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"I am the queen of my soul," to paraphrase the poet. Rouben Mamoulian begins with an adumbration of Welles' Chimes at Midnight in the battlefield, the King of Sweden expires so his daughter must continue the Thirty Years' War. (The camera pulls back from a still-life of the crown on a cushion to a long shot of the packed royal court as the child ascends the throne, after a bit of difficulty.) The regent (Greta Garbo) is a bluestocking who enjoys Molière and Velázquez, hopes for peace and yearns to get lost in the snow. "Europe is an armed camp, Your Majesty, not Utopia peopled with shepherds," says the Chancellor (Lewis Stone). A Shakespearean disguise, a brush with the Spanish envoy (John Gilbert) who does a double-take as the androgynous veil falls, a bed at the inn happily shared. The fairy-tale interlude has Garbo's metronome-set pantomime of a woman's divine joy in melding the tactile into the memorial, voyage autour de ma chambre... Affairs with the scheming nobleman (Ian Keith) and the fickle maid of honor (Elizabeth Young), a duel concurrent with Liebelei, palatial intrigue to suffocate the bold heart behind the regal title. "I'm tired of being a symbol!" The blurring of performer and protagonist is luminously captured by Mamoulian, the kingdom of emotion amply fills the vast MGM sets. In close-up she luxuriates in the dreamy whiteness of a pillow and stares down a torch-bearing mob, by the prowl of the vessel she stands midway between Locke's tabula rasa and Warhol's screen tests. "Disguise the elemental with the glamorous," thus the Garbo mystique as voiced by her old lover cast as her new lover. Sternberg floors the pedal a year later with The Scarlet Empress. Cinematography by William Daniels. With C. Aubrey Smith, Reginald Owen, Georges Renavent, David Torrence, Gustav von Seyffertitz, and Ferdinand Munier. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |