Greta Garbo's film career draws to a close

 

 

 

This is my penultimate post in the series of essays on Greta Garbo's movies. Her last film, "Two-Faced Woman" (1941) was pretty awful and I feel it didn't work on so many levels. I don't want to end this series of posts on that mess, so I am wrapping up Garbo's career this week and then next week I will circle back to finish the series by celebrating the delightful "Ninotchka." If you do want my take on "Two-Faced Woman," here's a link to a post I did last summer which includes Garbo's last film. MGM put together a 1964 compilation old film footage called "The Big Parade of Comedy" which includes soem clips of Garbo and Melvin Douglas comedy-skiing, falling down in the snow, and so on, taken from "Two-Faced Woman." Fifteen years of making movies for MGM and this is what they drag out to showcase. Oy. 

From the very start of her career, Greta Garbo was ambivalent about show business, and several times during her movie star years  she considered quitting showbiz and going back to Sweden. She compared the atmosphere of a movie studio to that of a factory. You reported to work each day and someone told you what to do until it was time to go home. 

Unlike some other actresses who aged out of leading-lady roles and then were willing to take on character roles or guest shots on television shows, once Garbo was done with the movies, she was done. She lived to be eighty-four, and she was physically active late into her senior years. Though she was portrayed as a recluse by the media, Garbo actually had a number of close friends and enjoyed visiting people in private settings. Rather surprisingly, Garbo's moods could change in a flash, and at times, she could be found whooping it up at big celebrity parties. 

But she really wanted a home where she could retreat when she wanted to, and when choosing a home city she did not in fact decide to return to Stockholm. Ten years after the release of "Two-Faced Woman," Garbo became a U.S. citizen (the photo at the top of this post is the actress signing the paperwork) and a couple of years later she bought an apartment in New York. This was an adjustment; Garbo was plagued constantly on city streets by cruel paparazzi who delighted in catching each new wrinkle on the once-beautiful face.  But Garbo did like to walk, and she had various walking companions who helped shield her from photographers. 

Her apartment was on East 52nd Street in Manhattan.  For 31 years Garbo's cook and housekeeper was a woman named Claire Koger for 31 years. In truth, Claire was Garbo's age and when Claire's knees were too bad for her to get down and scrub the dfloor, Garbo would do the job. She also sometimes cooked because she did not like American food and preferred Swedish and German dishes. She filled in her diet with tinned anchovies and sardines which were imported and shipped to the Manhattan apartment in wooden crates. Here are photos of part of Garbo's living room and  little window nook table. I like to think she sat at the round table and ate Swedish sardines and crackers while she looked out her fifth-story window at Manhattan. 

 

 

 

Her neighbors liked to spot Garbo when she was  out on a walk. I think this reputation was behind the making of the 1984 film "Garbo Talks."

The film is about a man whose outspokenness and radical politics are always getting her in trouble, which her son (literally) bails her out of. Then a new kind of trouble happens, one no son can fix for his mother. Here's the movie trailer:

Sidney Lumet, who had five Academy Award nominations as a director, did a nice job with 'Garbo Talks," but it flopped at the box office anyway.  Roger Ebert hated the film, and was pretty nasty about it on a segment of  "At the Movies,"  saying that he thought Anne Bancroft's character Estelle ought to have been told to sit down in a corner, calm down, and shut up. He said he thought the film tried to sell Estelle as fun and admirable as an activist, and I think Ebert's knee-jerk emotional response kept him from seeing that Estelle's son is not a "wimp" (Ebert's word) for trying to help his mother have her dying wish, but instead someone saying goodbye to a difficult parent. 

"Garbo Talks" is not a good movie for someone who isn't interested in A. Greta Garbo, B. old movies C. New York or D. people and their family problems. It's full of fun people -- Carrie Fisher and Harvey Fierstein are in it -- and even though it's a film about the end of someone's life, it's not depressing. You can  watch it for free on the streaming channel Tubi, so judge for yourself. 

 

As I've said, "Garbo Talks" is less about the actual movie star, and more about families and what we need from popular culture to help us get through, but it does contain clips of some of Garbo's most famous film work, as seen on television. Though Greta Garbo made her last movie in 1941, and the awareness of her cultural influence has risen and fallen over the decades, we still find traces of her in popular culture.

Cartoons made at the height of Garbo stardom have stayed with us, first as filler for analog TV, then as filler for cartoon compilations on VHS tapes, and now as topics for blogs/podcasts or filler for cable and internet programming. Someone gathered up cartoon moments mocking Garbo and put them on YouTube. Garbo was an MGM star, of course, and rival studio Warner Brothers had a well-developed cartoon division and they were merciless on the Swedish film star, showing her with nearly-closed eyelids, sunken cheeks and enormous clown feet. 

Most of these depictions are not only mean but off the mark. I prefer this caricature of Garbo, from a 1937 cartoon showed Hollywood stars at a celebrity picnic. Each star is struggling with a way to eat peas. Garbo is gloomy but competent with her flatware.

 

 

After Garbo retired, she pops up now and then in non-cartoon films. "Hollywood without Makeup" sounds like it'll be merciless, doesn't it? But it's actually a fun mix of bloopers, home movies, and bits of archival material, like this bit of silent-era Greta Garbo in her silent-are career we see about 14 minutes into the film.  

The ripples of Greta Garbo's fame have traveled out and out and out and become more faint and rippled so that the original actress gets lost, except for her name or a catchphrase. There have been two different musical groups with the name "Garbo Talks." One featured a pair of Madonna-like singers: 

The other group (which i think might be German) plays hard rock music. 

And how could I end this post without someone saying the thing that everyone thinks Garbo said in the movies but which she never did exactly say? Here's a short clip from the dark comedy "Death Becomes Her."

Notes: 

One of my favorite things about "Garbo Talks" is how they handle the "appearance" of Greta Garbo. She is never shown, except from the back, in a sensible tweed hat and coat which remind us of course of stern Russian official Garbo plays early in "Ninotchka."

Recently, I found out who was in the Garbo coat in "Garbo Talks." It was composer Betty Comden, who was also a beloved singer/actress. 

"Garbo Talks" was released in 1984, and the video clip below comes from 1987, so this is approximately how Betty as "Garbo" looked to the actors in the film. 

I'll finish today's post with a nice Betty Comden tribute video from a cable TV show about the theatre -- that's not Betty in the thumbnail image for the clip, but a colleague talking about Betty's work. 

One last note:  In the late 1980s I began writing a newspaper column called "Garbo Talks." Over the years, there were a couple of chapbook collections of these columns, and while looking for something on Amazon recently, I came across the second volume in the series. A much younger me, in white gloves, is giving etiquette advice like Miss Manners, a popular magazine columnist at that time.