Mata Hari (1931)

GARBO TALKS... and the world listens in mesmerizing attention. Here also Garbo dances, to a far lesser effect, and the movie its a true definition of a mega-star vehicle, with an uncredited (and unimportant) director George Fitzmaurice giving Garbo all the freedom for her to do what she did best, in what is clearly a project with the Irving Thalberg hand all over it. With 1930's "Anna Christie" all the future of Greta Garbo's greatest silent movie star on earth status hang on the thread of whether she could or not act in "talkies", and whether the audience could or not accept her voice. The test was passed with flying colours and the world became in awe of the deep voice and the diva flings of emotion. And from "Anna Christie" to "Mata Hari", in the short space of a year, she made 3 more films, consolidating her status as MGM's (and Thalberg's) brightest star. In "Mata Hari", Garbo found a role perfect for her personality, albeit she proves far more extroverted than usual. She is off course the famous dancer turned spy in Paris during the first world war, that uses herself as the tool to pluck the secrets out of the higher officials and selling them to Germany. The plot concerns some papers brought from Russia by Ramon Novarro (the Ben-Hur of the 1925 silent version), which Mata is given the job to get her hands on. On the meantime, she is working on another general for secrets, played by the great Lionel Barrymore. 10 minutes into the film we see Garbo for the first time, dancing on stage. To modern standards, the dancing is nothing much, and Garbo does it herself, and it seems to drive men wild... at least on film. Gratefully we never see her dancing again, but on the scene right after that, when she talks and reveals her personality, there is such a charisma, such seductiveness in the way she moves, talks and looks, that one is instantly drawn into the world of Garbo. Between intrigues and seductions, Garbo steals the papers, but the rub is that she falls in love with Navarro, that proves to be her downfall, later to be caught and tried. The last emotional scenes, with a blind Novarro (he had an accident flying back to Russia), and a soon to be shot Garbo, are clearly aimed at a tearjerking audience of the 30s, and really are not in tune with the rest of the movie. Also, she and Novarro probably saw each other 3 or 4 times, so her undying love is somewhat hard to believe. Yet, cinematographically, this is the best part, with the black and white photography filled with shadows in the long shots and close-ups of Garbo's emotional face (she was the master of that in silent films). The 85 minute movie is a typical product of the time. Short, with a straight plot, a screenplay-movie, filmed entirely in interiors with mostly static camerawork. But all this is just a setting. We actually care little for the plot. We actually care little for anything else beside Garbo. This has died in modern cinema. The star power. Once she hits the screen at 10 minutes or so, Garbo never leaves it, she enters in almost every single scene after that. And that's what we want to see, and die to see over and over again. Another fantastic performance by Garbo, in which she is surprisingly all out, and incredible seductive, ranging from assurance to fear and then plunging into love, hanging with claws of steel to any of these sentiments. Her talkie greater successes in "Grand Hotel" (1932), "Camille" (1936) and "Ninotchka" (1939) were yet to come, but "Mata Hari" is no shorter in her power, in a nice little story about spying and love.