Camille (1936) Movie
I haven’t seen many Greta Garbo films. This has not been weighing heavily on my conscience. Her idea of artistically worthy vehicles is our idea of creaky claptrap. But Camille is excellent.
The source material, Dumas filles’ work, was balanced haphazardly between the waning Romanticist era and the on-coming Realists, and the film captures that; it’s about people, society, the painful way feeling and necessity collide, capturing a sense of real people, in their milieu, acting as fate and character dictate they act. A lot of it is also due to George Cukor’s featherlight touch.
Where his adaptation, the previous year, of David Copperfield was hamstrung by producer David Selznick’s chocolate-box production and conception, Camille remains an adult flm, loaded with a strong undercurrent of powerful, almost sick eroticism, apparent to anyone paying attention, such in the deliriously weird scene in which the Baron de Varville (Henry Daniell) and Marguerite Gautier (Garbo), while he plays the piano, ignore her young lover Armand (Robert Taylor) banging on the door.
Both try to act amused, but she’s terrified and sorry and he’s creepily furious. Taylor is in his star-making role and though he still can’t act worth a damn, his youth, ardency, and beauty put him over; he’s so pretty even I was swooning.
Garbo strikes me as a contradiction; her style of acting all gestures, glances, and flighty movements, can seem very dated. Yet she she had an exact idea of how far to, so nothing becomes corny or showy. She fills her part with an emotional genuiness that sustains her in flight.
Cukor leaves the actors to play out their scenes in long, uninterrupted verbal exchanges, but the film is littered with little moments that communicate a lot – the dash of real eroticism when Garbo plants kisses all over Taylor’s face, and the sadistic glint in Daniell’s eye. Even the duel between Taylor and Daniell is reduced to one very brief shot, the real confrontation between them having been the night before. Our Dame aux Camelias suffers nobly and dies in decorous manner for someone coughing their lungs up from TB, but hey that’s Hollywood.
