David Thomson

"If you look at Greta Garbo's Camille today, you can act smug if you are so inclined. You can say, Well, of course, they could do that kind of nonsense in 1936, but you couldn't do it today. I think you'd be right--no one in Hollywood, at least, now has the daring or the wisdom to do this story with such breathtaking simplicity and brevity. They'd build it up; they'd camp it up. Whereas all Garbo does is murmur to herself, Well, of course, it's about someone who dies for love--what's more natural than that?

"There had been a lot of Camilles in picture history:  Sarah Bernhardt, Clara Kimball Young, Theda Bara, and Nazimova had done it ... But after Garbo, peple stopped doing Camille because she had nailed it, because no one was reckless enough to go near her gravity again, because no one could comprehend the simplicity with which she died finally--like a flower deserted by the light.

".... Zoe Akins delivered a script that worked on the principle that the less Marguerite had to say, the more she was going to feel. Time and again, Garbo found modest physical gestures (restrained but seething, Cukor said)--just look at the swoon that is actually her death. How does an actress make the death in Camille a surprise except through genius? The bittersweet expressions on her face are by now the idiom of classic cinema. Everyone went to school on her.

"You can say that Cukor merely attended to her performance. But consider that Max Ophuls attends to his actresses out of affection while a Joseph Mankiewicz, say, does so from strict duty. You can feel the difference...."

David Thomson, Have You Seen...? A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films (2008), p. 141