| BOOK: Greta Garbo: A Cinematic Legacy Author: Mark A. Vieira, 256 pages, Abrams, $50.
By Joseph Taverney What has happened to the Hollywood mystique? With the contemporary film elite determined to promote everything except their latest film - Kabbalah, diets, exercise videos, children's books - the allure of Hollywood's Golden Age, and the appeal of a book about one of its most enduring icons, is undeniable. Greta Garbo: A Cinematic Legacy was published on what would have been the star's hundredth birthday and issues a much-needed wake-up call to the vapid, self-absorbed world of the modern screen celeb. The celebrity's centennial is the worthy raison d'être for the publication of Legacy. Nevertheless, Legacy is a risky undertaking considering that, with nearly fifty bios already extant (including most critics' choice for the definitive Garbo bio, Karen Swenson's Greta Garbo: A Life Apart [1997]), little room was left for a new erudition. Where most of the previous books pry into the more salacious details of Garbo's closely-guarded life, author Mark A. Vieira attempts to turn the spotlight from Garbo the persona to Garbo the performer. Previous Garbo scholarship has downplayed the importance of her filmography and focused on her private life. Vieira's stated objective in this issuing is to rehabilitate the reputation of an oeuvre he feels has been critically underappreciated. While moviegoers associate icons James Dean, Marilyn Monroe and Clark Gable with specific films such as Rebel Without a Cause, Some Like It Hot and Gone with the Wind, no such epic emerges from Garbo's body of work. In fact, many of Garbo's projects blend together in our collective memories for the familiar formula involving a mysterious and alluring heroine tied to an older man but in love with a younger one. In reminiscing over her resume, it becomes arguable that the rationale for most of Garbo's movies seemed, simply, to showcase the luminescent beauty and melancholy loveliness of one of the most photogenic faces in film history. Vieira confesses to his unabashed adoration of Garbo since high school, and this bias comes through in the book. But as a film historian arguing the case that Garbo's works deserve a grander niche in cinematic history, he falls short. In the main, the text serves as a mere reworking of material from previously published sources...One point of distinction may be that, where previous authors emphasized the star's rumored Sapphic relationships, Vieira deliberately downplays some of Garbo's dangerous liaisons and ignores others completely. Vieira also opts to omit references to Garbo's more bizarre and idiosyncratic behavioral tendencies, thus revealing himself as more film fan than celluloid historian. One example of Vieira's occasional departures from a scholarly approach in favor of romanticized speculation includes his references to the death of Garbo's mentor, Mauritz Stiller. About Stiller's failure in Hollywood, Vieira asks, "Did she feel guilty for not using her considerable clout to reinstate him? Had there indeed been some kind of love affair? Had Stiller died of a broken heart?" That said, however, Vieira's work succeeds wonderfully as a coffee table showcase of the screen goddess's allure via brilliant black-and-white photography by MGM portrait artists Clarence Sinclair Bull and George Hurrell Sr. Significantly, and surprisingly, however, Vieira opts to omit the most iconic photograph in the Garbo library: Hurrell's portrait of "Garbo as Sphinx." Despite this notable absence, Garbo's noble image holds time suspended. At 100-years young, Garbo's mystique remains tacitly intact, and Legacy serves to remind us (through its stills) that the glamour of "Old Hollywood" can still titillate a film fan. |
