Quote of the Day (Tolstoy’s ‘Anna Karenina,’ on Forgiveness)

“Lord, forgive me everything.”― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (1877)

He does.

(The image accompanying this post is of Greta Garbo, who played the role twice—once, in the silent film Love, and the second time in the far finer 1935 talkie.)

Movie Quote of the Day (“Ninotchka,” on Man- and Womankind)

Ninotchka (played by Greta Garbo): “What have you done for mankind?”

Count Leon D'Algout (played by Melvyn Douglas): “Not so much for mankind... for womankind, my record isn't quite so bleak.”—Ninotchka (1939), screenplay by Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder and Walter Reisch, story by Melchior Lengyel, directed by Ernst Lubitsch

Ninotchka premiered on the nation’s screens on this date in 1939 as one solitary shaft of light at the conclusion of W.H. Auden’s “low, dishonest decade.” Only two months before, Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin had contrived to carve up Poland between them, precipitating WWII. The setting for this delightful confection—Paris—would, in mid-June the following year, fall to the Nazis.

All the more poignant, then, to hear these words from the eponymous Soviet envoy:

“Comrades. People of the world. The revolution is on the march. I know….Wars will wash over us. Bombs will fall. All civilization will crumble. But not yet please. Wait, wait…what’s the hurry? Let us be happy. Give us our moment.”

The quest for happiness, no matter what strange turns it took, could undo even the most committed totalitarian, suggested Ernst Lubitsch in every frame of his classic political satire. Watch how Melvyn Douglas’ Leon cagily pursues Greta Garbo’s visiting Soviet functionary:

Leon: “Ninotchka, you like me just a little bit?”

Ninotchka: “Your general appearance is not distasteful.”

Leon: “Thank you.”

Ninotchka: “The whites of your eyes are clear. Your cornea is excellent.”

Leon: “Your cornea is terrific!”

The snatches of dialogue I’ve quoted here epitomize the famous “Lubitsch Touch.” Over the years, thousands of words have been summoned to describe its effervescent fizz (several especially good definitions can be found here), but for my money, the one that escapsulates all these quotes comes courtesy of Richard Christiansen of the Chicago Tribune: “sophistication, style, subtlety, wit, charm, elegance, suavity, polished nonchalance and audacious sexual nuance."

“Garbo talks” was the tagline for the Scandinavian leading lady’s first talkie, Anna Christie (1930). This time, for what turned out to be her next-to-last film, the ad slogan ran, “Garbo laughs.”

As he would do three years later with To Be Or Not To Be, Lubitsch was promising something counter-logical in a very dark time: that even the world’s worst tyrannies were powerless before the forces that sustain life: laughter and love.

The nonpareil film blogger “Self-Styled Siren,” in a provocative post on her “Top 10 Objections to the AFI Top 100,” brought to my attention the following priceless exchange at Lubitsch’s funeral. The screenwriter Lubitsch helped to groom for future greatness as a director, Billy Wilder, sighed to his friend, fellow émigré William Wyler: “No more Ernst Lubitsch.” Wyler: “Worse than that. No more Lubitsch pictures.”

Several more points, on the actress who brought Ninotchka to such unforgettable life, Garbo:

* Contrary to popular myth, Garbo did not abruptly retire from the screen because of her desire for privacy. Her last film, Two-Faced Woman (1941), was subpar, and the actress had saved enough money over the years that she could be choosy about future projects. Just as crucial—perhaps more so—Garbo recognized that WWII had closed off Europe, a key part of her fan base. Her withdrawal from movies was meant to be temporary, and she thought seriously about a couple of projects (Alfred Hitchcock’s The Paradine Case and an adaptation of Balzac’s 1834 novel La Duchess de Langelais, for which she even took screen tests). But nothing came of them, and by the time she was given an honorary Oscar in 1954 (needless to say, the elusive star never showed up to collect it), the retirement was more or less set.

* She had a memorable—come to think of it, downright bizarre—encounter with Wilder during her hiatus from films. Speaking more than 50 years later to fan-director Cameron Crowe, Wilder told of how the star, while out running, accepted his spontaneous offer to come in for some drinks, downed several martinis with lightning speed, then spoke of her desire to make another film—but this time with clown makeup that would hide her world-famous features.

* Wilder undoubtedly recalled impressions of the actress while making his next-to-last film, Fedora (1978). The director’s adaptation of Thomas Tryon’s novella from Crowned Heads focuses on a reclusive star whose biography recalls two European goddesses he had worked with: Marlene Dietrich and Garbo. The movie, because of initial difficulties in financing, remains shamefully neglected, and is a fitting coda to the more famous Sunset Boulevard.

* Midway through her retirement, she was already recognized as belonging irretrievably to the past. Probably nowhere is this better epitomized than in John O’Hara’s searing portrait of an early Hollywood cad, The Big Laugh (1962). The novel is dedicated to a quartet of silent-film immortals: Rudolph Valentino, D.W. Griffith, Roscoe (Fatty) Arbuckle, and Greta Gustafsson (aka Greta Garbo). Of the four, Garbo was, at age 57, still alive and healthy, and she would not die for another 28 years. But already, the Swedish beauty of timeless beauty was being referred to in the past tense.

This Day in Film History (Botched Sound Ruins Silent Star Gilbert)

September 28, 1929—The transition from silents to talkies claimed its most prominent victim when preview audiences for His Glorious Night howled at the unexpectedly off-putting voice of John Gilbert, successor to Rudolph Valentino as the great male lover of the big screen.

