Flesh and the Devil is a silent melodrama released in 1926. The film established Greta Garbo as an important Hollywood star. The picture was exuberantly directed by Clarence Brown and remains remarkably entertaining. Brown's esthetic seems to have been that a movie had to deliver a thrill, a rapturous love scene, or a belly-laugh about every five minutes -- he crams the picture with all sorts of business and the mise-en-scene is fantastically ingenious. Silent films were invariably effectively edited -- most pictures of this era feature short shots, many of them pictorially striking, cut into fast-paced narrative montage. Flesh and the Devil looks great and it moves like a thoroughbred race horse.
Based on a novel by Hermann Sudermann, the German author whose story affords the basis for Murnau's Sunrise, the film's plot involves an irresistibly beautiful woman who ensnares men, seemingly by accident, and destroys their lives. Garbo plays the femme fatale and her performance is subtle -- she's both tantalizing and sympathetic. It's as if she can't help herself. Silent movie vamps sometimes slump their shoulders and move as if boneless -- the vamp is a serpent in the garden of blissful marriage. Garbo adopts this habitus toward the end of the film, but she's also assertive and dominates the sequences in which she is featured. Her co-star (and real life lover) John Gilbert is a vapid, if handsome, foil to her seductive wiles. But she's clearly in command and Brown's camera dotes on her pale features, so perfect as to seem almost abstract. Her seductiveness isn't carnal notwithstanding the film's lurid title -- it's more abstract, pre-Raphaelite, and, indeed, almost Platonic. Her face is the idea of a face: the visage that is the ideal from which all beauty originates.
Flesh and the Devil has a clever plot that Brown works out with laudable concinnity. Two chums from boyhood, Leo (John Gilbert) and Ulrich Eltz are together in the military, serving as cadet-hussars in Rhineland cavalry. (The film is set in an operetta-picturesque Germany with castles and medieval gates and great manor houses -- the movie is a showpiece of matte effects, that is painting images on the camera's lens to create the effect of towering mountains or Heidelberg castles.) The first twenty minutes of the picture is an entertaining comedy involving mischievous behavior by the youthful Leo and Eltz. (On KP duty, we see them shoveling manure that literally steams, creating photogenic images notwithstanding the rather mundane subject.) Returning home to their manors, the boys sail along the mighty Rhine and pass an island that they have dubbed "The Isle of Friendship" -- as little boys Leo and Eltz became blood brothers under a marble monument to two friends, young men clutching at their hearts as they hold hands. Of course, the viewer has a foreboding that nothing good will come of this -- particularly since Leo has become enamored with a gorgeous young noblewoman that he has glimpsed in the train station. Eltz' s kid sister secretly loves Leo, but he ignores, or worse patronizes, her. The two friends, and the young girl, attend a ball where Leo dances with the mysterious woman he saw at the train station, Felicitas von Rhaden. The two leave the dance-floor for a tryst in a sort of enchanted bower. As foreplay, they pass a cigarette back and forth between their gorgeous rim-lit profiles. Then, Leo lights the match and it casts a bewitching glow on Felicitas' pale features. From the outset, she has cast smoky-looking bedroom eyes on Leo. They kiss, Garbo submerging her lips in Gilbert's mouth -- this is all filmed in the utmost close-up in intense chiaroscuro and the kiss has an electric charge that is agonizingly erotic. In the next shot, we see Leo, a sort of kept man, lounging with his head and glittering eye on Felicitas' bosom -- she looks like Salome caressing the head of John the Baptist. They are on a day-bed, but there is a larger bed under a tent of drapery visible behind them. Of course, Felicitas is married and there's an embarrassing scene when Count von Rhaden arrives home -- although Garbo is too proud to show much in the way of shame or abasement. The inevitable duel follows and, of course, the youthful hussar, Leo, shoots von Rhaden dead. The German armed forces require him to go abroad to colonies in Africa for five years (in recompense for the killing) -- in fact, he's gone for three years. Von Rhaden wished to spare his name from scandal and so he has sworn to Leo that the true cause of the duel, the unfaithful Felicitas, not be named. The duelists have claimed that the affair of honor related to gambling, a card game that went wrong. Leo goes to Africa but first tells his blood brother that he must befriend and help the bereaved Countess von Rhaden. Needless to say, you don't need a map to know where this is now going. Disastrously, the honorable Leo has not told Ulrich Eltz about the affair with Felicitas. Three years later, Leo returns to Germany only to find Eltz married to Felicitas. He tries to stay away from the couple, but she comes to his castle during a snow storm and lures him into a rustic hut where there is a big fire burning, all the better to cast her beautiful features in flickering chiaroscuro. She seduces Leo again leading to a duel fought in knee deep snow on the Isle of Friendship -- the two blood brothers point dueling pistols at one another standing in front of the stone monument to friendship. Garbo learns of the duel, rouses herself to run across the frozen Rhine to stop the men from killing one another. The ice breaks under her and she falls into the dark water. By this time, Leo and Ulrich Eltz have decided that the fickle Countess is not worth the bloody demise of their friendship. They embrace in hip-deep snow. The film's last shot shows the shattered ice on the river with a couple of big bubbles rising to the surface.
Clarence Brown throws everything at this tale but the kitchen sink. He films Garbo by firelight, in moonlight, and through panes of glass streaming with water. The first duel is filmed in long shot in silhouette against a misty landscape. When the shots are fired, both combatants are off-camera. The film, then, cuts to an image of Garbo being measured for a widow's veil. The second duel involves a spectacular point-of-view shot aiming down the barrel of a dueling gun that would have made Hitchcock proud. There's outré imagery involving a demonic Lutheran pastor who knows the cause of the duel and haunts the action. In his church, Felicitas takes the chalice from which Leo has just received the sacrament and voluptuously licks the edge of the vessel, her eyes half-shut in a swoon. The camera-work is ultra-expressive featuring gauzy mists, torrential rain and blizzard-like snowstorms. Several moving camera shots have a visceral effect -- one two-shot featuring the evil Pastor Voss and Leo concludes in jarring dolly into a closer shot of the two men. You can feel the portentous camera-movement in your belly. (Voss inserts his cigarette in some kind of eccentric cigarette-holder and sucks in the smoke -- everyone smokes so that the camera can better luxuriate in the foamy and erotic mists haloing the characters.) Strangely, the movie indulges in burlesque mocking the Teutonic plot and characters -- there are long German words flashed on the screen, a gag involving Voss seeing double (it's really just twins but it puts the drunkard off his beer) and another gag involving four dachshunds waddling one after another out of a tiny dog house. If Brown isn't tugging at your heart strings, he's engineering vaudeville gags. The film is pretty explicit about the love affair -- Garbo's lips literally sink into Gilbert's face and, in one scene, he fantasizes about Felicitas, a state of mind resulting in a shot of throbbing pistons on a train, with Garbo's face floating over all the plunging and thrusting while the letters of her name seem to form in steam. This is an iconic film and far better than I expected it to be -- it's trash, but trash of a very high order.
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