(Edmund Goulding, US 1927, 82 min.)

Greta Garbo and John Gilbert star in this tale of a woman who leaves a cruel marriage for her lover but who still wishes to be with her son. Based upon Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, this later proved to be the only film that the great actress remade — to lesser poetic effect — in the sound period. After the screening, a look at Love’s alternate ending. Live piano by Phillip C. Carli.

Program Notes

1927, a significant year in film history, is popularly conceived as a landmark which signified the transition of cinema from silent to sound with the advent of the The Jazz Singer. Though Donald Crafton argued The Jazz Singer’s reputation might not justify it as the single film which established the new direction to talkies, it is clear that its enormous box-office success made it stand out as one of the most important films during the transitional period. Edmund Goulding’s Love was released that same year in 1927. Starring Greta Garbo and John Gilbert, Love was even more popular at the box-office than The Jazz Singer.

What stimulated its popularity? The widely publicized romance between the glamorous Gilbert and the mysterious Garbo was undoubtedly one major factor. Gilbert, one of the leading male stars of the silent screen, was acclaimed as the great lover; dynamic, vigorous and reckless. By 1926, he was paid $10,000 a week by MGM. Garbo, a newcomer from Sweden to Hollywood, had only appeared in two silent films by MGM, and her weekly salary was only $600. When the two stars started production on Flesh and the Devil, they fell in love. Their romance fed into the press and ignited the success of Flesh and the Devil. After the film, Garbo was a certifiable celebrity. With Gilbert’s support, Garbo went on a strike after Flesh and the Devil was completed and won herself a better salary. When Love was released, the original title of Anna Karenina was cleverly changed by MGM so that the advertisements could read “Greta Garbo and John Gilbert in Love.” Whether the two were really in love or not, the duet of Garbo and Gilbert brought about phenomenal attention for the film and won praise from the press. Motion Picture magazine concluded that “With the start they’ve got, Miss Garbo and Mr. Gilbert are in a fair way to become the biggest box office mixed team this country has yet known.”

Love, starring Greta Garbo as Anna Karenina, was adapted from the novel Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. It was Greta Garbo’s unforgettable performance that contributed to the success of Love. Anna Karenina is one of the most adapted novels of all time, and in the silent era alone, there were six renditions of the story adapted for the screen. Around the world, the story has been adapted for film in Russia (and later in U.S.S.R.), Germany, France, Italy, Hungary, Austria, India, Argentina, United Arab Republic, and the United States. For Love, Garbo delivered one of her best performances – one that “outshines any other performance she has given on the screen,” according to the New York Times. Her performance was so mesmerizing that the Times commented, “her singularly fine acting as Anna held the audience in unusual silence…” Garbo loved playing the part of Karenina, and she requested a remake of the story in the sound era, hence the 1935 MGM sound version, Anna Karenina. For this second version, Garbo was presented with the New York Film Critics Circle’s first annual award as Best Actress.

Love has two alternate endings – one was specially arranged for the European audience and the other for the American audience. Certainly, one of the two endings paid tribute to the original novel and its social reflection, while the other ending was tailored for the prevailing tastes of American audiences.

~Wang Ying, Student, The L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation

FOR FURTHER READING

(Gregory LaCava, US 1937, 92 min., 35mm)

LaCava’s glittering backstage comedy-drama is one of the best films of the 1930s. Katharine Hepburn plays an aspiring actress who moves into New York’s Foot-lights Club. There, she joins a group of other up-and-coming ingénues (including Ginger Rogers, Ann Miller, Eve Arden, and Lucille Ball) all waiting for the big break that will lead to a successful Broadway career. Though ultimately tear-jerking, the screenplay contains some of the snappiest (and insult-laden) dialogue in movie history.

Program Notes

Katharine Hepburn: Box Office Poison?

How did Katharine Hepburn go from winning an Oscar for Morning Glory and shattering box office records with Little Women to being labeled “box office poison” just a few years later? Maybe her in-house nickname, “Katharine of Arrogance” gives us a clue! Here’s the back story of her near-fall from grace at the very beginning of her career.

After impressing talent agent Leland Hayward by leaping down a flight of stairs with a stag over her shoulders in a 1932 Broadway play, Hepburn was wooed to Hollywood. David O. Selznick, then production head of RKO, cast her opposite John Barrymore in 1932’s A Bill of Divorcement and the film was a hit. Critically acclaimed crowd-pleaser Morning Glory, co-starring Adolphe Menjou, came next. Hepburn won Best Actress Oscar for Morning Glory—but thought she personally felt she should have won for her extremely popular next performance, that of Jo March in Little Women.