What none of the fans understood that night was that Gilbert’s image had been sabotaged because of a quarrel with MGM studio head Louis B. Mayer.

And what did that quarrel involve? Well, the same thing that 99% of guy quarrels revolve around: a woman, of course.

Only this wasn’t just any woman. This was Greta Garbo, the epitome of wistful foreign allure, now as much as then—Mayer’s employee and Gilbert’s lover.

Eleven years ago, at the John Harms Center for the Arts in my hometown, Englewood, N.J., I attended a screening of the most famous Gilbert-Garbo collaboration, The Flesh and the Devil. I had seen the film 25 years before on public television, but this screening was special. Gilbert’s daughter, Laeticia Gilbert Fountain, introduced the movie and spoke about her dad.

Moreover, instead of a clunky piano accompanying out-of-kilter movements, I was watching something closer to the experience of 1920s audiences, with the 95-member New Jersey Youth Symphony Orchestra providing full-bodied accompaniment.

Most of all, that big screen projected images of Garbo and Gilbert that radiated a palpable erotic charge. Silent-film audiences sensed the two weren’t faking their love scenes, and the film became a roaring success.

With Love (an adaptation of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, only with a happy ending) and A Woman of Affairs, the two became possibly the greatest romantic team of the entire silent era.

Gilbert wanted them to marry—he liked matrimony so much that he went through with the ceremony four times in his 36 years on this planet—but his skittish Scandinavian lover stood him up at the altar. As Gilbert groaned, sulked, and sank deep in his cups, Mayer made a raunchy suggestion about what the actor could do with his runaway bride. Gilbert took extreme offense and had it out with his boss.

That’s how the legend has the prelude to Gilbert’s fall, anyway. Is it true? I’m not sure there’s a smoking gun, but the circumstantial evidence is so suggestive that I don’t see any reason to doubt it.

Let’s pick up on our story, then:

Mayer waited awhile—after all, revenge is a dish best served cold, as they say. His opportunity came with the arrival of sound.

Anyone who’s seen Singing in the Rain or the first wildly funny play written by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, Once in a Lifetime, is likely to chuckle over these depictions of the coming of sound, then dismiss it all as somewhat exaggerated satiric fun. Well…not quite.

The fact is that, when everyone in Hollywood had the rules figured out, The Jazz Singer changed the game. English-challenged European actors, for instance, used to emoting through their gestures, wondered—with reason—if they’d be employable in the new Hollywood.

But even American and Anglo actors grew concerned. Actors began frantically training with voice coaches, lest their careers go the way of Vilma Banky, Clara Bow, and the Talmadge sisters. Even the normally sensible William Powell—perfectly cast as suave, self-possessed private eye Nick Charles of the “Thin Man” series—ran from the room when he heard his voice for the first time.

Was Gilbert scared by all this? From what I’ve read, he didn’t have to be. In the first MGM film featuring sound, Hollywood Revue of 1929, there were no problems with his voice. In all but one film he made afterward, there was likewise no issue with it.

The exception was His Glorious Night, a misnomer if there ever was one. I hope Drew Barrymore achieves more success with her directing debut, Whip It, than granduncle Lionel did in this case.

Lionel Barrymore may have been more even creatively versatile than his marvelous siblings Ethel and John. An accomplished painter, he had enough of a visual eye that he’d already directed some silent films. His Glorious Night would also mark his debut as both a producer and composer, for heaven’s sake.

Maybe all that activity made it harder to keep track of everything. Maybe the family penchant for substance abuse began to rear its ugly head. Maybe he was just flummoxed by that darn microphone, which was bedeviling everyone in those days as they tried to focus on what was happening through the camera lens without having some stupid noise spoil everything. Or maybe he simply threw up his hands at the ridiculous dialogue he had to turn into gold.

Was Lionel paying attention? Because something big was happening beneath his nose: the destruction of a major star. Here’s the story, as related by E.J. Fleming in The Fixers: Eddie Mannix, Howard Strickling, and the MGM Publicity Machine: Mayer had ordered that all bass be removed in recording Gilbert’s lines.

The results at the preview were everything he could have wished for. He must have especially loved it when a viewer yelled out, “Gilbert, your slip is showing.”

By 1952, when Singing in the Rain appeared, Mayer, ousted the year before at MGM by Dore Schary, was a grumpy old man. But he must have perked up an awful lot when he saw the scene in the great musical from his old studio when Gene Kelly’s character, Don Lockwood, improvises by endlessly repeating to voice-challenged Jean Hagen, “I love you, I love you, I love you.” This was the part that made the audience for His Glorious Night howl.

But was it as bad as all that? A post on the blog "Trouble in Paradise" made me wonder. It has a clip from His Glorious Night that shows what all the fuss was about. I don’t share that blogger’s belief that there was nothing wrong with Gilbert’s delivery—audiences were right to detect something odd and artificial in that voice—but he’s right that it’s not as bad as has been made out. Maybe Singing in the Rain has colored modern perceptions of the scene.

Whatever the case may be, you can trace Gilbert’s decline pretty clearly from this point on. The roles came less steadily now (though Garbo managed to push aside a young Laurence Olivier and replace him with her old lover in Queen Christina), and he drank more heavily. He died in 1936.

I don’t think silent-film audiences saw anything fake in his allure, though. Consider this: In his short lifetime, he not only married four times but had two of the world’s most bewitching women: Garbo and, even at the time of his drink-besotted death, Marlene Dietrich.

Whatever Gilbert had, I’m sure a lot of men wished it could have been bottled and sold.