INSPIRATION (1931)

While hardly Greta Garbo’s worst film (her Early Talkies loaded with stinkers) this is surely her most unnecessary.  An uncredited adaptation of Alphonse Daudet’s SAPHO ('dialogued' by Gene Markey), it mostly scrambles plot points, story beats & characters from CAMILLE, properly filmed by Garbo with George Cukor in 1936.  Here, our oddly coifed divinity has favored director Clarence Brown, never at his best in his early Garbo Talkers.*  He tries out a snappier pace and slips in visual flourishes with cameraman William Daniels (a tricky First-Person P.O.V. apartment tour; a one-take walk up three parabolic flights of stairs for Garbo and inexperienced lover Robert Montgomery), but such fancy efforts merely point up what’s lacking elsewhere.  With the story updated, the old Paris demi-monde lifestyle settles for having Garbo play muse (‘with benefits’) to a quartet of middle-aged artists (poet, painter, composer, sculptor) only to fall hard for dewy, young Montgomery.  And while he’d leave family & fiancé to follow her to ruin, he’s too jealous to let her get paid as an inspiration to those older men; while she’s too generous to let him throw away his future on her.  Thank goodness an ex-lover about to get out of jail is the forgiving type!   Tripe, but Garbo was at her commercial peak in a period of low expectations, so it hardly mattered.  And she’d soon start getting better projects: GRAND HOTEL and QUEEN CHRISTINA over the next two years.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT As mentioned, CAMILLE, with a similar story and period setting to make sense of it.  Only this film’s male ingenue is missed, Robert Montgomery having aged out, replaced by glossy Robert Taylor.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *Brown’s critical rep long held down by these stiff Early Garbo Talkies.  Compare with his superior handling of two other M-G-M divas the same year: Norma Shearer in A FREE SOUL and Joan Crawford, a youthful revelation in POSSESSION.  But he could also bring out Garbo’s best, in silents like FLESH AND THE DEVIL/’26 and A WOMAN OF AFFAIRS/’28, or in their last collaboration, ANNA KARENINA/’35.