Andrew Sarris

Sarris begins his chapter on Garbo with Kenneth Tynan's famous quote:

"'What, when drunk, one sees in other women, one sees in Garbo sober.'"

Later, Sarris quotes Charles Jackson, in his novel The Lost Weekend, from a description of his alcoholic lead's character's response to her performance in Camille. Tynan's famous quote could itself have been inspired from this passage, quoted below.

Sarris on Garbo:

"Greta Garbo remains the most enduringly and endearingly mesmerising after-image of the MGM star system.... The spine-tingling death scene in Camille (1937) transforms cinema into sculpture.... Without benefit of the perpetually avant-garde mannerism of stop-motion, Garbo stops the flow of images on the screen by enslaving the memory of the spectator. Her demoralizing beauty corrupts the optical habits of the wariest critic....

"... Garbo's inexhaustible visual force has swept away the petty differences between men and women, outdoors woodsmen and interior decorators, hard-boiled professionals and soft headed dilettantes. What other goddess of the screen could claim equal devotion from Ernest Hemingway and Truman Capote? There is remarkably little pathos in her films, and virtually no trace of self-pity. What Garbo offers her worshippers is a vision of life without compromise, love without disenchantment, sexuality without sordidness...."

"Clarence Brown, the genially modest director of Anna Karenina, conceded in an interview given in Paris in 1961 that George Cukor had gotten more out of Garbo in Camille (1937) than he (Brown) ever could have. But, Brown added, Cukor did not really know much about making movies. The implication was that one had to choose between making good pictures or giving great performances. Whatever the merits of this dubious distinction, Camille is for Garbo's most discerning admirers her most accomplished portrayal. Indeed, her erstwhile theatrical detractors were compelled to admit that Garbo's might be the most incandescent Lady of the Camellias in any medium.

"Charles Jackson's alcoholic Don Birnam is particularly eloquent on the matter in The Lost Weekend:

On the mantel over the bar, tilted against the mirror, was a yellow card advertising the double-feature at the Select next door. Greta Garbo in Camille, and some other movie. It was like a summons, for God's sake. He had seen the picture three times during the week it opened on Broadway, a month or so ago. All of a sudden (but no, it was too early, it would have to wait) he had to see again that strange fabled face, hear the voice that sent shivers down his spine when it uttered even the inconsequential little sentence (the finger-tips suddenly raised to the mouth as if to cover the rueful smile): "It's my birthday." Or the rapid impatient way, half-defiant, half-regretful, it ran off the words about money: "And I've never been very particular where it came from, as you very well know." And of the scene where the Baron was leaving for Russia--how she said "Goodbye ... goodbye." ("Come with me!" The shake of the head and the smile, then; and the answer: "But Russia is so co-o-old--you wouldn't want me to get ill again, would you," not meaning this was the reason she couldn't go, not even pretending to mean it.) He knew the performance by heart, as one knows a loved pied of music: every inflexion, every stress and emphasis, every small revelation of satisfying but provocative beauty. There was a way to spend the afternoon!--the bartender slid the bottle across the counter and this time he poured the drink himself.

"....Cukor's main contribution was not in getting something out of Garbo that wasn't there, but in allowing her to lighten her tone in pleasing contrast to the solemn melodramatics swirling around her. From her first smiling entrance in a carriage, Camille is every inch the playful courtesan whose heart is yet to be broken....

"Cukor captured the essence of the collaborative process in working with Garbo in a 1964 interview with Richard Overstreet in Film Culture:

It is hard to talk about Garbo, really, for she says everything when she appears on the screen. That is GARBO ... and all you can say is just so much chit-chat. There she is on the screen. How she achieves these effects may or may not be interesting. She is what she is; and that is a very creative actress who thinks about things a great deal and has a very personal way of acting. You have to give her her head--let he do what she feels. If you remember in Camille when the father comes in to tell her to leave his son, she falls to the ground and puts her hand on the table. That's a very original thing to do. One must let her do these things and they happen marvelously.

Also, do you remember in Camille when the man made her pick up her fan--he just stood there, the Baron de Varville. When she reached down she did the most unforgettable thing. Sweeping down, like a dancer ... Isadora Duncan ... she swept it up--the whole motion was done without bending her knees. She doesn't move like a ballerina acting--but like an actress acting. It is not dance but acting. This is an important point. She moves like an actress.

Garbo's incandescent Camille did not keep her off Harry Brandt's "Box-Office-Poison" list.... [S]he lost the Oscar to Luise Rainer.... In an era of notorious studio block voting, MGM can be said to have let Garbo down once more, perhaps as a conditioned reflex to her unyielding aloofness. Subsequent critical opinion, however, has reduced Luise Rainer to a footnote in Greta Garbo's voluminous chapter...."

Andrew Sarris, "You Ain't Heard Nothin' Yet": The American Talking Film, History and Memory, 1927-1949 (1998), p. 375-75; 387-89