The Arts
Garbo, Garbo, Garbo
By ISABEL QUIGLY
Garbo Season. (Empire.)— The Birds. (Odeon, Leices- ter Square; 'X' certifi- cate.)—The Condemned of Altona. (Carlton; 'A' certificate). — Freud 'The Secret Passion.' (Colum- bia; `X' certificate.) THE Garbo image (in ad- vertising terms) has always been rather unfortunate: in spite of all the legendary attributes, a lot of people tended, still tend, to think of her as a large- footed oddity who spent her time gloomily muttering, `Gif me a visky,' on screen, and, off it, 'I vant to be alone'; indifferent to adulation, clothes, success, or in general what you might call feminine fun, mysterious to the point of affectation about her private life, ageless, sex- less, unapproachable, practically non-existent, she was the anti-star long before it became the thing to be, the non-competer who did none of the Hollywood right things and, in the days when they really counted, got away with it. 'Garbo laughs,' advertised Ninotchka, as if Garbo had never laughed before.
Carried away by the image of Queen Chris- tina gazing over the prow of the ship, or Marguerite Gautier alarmingly waxen and dead, and other stern Garbo-ish moments, I had for- gotten how often in fact Garbo laughed long before they made a fuss of it in Ninotchka, how gay and even light-hearted she could be, how far from the tragedy-queen image, and all the possibilities for comedy in that low, amused and, in the best sense of the word, suggestive voice. It always said much more than its words, whether its words were 'I love you,' or Napoleone,' pro- nounced lingeringly and Italianly, or merely 11'm,' which she could suggest very clearly without saying it at all. I had forgotten the curiously graceful, gliding movements that were somehow always unpredictable, as if the director could really have no precise idea where exactly she was going next, and the fact that in the right clothes (I thought the early nineteenth-century ones in Marie Walewska suited her best), the much-maligned figure, sometimes so awkward and angular, far from detracting from, strangely complemented a face almost eerily, inhumanly beautiful.
It is the face, of course, that carries her across the years, because it belonged to no particular year and is as fashionable or unfashionable today, as far beyond fashion, as it ever was; for it was never a face to judge by ordinary standards, it set its own. No one has copied or
imitated it successfully, it set no style, seemed to have no special place in the world, no race or country, nothing 'typical' or 'characteristic' about it; but it seemed (still seems) the furthest stage to which the human face could progress, the nth degree of structural refinement, com- plexity, mystery and strength. It was ageless, too, in the sense that it might have been eighteen, or twenty-five, or thirty-five, or more, at any stage in her career, quite apart from a kind of inner look that suggested it might very well be a thousand; and it went with any sort of dress or style—the fluffy white clothes of Camille, the • straight hair and sacks of Ninotchka, Queen Christina's boots and disguises, Anna Karenina's elegant, suffering blacks. I only wish it had had more chance of comedy, and of parts with more bite and individuality. Just stuck up on the screen, without the director seeming to do a thing about it, it said so much, its very bones (quite apart from any expression it might assume) were eloquent;, sometimes, indeed, too eloquent for the context it was seen in and the parts it was given to play.
After much brooding and reappraisal 1 still cannot make up my mind whether Garbo was a remarkable actress or simply a person so extraordinary that she made everything she did, even acting, seem remarkable. She was, of course, in spite of her chameleon way of fitting into place or period, the sort of actress who dominates her parts, who is first of all herself and cannot subdue that selfhood for the (perhaps dimmer) requirements of a part. Her presence was so strong that she made every part hers, rather than making herself its, and the presence, whatever the limitations of the parts, or the leading men, or the films in general, was always enough. It even managed to dominate circumstances hard to believe in, sentimentalities hard to stomach, death-scenes and moppets innumerable, and a dreadful fizzle-out of a farewell which I saw dubbed-in in Paris as La Femme aux deux Visages soon after the war. It was, of course, un- repeatable and (quite literally) incomparable. Later actresses have had different, perhaps greater, gifts, beauties, and the rest of it: no one, though, has had so supremely that presence.
Hitchcock is a master of many things and the pointless joke is one of them. (Not that I am against pointless jokes, but that I think it spoils them to look for the point.) He can handle the mechanics of a joke, a fear, a fantasy, so well that at the time you forget to wonder about mundane things like meaning. In The Birds he is (as ever) having fun, stylish, well-considered, horrific fun, but meaningless, shaggy-dog fun that takes your breath away with fright at the time but has you feeling `So what?' two minutes after the end. Not that I mind, or feel dis- illusioned : Hitchcock's shaggy-doggedness has always seemed to me one of his most endearing qualities, a part of his refusal to give the ex- pected answer, and if he had made his film about cats, dogs or performing fleas gone berserk he would certainly have got as much terror into it. But birds are strangely alarming to some people (I know two who scream if the smallest sparrow comes within touching distance), and as photo- genic as cats, and if some part of the animal kingdom is to set upon humans it may as well be creatures, so individually soft and collectively sinister.
Hitchcock has given his fantasy a realistic setting, indeed a setting superficially light and gay; and no explanation. The humans are going about their business and the birds, first individu- ally, then in their hundreds, then in cloudfuls, attack them. And (all in the setting superficially light and gay) peck out their eyes, set them on fire, kill in broad daylight. With beautiful scenery to mock and a sure, steady hand to mock twice over.
Fredric March, Maximilian Schell, Sophia Loren, Frangoise Prevost, play by Sartre, direc- tion by de Sica : The Condemned of Altona sounds promising and has its moments, but is wrecked on a kind of internationalism (too many nationalities playing, analysing or trying to understand, Germans), and by an extremely turgid script (from Sartre, but a long way from) by Abby Mann. Shipbuilding tycoon, near death, has two sons: feeble, good-hearted, liberal lawyer, and crazy, forceful ex-Nazi in the attic; and a concentration-camp site in the garden, to complicate, consciences. Everyone shouts a great deal; Renato Guttoso has scrawled out the Nazi's neuroses very effectively on the attic walls; de Sica's direction flounders.
And John Huston's Freud 'The Secret Passion' is one of those nonsense films on a serious sub- ject, telescoping the work of years and in- numerable cases into a single pretty girl with a lurid and highly flashbackable past. Montgomery Clift, neolithically bearded, is Freud; Susannah York is cruelly miscast in the part of a girl who, to make her story effective, should above all look dewy and innocent. Eileen Herlie, who plays the girl's mother, is the only pleasant surprise.
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