewels Fontenoy had given her to the Marquis to bail him out of his “debts of honor,” and Manuel hot-foots it back to his native Argentina. There we see a lot of shots of him and his fellow gauchos riding through the Argentinian countryside and singing lusty songs about lands where men are men and women are women (though since this is a silent film, the “songs” have to be suggested with intertitles). Manuel is entrusted to lead the construction of a massive dam across an Argentine river, and his two straw bosses are Canterac (a young and surprisingly agile Lionel Barrymore) and Pirovani (Robert Andersen), an Italian immigrant who plans to make enough money on the dam project to send for his beloved daughter to join him. Alas, things get screwed up big-time when Elena shows up with the Marquis at the workers’ camp and moves in a preposterous amount of baggage that reminded me of Katharine Hepburn’s entrance in the 1937 film Stage Door.

Also on hand is Argentine bandit Manos Duras (which Charles told me means “Hard Hands”), who gets an almost spectral entrance. He’s first seen as a silhouette, standing in a shadow and smoking a cigarette from a holder, and only then does the camera reveal him full-figure. He’s played by Roy D’Arcy, whose second film was Erich von Stroheim’s The Merry Widow (1925) as a last-minute replacement for Stroheim himself after MGM production chief Irving Thalberg wouldn’t allow Stroheim both to direct and act. (He and Mayer wanted the option to fire Stroheim, which they couldn’t well do if he were both director and a major actor, but as things turned out they couldn’t fire Stroheim anyway because when they tried it, the extras and the crew threatened to quit the film if he went.) D’Arcy got a few plum villain roles in films like this and King Vidor’s Bardelys the Magnificent (1926), but his career didn’t last long and within a few years he was reduced to playing minor parts like one of the “Three Greeks” in Flying Down to Rio (1933). Manos Duras tries to rape Elena, Manuel saves her from the Fate Worse than Death, and later Manos Duras tries to shoot Elena but fate intervenes and her husband takes the bullet meant for her instead. Unfortunately, having a woman around has inflamed the libidos of just about everyone in Manuel’s work crew, to the point where they’re too busy lusting after her to get the job done. Both Canterac and Pirovani cruise her, and they end up in a bizarre fight scene in which Canterac – who shows up for some reason in the uniform of an Argentine military officer, which at first had me thinking that this was a totally different character – stabs Pirovani out of jealousy and then remorsefully breaks the sword with which he killed him and says, “I have murdered my friend.” Manos Duras is so angry at Manuel for breaking up his sexual assault on Elena that he decides to blow up the dam, and he manages to plant enough dynamite to blast a hole that takes out about one-third of it. With a big storm brewing (like Torrent, The Temptress ends with a major natural disaster), Manuel tries to build a breakfront to keep the raging floodwaters from destroying the whole dam. He ends up hauling bags of sand himself when the crew deserts the site, but it’s too late: the dam collapses anyway and it’s almost totally destroyed. (The special effects work is quite convincing and surprisingly good for a 1926 film.)

Years later Manuel shows up in Paris again after having finally finished the dam and earned a worldwide reputation as a great engineer for doing so, and he runs into Elena, very much the worse for wear as she’s been reduced to cadging drinks in cheap cafés. Manuel is there with Celinda (Virginia Browne Faire), the proverbial “nice girl” he took up with after the disaster, and when Elena makes a play for him again he virtuously refuses. That’s how the film ends; in a 1930’s movie either Garbo’s character would have had to die for her sins or she’d have had to go through a moral redemption and end up with Manuel as a good little wife at the end. But in this truly “pre-Code” era the writers and directors could give the film this bittersweet, morally ambiguous and quite beautiful and moving ending. Later MGM boss Louis B. Mayer demanded that a happier ending be shot – much the way that in a later Garbo film, Love (1927), an adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, European audiences got to see her commit suicide as she did in Tolstoy’s novel while American ones got to see her and the male lead, John Gilbert, get together and presumably live happily ever after. The version of The Temptress we were watching was a 2005 restoration produced by Turner Entertainment with a musical score by Michael Picton, which was quite well done in the Paris scenes but tended to sound too much like Elmer Bernstein’s The Magnificent Seven (1960) for my taste as Manuel and his crew rode their horses through the Argentine expanses. It’s actually a quite good film, though it’s tempting to credit the genuinely inventive shots (including the scene at Fontenoy’s dinner party in which the camera tracks down the long dining table and then pans under it to show the men and women playing footsie with each other and even starting to dance; Charles was reminded of the similar scene in Ernst Lubitsch’s 1919 silent The Oyster Princess and we both wondered if someone involved in The Temptress had seen the Lubitsch film and consciously copied it) to Stiller and attribute the plainer ones to Niblo. Still, like Torrent, The Temptress is a surprisingly good film. Charles said it had a dreamlike quality, and the last time he said that about a film we were watching together was Rex Ingram’s independently produced masterpiece Mare Nostrum (1925) – by coincidence (or maybe not), also based on a Vicente Blasco Ibáñez novel!