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Here is the trailer for Conquest,
one of the MGM’s major productions. Released in 1937, Conquest suffered the biggest loss of any of the studio’s movies from
the 1920s to the 1940s: budget $2,732,000, gross $2,141,000.
Conquest was Greta
Garbo’s last appearance in a romantic melodrama, the genre that made her the cinema’s
most prestigious star. Her two remaining roles were in comedies, Ninotchka (1939), a great success, and Two Faced Woman (1941), a clamorous
failure. The latter brought her career to a premature end.
Garbo’s final lines in Conquest
are “Don’t talk, Alexandre, just now. He has a star to follow. Let us pray that
it may bring him peace.”
A moment later, she (as Maria Walewska) and little Scotty
Beckett (as her son, Alexandre) weakly wave farewell to figurerines of Charles
Boyer and a little boat—Napoleon going into exile. We silently applaud her request
for silence since words (supplied by reputable screenwriters Samuel Hoffenstein,
Salka Viertel, and S. N. Behrman) have both literally and figuratively engulfed
images all through the film. Yet Garbo is not permitted to take her own advice.
She is made to articulate the prayer that is best seen unsaid. This is
emblematic of what I find disappointing in Conquest.
Garbo is presumably mediating for us an act of renunciation, showing us how to
give up, to take leave, to let go, as she does so memorably in Mata Hari (facing a French firing squad), Grand Hotel (joyously leaving the
eponymous hotel, unaware that her lover is dead), Queen Christina (her seemingly impassive face held in a thirty-second-long
closeup), and Camille (fading out of life and frame, the ultimate goodbye). Here, in Conquest, this actress, the incarnation of farewells, is made to
speak an excess of sententious, moralizing dialogue.
A great opportunity was lost in Conquest, a film that paired Garbo with a worthy co-star, Charles Boyer.
As he proved in films with Dunne, Arthur, Dietrich, Davis, and so many others, the
concentration of “the Great Lover” bestows as much flattering attention on a
leading lady as does the most loving camera lens. In the melodramas Garbo made
in the sound era, Herbert Marshall, in The
Painted Veil, is the only other actor able to match her emotional, visual,
and aural harmonies. But in Conquest,
like Garbo herself, Boyer is often undercut by the awkward context and
verbiage.
And yet Garbo’s first appearance in the film is one of most
striking of her career. She is leered at by the meanest bunch of Cossacks who
ever raped and pillaged, and through their blatantly lustful eyes the sense of Garbo
as pristine surface is violated. She holds no mystery for men who have already
transformed luxurious furniture into firewood, and have filled a piano with hay
for their horses. It is always shocking to see Garbo in a crowd and here our
spectatorship is provocatively tested by this collection of would-be rapists.
The film thus acknowledges Garbo’s value as an object both for contemplation
and for possession.
Another kind of scrutiny, at the grand ball in honor of
Napoleon, is skillfully staged on a set that seems as appropriate for Eleanor
Powell’s dance routines as for the ceremonial deployment of the emperor and his
soon-to-be mistress. Seated on a dais, Boyer searches the crowd for Garbo
through his lorgnette. The ranks of dress extras obediently part, opening
telescopic paths for the imperious gaze that Garbo attempts to elude. As
Boyer’s eyes clear the way to Garbo, she constantly makes him redirect his
stare as well as ours. This model of form and variation is immediately exploited
in the ensuing dance sequence when Boyer subverts protocol to continue
partnering Garbo.
(N.B: the above still has been colorized; the film is in black and white)
The formality of the dance is modified by the will of the
emperor, and suitably so in a film where the actor as emperor rules through his
eyes. And the reorganizing will that disrupts and then reconstitutes the
patterns of a crowd and a formal dance will reorganize the feelings of Maria
Walewska, first transforming her patriotic love for the savior of Europe into
love for Napoleon the man. Later, he capitalizes on that love to make his
mistress accept his betrayal, and his ultimate marriage to his ambition.
The ballroom sequence is the last in Conquest in which a sustained directorial effort of mise-en-scène foregrounds
the cinematic rather than the merely pictorial. From this point on, Garbo and
Boyer will be only faintly animated by a dynamics of visual inquiry. The
remaining scenes and shots are like the illustrations we find in 19th-century
editions of novels, skillfully shaded plates that freeze and label significant
moments.
We should perhaps not complain about illustrations as lovely
as some of those in Conquest: Garbo
in dark velvet, Boyer over her shoulder, confusion about love and patriotism
flickering on her face and in the framing candelabrum; on a wintry terrace, the
simplicity of her surrender, her presence fascinatingly de-eroticized by a
white shawl (shown in the trailer); Garbo slumped on her knees, Boyer striding
through the set, trying to justify his marriage of state to a Hapsburg
princess.
Yet shots such as these are just as detached from Conquest as those lonely plates, usually
unnumbered, and overwhelmingly outnumbered in word-filled novels. Nothing in
the structure of Conquest sustains
its “beautiful” moments. It is as if the film’s rhythm were controlled by the
intermittent turning of pages rather than the regular succession of frames.
Insistent titles—“Two years later”—“Two years later”—are meant to convey a
semblance of historical accuracy, a rhythm contrary to the way we are meant to
view the greatest movie stars. In its refusal of visual challenges, Conquest represents a loss of faith in
images of paradox. Instead, it offers us a straightforward, reductive history
lesson embedded in a format of “show and tell.” And the leading lady does not
even get to speak the movie’s best lines. In a delicious encounter between
Boyer and Maria Ouspenskaya, the vocal virtuosity of the performers nicely
scrambles Moscow, Paris, and Hollywood. Their Franco-Russian duet ranges over
cheating a cards, empire building, time, identity, and lunatic asylums.
Well-written, civilized, and very funny, this exchange, and many subsequent
one-liners, “tell” us how much everyone responsible for Conquest believed in the power of dialogue. But neither script nor
direction favor the flux, the playing against the grain that elsewhere makes
Garbo an animating presence as well as an object of reference. In her most
successful films, the portrait-like closeups are the sum of previous visual
activity, of artful collaborations between actress, cameraman, director, and,
on rare occasions, co-star.
Conquest should
not to be totally dismissed. It is impossible to fail with a shot of Garbo
sagging under the weight of love and history, of Boyer manic with ambition or
bloated with world-weariness, or with any frame that contains two faces such as
theirs. But such frames are the most precious pages in an album that seems to
have been organized for its captions rather than its images.
