Otis Ferguson

"And all of this frank, sensitive reanimation of a thing that time and change and indifference had almost made into a dramatic platitude is all the more generous of Hollywood and unexpected because it is the setting for a personality that truly requires none, being beauty in itself and its own excuse for being. For this is the Camille of Greta Garbo, the screen's first lady and dramatic phenomenon of our time--and phenomenon it is, because not wealth or her legend or the adulation of millions seems to jar her pure constancy; because in spite of a private dignity that has moved to envious jokes the whole army of those whose profession it is to fawn, pry, and peddle gossip, she is still high in her place, an abiding name in this nation; because she continues in a form that still distresses the high of brow, with a power and unfailing beauty that are undeniable to all brow levels by the million.

"The picture opens with lights, gaiety, and the coarse swirl of life; but if its end is to grow naturally from these first scenes, the mood must be set now. Camille must contrive from the start to be radiant in the tricky strange light of a figure with the late sun behind it, the outlines on fire and a lengthening shadow at the center. And she must be--nothing so obvious and easy as the lily defiled, the stinkweed transformed, but a plant that grows in these low places, both part of and lovely above them. And some such presence is felt from the earliest scenes at the auction rooms and music-hall, by no more outward signs than the slight cough (it is nothing), the straight glance and word for Young Handsome, the delight in flowers, the shrug for her friends' scheming prattle or the Baron's propositions. The emotional charge becomes heavier as conflicts develop, until we have the superb duet between Camille and the Baron at the piano, the mortal eloquence of the love passages, the renunciation, forced quarrel, last words, etc. But the gauge of Miss Garbo as this or any other figure may be taken from her command of the screen in her first tranquility, before an explicit relation with the audience has been built up or the action has provided for revelation by word or gesture. It is more than the distant shimmer of beauty, or a resonant husky voice, or a personal dignity wide enough for the demands of both humility and arrogance. It is more than can be measured in any of the dimensions through which we receive it, because sound waves and planes of light are only a medium of reflection for the regions of the spirit concerned here. Greta Garbo has the power of projecting not only the acting moods of a play but the complete image of her own person; and seeing her here, one realizes that this is more than there are words for, that is is simply the most absolutely beautiful thing of a generation."

Otis Ferguson
The New Republic, March 24, 1937
The Film Criticism of ..., p. 170-71.