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The consonance with Ophüls is a marked one from the beginning, long before "the melancholy of happiness" is mentioned. Paris in 1847, "the code was discretion—but the game was romance." Camellias for the lady in the carriage (Greta Garbo), the favorites of the courtesan running out of time but with no faith in ideals or sad thoughts. "Easygoing with money" yet not so desperate that she won't treat a malentendu at the opera with good humor, the ardent young suitor (Robert Taylor) mistaken for the heartless nobleman (Henry Daniell). On and off goes the affair, the caprices of a fatalistic coquette that deepen into authentic yearning, blooming in a summer interlude only to be plucked out by the lad's protective father (Lionel Barrymore). La mort et l'amour, George Cukor shading dread into glamour with two different cinematographers, William Daniels and Karl Freund: "I always look well when I'm near death." Garbo at her most sublime is a shifting ocean of sensuality and irony and morbidity, Lenore Ulric and Laura Hope Crews and Rex O'Malley are the vigorous satellites orbiting around her sun, a Toulouse-Lautrec gallery. The perfumed cruelties of the epoch, the laughing piano and the dropped fan, pistols at dawn following the gambling parlor. "I might say that there is someone at the wrong door... or the great romance of my life." Between Prévost's Manon Lescaut and Colette's Chéri, the society swan coughing into the luxurious MGM handkerchief. The raucous laugh rippling through the elegant soiree, the high kick under the bulky gown—period tastefulness jangled by a distinctly American, or more specifically Cukorian, ebullience. "It's my heart. I'm not used to being happy." From deathbed to divan for the last embrace, a translucent close-up emulated by Dreyer in Ordet. With Jessie Ralph, Elizabeth Allan, E.E. Clive, and Joan Leslie. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |