‘Garbo’ Galore: LACMA Salutes a Silent Beauty

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s “Garbo” series opens Friday at the Bing Theater with “Camille” (1936) and “Flesh and the Devil” (1926), which screen at 1 and 8 p.m.

In the first, under George Cukor’s direction, Garbo gives what is generally regarded as her finest performance, as Dumas fils ‘ tubercular courtesan Marguerite Gauthier, whose death scene represents the star at her most sublime.

The second is Garbo’s most famous silent, a contemporary romance in which she bewitches two good friends (John Gilbert, Lars Hanson) and which is celebrated for the intensity of her love scenes with Gilbert, filmed at the height of their off-screen romance.

Less well-known is Saturday’s 8 p.m. double feature, “Love” (1927) and “A Woman of Affairs” (1929). Directed by Edmund Goulding, the first is a modern-dress silent version of Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina,” which Garbo would remake in period in 1935 with Fredric March replacing Gilbert as Count Vronsky. Made right after “Flesh and the Devil,” the film has love scenes between Garbo and Gilbert of equal passion to the earlier picture. In settings of trademark Metro opulence re-creating imperial Russia just before the Revolution, Garbo, married to a much older man, is torn between her forbidden love for Gilbert and her love for her little son.

Garbo plays a beautiful aristocrat whose resistance to the ardent Gilbert merely fuels the passion so surely to overcome them that they overlook the consequences of their romance, which can only mean banishment from their world at the highest levels of Romanov society. Indeed, in updating Tolstoy, MGM overlooked an opportunity to find irony in the plight of two people whose happiness is to be sacrificed to conform with the mores of a luxurious world on the verge of crumbling.

A 1929 silent adaptation of Michael Arlen’s “The Green Hat,” “A Woman of Affairs” casts Garbo as a rich, gallant star-crossed Englishwoman who inspires the love of many but never finds happiness. The combination of Garbo, her most frequent director Clarence Brown, her favorite cameraman William Daniels, and Gilbert--plus Adrian’s soft-edged, timeless gowns and elegant Cedric Gibbons sets--results in romantic screen magic so mesmerizing it overcomes a dated and laundered plot. The film does suggest the dark undertow of the Roaring ‘20s in which the clash between free spirits and lingering Victorian movies could indeed be tragic; its fine uncredited synchronized score is alternately tempestuous and melancholy.

Information: (213) 857-6010.

Those Femmes: The Nuart concludes its “Violent Femmes” retrospective with a three-day run, starting Tuesday, of Wade Williams’ loving but sadly inept remake of Edgar Ulmer’s 1946 film noir classic, “Detour.” Lea Lavish, an admirably focused actress, does well by Ann Savage’s original Vera, the hitchhiker from hell, but Tom Neal Jr., taking his father’s part as the hard-luck hero who crosses paths with Vera in the desert, needs better direction than he receives here. Bill Crain deserves a nod for his splendid period-style score.

Information: (310) 478-6379.

Dancing Crawford: That dark undertow is also present in the frenzied gaiety of Metro’s 1928 “Our Dancing Daughters,” which made Joan Crawford a star as a Charleston-dancing flapper; it screens Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. at the Silent Movie with its star, Anita Page, present. Information: (213) 653-2389.

The UCLA Film Archive’s “Dear Antonioni . . . “: The Complete Works of Michelangelo Antonioni pays homage to one of the greatest modern directors, an artist who has explored the unique possibilities of the camera in expressing a highly contemporary sense of malaise; it’s not too much too say that he has been as effective in expressing cinematically alienation as Hitchcock has suspense.

The series commences Saturday at 7:30 p.m. with Antonioni’s dazzling debut feature, “The Story of a Love Affair” (1950), a work of beauty and sorrow. For all the sense of inevitability with which this highly romantic and ironic tale of guilt and retribution proceeds, it is essentially an Antonioni mood piece, capturing the bored and restless existence of upper-middle-class Milan in which a textile manufacturer (Fernando Sarmi) for no good reason decides to hire a private detective to poke into the past of his beautiful fashion-plate wife (Lucia Bose). Followed by “The Defeated” (1952).

Information: (310) 206-8013.