Conquest (1937): Garbo talks … and talks

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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 19^th-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.