Triumphant on the West Coast, Hepburn now wanted to conquer Broadway. Her RKO bosses wouldn’t release her unless she did another film first; Spitfire, the story of a backwoods tomboyish faith healer. (Imagine that with Kate’s upper-crust accent!) She agreed; a decision that was the beginning of her downward spiral. Back on Broadway, Kate starred in a new play titled The Lake, but her performance, impeded by a tempestuous and complicated relationship with its tyrannical director, was dreadful. Her lifeless acting in that play prompted the famous Dorothy Parker quip that the actress “ran the gamut of emotions from A to B.” Kate limped back to Hollywood in 1934, her colossal self-confidence shaken for the first time in her life.
To recoup her losses, she took a main role in the costume drama The Little Minister, mainly to keep Ginger Rogers, RKO’s other leading lady, from getting it. Break of Hearts, a contemporary romance, followed, garnering her worst reviews to date. Hepburn got a break with her next film. Alice Adams is still regarded as one of her finest film triumphs. Kate then cropped her hair and dressed as a boy in the oddball, disastrous Sylvia Scarlett; audiences stayed away. Hepburn said of her subsequent film, costume drama Mary of Scotland, “It laid a great big egg.” Hepburn later recalled this sequence of flops as “four skunks in a row.” These box office failures, her reputation for being a backstage diva, and her well-documented disdain for publicity and the movie-going public, now jeopardized her Hollywood status.

Producer Pandro S. Berman convinced RKO to make one more try at reviving Kate Hepburn’s now-flagging career. The successful Kaufman-Ferber play, Stage Door, was the chosen vehicle. Hepburn was supposed to star in the original Broadway version, but its producer (and her former lover) Leland Hayward was jealous of Hepburn’s new love interest, John Ford, so he gave Margaret Sullavan the role. He later married Sullavan. To Hepburn’s satisfaction, Sullavan couldn’t star in the film version as she was pregnant with Hayward’s child.

Stage Door was chosen as much to showcase popular Ginger Rogers in a non-musical role, as to rescue Hepburn. The 1937 film features several rising young comediennes: Lucille Ball called this film her big break, coltish Ann Miller snuck into the cast at age 14 using faked birth certificate, and a young Eve Arden makes some of the film’s best wisecracks. Adolphe Menjou, playing a character not in the original play, was cast in an attempt to recreate the chemistry he’d shared with Hepburn in Morning Glory.

In fact, a good amount of this film isn’t from the play’s text. Director Gregory La Cava, a hot-ticket since his wildly successful My Man Godfrey, liked to direct by throwing out the script and improvising daily on the set. Hepburn later admitted to being terrified by so much improv. La Cava brilliantly distracted her by inserting a line from her doomed play, The Lake. This time, she nailed it, “The calla lilies are in bloom again…” Despite being nominated for an Oscar for Best Picture and having Andrea Leeds (playing an emotionally fragile actress) nominated for Best Supporting Actress, the movie got lukewarm box-office. Surprisingly, so did Hepburn’s next film Bringing Up Baby, now considered a screwball comedy classic. These box office failures were blamed on Hepburn’s unpopularity.

Harry Brandt, then president of the Independent Theatre Owners of America, published a list of actors he claimed were “box office poison.” The list was a plea by his organization for the studios to stop hitching their wagons to these lackluster stars. The names might surprise you; in addition to Katharine Hepburn, he called out Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Joan Crawford, and Fred Astaire. Seems like Hepburn was in good company!

Hepburn finally shed her “poisonous” reputation when she bought the rights to a play she knew was “hers”: The Philadelphia Story. In it, she portrayed a barely disguised version of herself; touring first to perfect the play, then starring in the enormously popular movie. The curse was finally lifted—just in time for her to begin her famous on—and off-screen collaboration with Spencer Tracy.

~ Karen Noske, volunteer, George Eastman House/Dryden Theater

Sources:
Berg, A. Scott. Kate Remembered. New York: Putnam’s Sons, 2003.
Leaming, Barbara. Katherine Hepburn. New York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1995.

Celebrating the Anniversary of Louise Brooks’s Birth

“There is no Garbo, there is no Dietrich, there is only Louise Brooks!”

With these fighting words in 1955, Cinémathèque Française founder Henri Langlois acknowledged a growing cult phenomenon surrounding a long-forgotten movie star. In the years following that statement, Louise Brooks (1906–1985) received more recognition than ever during her active career in cinema, which was cut short partially by her own professed “failure as a social creature.” In conjunction with the centennial of Louise Brooks’s birth and a special exhibition in our photo gallery, on Tuesdays in November the Museum celebrates the film work of this magnetic and mysterious performer who lived out the last act of her life right here in Rochester.

Born and raised in Kansas, Brooks began her career as a professional dancer in popular Broadway revues. She signed with Paramount Pictures in 1925, appearing at first in bit parts and eventually moving up to supporting roles in good movies like Howard Hawks’s A Girl in Every Port (screening November 7) and It’s the Old Army Game (November 21), opposite her old Ziegfeld Follies co-star W. C. Fields. Her greatest triumph at Paramount was as one of the three leads in William Wellman’s saga of train-hopping hobos, Beggars of Life (November 28).

Due to her distaste for Hollywood filmmaking, Brooks terminated her contract with Paramount and accepted an offer from legendary German director G. W. Pabst to play Lulu, one of Germany’s most beloved literary characters. An enduring cinematic masterpiece, Pandora’s Box will be screened on November 14 (Louise Brooks’s 100th birthday) following a special lecture from noted film scholar Peter Cowie, author of the new book Louise Brooks: Lulu Forever.

If you’d like to purchase tickets to Peter Cowie & Jack Garner’s lecture on Louise Brooks, and the screening of Pandora’s Box, please click the link below.