SUSAN LENOX: HER FALL AND RISE (1931)

I've seen several Greta Garbo films and I just do not get her appeal, beyond her rather icy sensuality. This film begins promisingly, with the first few years of Garbo's life conveyed almost entirely by shadows against a wall. Her mother, a young unmarried woman, dies giving birth; the woman's father (Jean Hersholt) wants the baby to be left for dead, but the doctor refuses. The girl (Garbo) grows up under the thumb of the unloving Hersholt, and when he plans to marry her off to an older, drunken brute (Alan Hale) who tries to rape her, she runs away and meets up with engineer Clark Gable. The two fall quickly fall in love, but when Hersholt finds her, she runs away on a train and joins up with a circus as a coochie dancer. By the time Gable catches up with her, she has become, against her will, the kept woman of the circus owner and Gable, disgusted, leaves her. Her "fall and rise" commence as she does some serious whoring, eventually getting out of the gutter (where Gable told her she belonged) and into a penthouse as the mistress of a politician (Hale Hamilton). Once again, she and Gable meet up and once again, he misunderstands her situation and storms off. Garbo leaves Hamilton and follows Gable down to a rough Central American country, this time as a dancer (but not a whore) at a dive bar; a rich American man offers her security, but she waits for Gable, by now a drunken wreck, to come upon her one more time. Of course, the third time's the charm. This is the kind of overwrought melodrama that Marlene Dietrich and director Josef von Sternberg could do in their sleep, but Garbo and her director, Robert Z. Leonard, can't pull it off. Leonard does throw in some nice stylistic touches (the shadows, some effective camera moves) and the sets are elaborate, but Garbo never gets further than skin deep into her character. Gable is good, smoldering and using mannerisms that wore well through his career, right up to and including Rhett Butler, but the two don't set off many sparks together. Cecil Cunningham has some fun as the circus tattooed lady. Not terrible, but nothing special, except for fans of the stars. [TCM]