What a cast! More stars than there are in the HEAVENS! And we get to hear Garbo moan, "I vant to be alone." Simply divoon!
The audience must gotten a big kick out of this in 1932, gripped by the Great Depression, watching these hoity-toity types in their evening clothes, milling around in the most expensive hotel in Berlin, sipping champagne, eating caviar ("tastes like herring"), powerful men hitting on poor but sassy stenographers, a dying old man living it up for one last time.
It's an ensemble movie and the stories get entwined. At times, it resembles one of those recent disaster movies in which you have to subject yourself to the back stories of each character. Get to know what they're like, what drives them, what moves them, why that back molar is bothering them.
That's a problem in a way. In a disaster movie you can sit through the back stories knowing there's a disaster of some sort in the offing -- an avalanche, a capsized ship, flocks of deranged birds. Here, there's no catastrophe. The back stories have to carry the picture themselves.
One thing really does stand out, and that's Greta Garbo's performance. It's not just her throaty voice and its curious locutions -- "finished" turns into "finched." Every line has unexpected contours. It's a little like Tommy Lee Jones. Someone asks Jones if, say, he would like a beer. "OH, yeah," he replies. The stresses come in extraordinary places.
And not just that. Garbo is supposed to be a ballet dancer. At first glance it seems an unlikely career for someone so tall and gawky, with such hunched shoulders. But then you notice that when she moves around she's a human grand opera. She doesn't move from place to place, she swoops. It conjures up the body movements of John Wayne. He seemed to fling one of his body parts -- an arm or a shoulder -- in one direction and the rest of that massive bulk seemed to follow. Garbo is the same way, flinging her arms out, whirling dervishly at times.
That aside, the stories are a little dull. The dialog isn't especially clever and the funny scenes, Lionel Barrymore drunk while a Charlie Chaplin tune plays in the background, may have been funny in 1932 but less so today.
In any case it has an elevated position among the cognoscenti and far be it from me, a humble shoemaker, to bone it too thoroughly.
The audience must gotten a big kick out of this in 1932, gripped by the Great Depression, watching these hoity-toity types in their evening clothes, milling around in the most expensive hotel in Berlin, sipping champagne, eating caviar ("tastes like herring"), powerful men hitting on poor but sassy stenographers, a dying old man living it up for one last time.
It's an ensemble movie and the stories get entwined. At times, it resembles one of those recent disaster movies in which you have to subject yourself to the back stories of each character. Get to know what they're like, what drives them, what moves them, why that back molar is bothering them.
That's a problem in a way. In a disaster movie you can sit through the back stories knowing there's a disaster of some sort in the offing -- an avalanche, a capsized ship, flocks of deranged birds. Here, there's no catastrophe. The back stories have to carry the picture themselves.
One thing really does stand out, and that's Greta Garbo's performance. It's not just her throaty voice and its curious locutions -- "finished" turns into "finched." Every line has unexpected contours. It's a little like Tommy Lee Jones. Someone asks Jones if, say, he would like a beer. "OH, yeah," he replies. The stresses come in extraordinary places.
And not just that. Garbo is supposed to be a ballet dancer. At first glance it seems an unlikely career for someone so tall and gawky, with such hunched shoulders. But then you notice that when she moves around she's a human grand opera. She doesn't move from place to place, she swoops. It conjures up the body movements of John Wayne. He seemed to fling one of his body parts -- an arm or a shoulder -- in one direction and the rest of that massive bulk seemed to follow. Garbo is the same way, flinging her arms out, whirling dervishly at times.
That aside, the stories are a little dull. The dialog isn't especially clever and the funny scenes, Lionel Barrymore drunk while a Charlie Chaplin tune plays in the background, may have been funny in 1932 but less so today.
In any case it has an elevated position among the cognoscenti and far be it from me, a humble shoemaker, to bone it too thoroughly.