GRETA GARBO, who radiated sophisticated cultivation and psychic weariness on screen, in fact came from a working-class Stockholm family; she never even finished high school, because her father’s death left them in such dire circumstances that she had to go to work in a department store. As teenage Greta Gustaffson, she was so beautiful that the store management put her in an advertising short which captured the attention of the comic director Erik Petschler, who put her in his 1922 movie Peter the Tramp. She won a scholarship to a drama school, but Mauritz Stiller discovered her and gave her a major role in The Saga of Gösta Berling, his 1924 adaptation of Selma Lagerlöf’s Nobel Prize-winning novel. And then, after she’d appeared in The Joyless Street by the German expressionist G. W. Pabst, he took her to Hollywood. That’s where M-G-M snapped her up and she became a star, first in late silents (she made ten for the studio) and then, historically, in talkies. She released fourteen of those between 1930 and 1941, but after the failure of a heavy-handed romantic farce called Two-Faced Woman, she retired from the movies forever. Her career had lasted a mere two decades. She continued to live by herself in New York, a figure of mystery, occasionally observed by admirers at museums or on the street. When she died in 1990 at the age of eighty-four, she hadn’t acted for almost half a century.
Our sense of the silent era is that it was dominated first by American, then by Russian, German, and French directors. But two of the most gifted of the early filmmakers were Swedish: Victor Sjöström—whom Lillian Gish invited to Hollywood in the late Twenties to direct her in and —and Mauritz Stiller. Gish’s co-star in both those pictures was Sjöström and Stiller’s countryman, the majestic Lars Hanson, who also plays the title role in . Set in rural Sweden in the 1820s, is a masterwork with spectacular set-piece sequences that D. W. Griffith might have shot. In the most thrilling one, Hanson and Garbo race in a sleigh across a frozen lake with wolves almost at their heels. Griffith’s movies reside at the intersection of romanticism and pastoral realism; Stiller adds the element of folk fable.
