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Such a frustrating disappointment

Save your money for something good and enjoyable

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

The movie has flaws, but one of them is not an old fashioned attitude toward women. The opening quote says "God and man created woman." That is to say, our perception of women is from men's point of view. But this film presents a beautiful woman from her own point of view (and the film's). We see a woman not only bearing moral blame for the actions and choices of men, but also being prevented from a fulfilling life by her beloved's obsession with his own desire. The most telling line Garbo has in the film begins something like, "They don't want me; they want my body. And they don't care about my happiness. It is for their own." And indeed not one man in the film sees her as anything but a fulfillment of his own desire, even the Moreno character, capable as he is of great heroism and dedication. He remains a run of the mill guy when it comes to women. She has no existence as a personality for any of these men. In the end our "hero" is left to deal with his conscience, as Garbo's character emerges as the only one in the drama with real substance. Look at Ibanez's biography and at his progressive sensibilies, which both of the film's directors apparently shared.

Greta Garbo's second Hollywood feature is an irresistible meller, done to a turn by director Fred Niblo at his finest. (Dig those parallel tracking shots; first over a formal dining table laden w/ service & delicacies, and then under the same table, now heavy w/ service & delicacies of a rather different nature.) At this point in her career, Garbo was still playing femme fatale types (watch how she cups her lover's face in her hands) and in this adaptation of a rum Blasco-Ibanez novel, she drives four men to their ruin without lifting a finger. The plot takes us from Parisian highlife (a superb masked ball, a suicide at a banquet, overnight love in a park) down to the Argentine for dam building, a duel of honor played out with whips, sabotage & floods (with remarkable effects), and then back to Paris for our moral. When he's at his best, co-star Antonio Moreno is a bit like Brian Donleavy, alas he usually just looks vaguely surprised. But Roy D'Arcy & Lionel Barrymore get to whoop things up splendidly. Note that Garbo's regular lenser Wm Daniels shares credit with Tony Gaudio. But everyone deserves a prize, including one for the fine newly commissioned score.

This silent drama provides an interesting role for Greta Garbo, who was still rather young at the time. It also has some good set pieces created by directors Fred Niblo and/or Mauritz Stiller, which liven up the story considerably. The supporting cast also features a couple of good performances, and all of the strengths help to make up for a rather downbeat story.As "The Temptress", Garbo is certainly believable as a woman who attracts the attention of every man around. What makes it more interesting than most such scenarios is that both the script and Garbo's performance leave some ambiguity about what the character is really like inside, and in any case she has a lot more depth than the male characters. The best supporting performances come from Lionel Barrymore and Marc McDermott, as two of the many men who desire her.Several sequences are filmed very nicely. Fontenoy's dinner party is an effective display of the hollow lifestyle it depicts, and there is some real danger and menace in the fight scene between Robledo and Manos Duras. The pace overall is uneven, and it does have some slow stretches that add unnecessarily to the running time, but the good parts make up for this. At least one DVD version includes a variant ending that changes the tone considerably, so there must have been some uncertainty about how it should close.Garbo's talent and screen presence are both easy to see, and in later features her characters would give her better opportunities to show them. She does a very good job here, and makes her character much more interesting than it would have been with a lesser performer in the role. Overall, it's a movie worth seeing for silent film fans, with some real highlights that make up for the occasional shortcomings.

Over the years I have seen pictures with Greta Garbo and thought she had that very special talent that brought her to such fame years ago; the so-called Pin Up Girl of the early 20's and 30's. After viewing this film, I could actually enjoy Greta Garbo playing( Elena,),"Anna Christie",'31, and truly see her great acting skills in action as she played her role as an evil woman who drained men like a spider, spinning a web for every man she decided to claim as a lover. The expressions in her face and eyes were acting all the time and she also had a great cast of supporting actors. If you looked close, you could see a very young Lionel Barrymore,(Conterac),"The Bells",'26, not sitting in a wheel chair like in "Key Largo", but straight and tall. This is truly a great Classic Film from the Silent era and very worth while viewing.