Consortium of Seven: Year 3: Greta Garbo and John Gilbert -- a pair, but not in the way MGM wanted you to think -- Garbo

In last week's post about "Queen Christina," I wrote a bit about Garbo emerging into public life during he age of the boyish flapper, and about her spare athletic Scandinavian frame being perceived as quite masculine to American movie-goers. John Gilbert, the romantic lead in "Queen Christina," was physically bigger than his female co-star, but the film shows the romantic pair as being more similar in s1ze. In addition, they are alike in style of dress, and there are some flipped expectations of traditional body dominance.

In "Queen Christina," Garbo and Gilbert are given to us as a somewhat androgynous couple, one person a bit more masculine and the other person a bit more feminine. The two remind me of the presentation of the elven people in the Lord of the Rings movies, or like some of the figures of history or mythology drawn by Aubrey Beardsley.

So diferent from standard Hollywood romances where the men were men, blah blah blah. What a relief for Garbo not to be in her usual movie-poster posture, head thrown back, neck exposed "I know you're a vampire but I'm so hot for you I'll let you drink my blood" position. John Gilbert also looks pleased with the situation.

The two were in a number of motion pictures together and the publicity stills and posters looked like this:

I think Greta Garbo and John Gilbert were much less like MGM movie stars madly and passionately in love, and more like Raggedy Ann and Andy.

Garbo's family in Stockholm was very poor and her blue-collar father died when Greta was fourteen. She left school to work, and then did modeling before starting her career in silent film. Her circumstances were not dissimilar to those of the young women central to the plot of Garbo's second major film release. "Joyless Street" (titled "Streets of Sorrow" in the U.S.) was set in Vienna after the First World War, when bread lines were long and options were few. The economically-pressed women start out as laborers, then get better-paying jobs as "entertainers" in shady nightspots, then end up doing whatever they need to do to bring home money or food to their families. I don't think Greta Garbo was driven to do terribly degrading things, but who knows what she had to put up with to get a job in the movies and have the money to help her widowed mother.

John Gilbert's young life was also tough. Gilbert's parents were traveling actors and he got the kind of child-rearing you'd expect, followed by a stint in military boarding school. In the silent film "Flesh and the Devil," Gilbert is a military cadet late for inspection because he's been out all night. Like his character, Gilbert had a complicated love life, kept late hours, drank to excess and got himself into scrapes. He married one of his wives while still married to his previous wife, and later there were various whirlwind romances and rushed marriage ceremonies in Mexico, Las Vegas and in a dressing room on the MGM lot.

By all reports, Garbo was comfortable with John Gilbert, with whom she had a close personal friendship, which may nor may not have been romantic. Whatever their relationship was, I personally like to see Garbo looking at Gilbert, and Gilbert looking at Garbo, in "Queen Christina." Though of course considering the way close-ups actually worked in classic Hollywood, who knows if they were even in the same room at these special moments. Still, in their scenes together, it's obvious that they feel much better together than they'd each felt with various other co-stars in the biz.