(George Cukor, US 1936, 109 min., 35mm nitrate, sound, b/w)
Print source: George Eastman Museum, Rochester, NY
“And just imagine how my father would have loved your film,” reportedly reads a letter from the daughter of Alexandre Dumas fils to Greta Garbo after she watched Camille, an adaptation of Dumas’s novel The Lady of the Camelias (1848). She allegedly went on to praise Garbo’s performance as exceeding those of Sarah Bernhardt and Eleonora Duse, whom she had seen in the role. Did Garbo really outshine the greatest actresses of their time in portraying the romantic courtesan, Marguerite Gautier?
Garbo’s success in this role did not come from treating Marguerite as a psychologically complex heroine of a nineteenth-century novel. In a sense, her performance moves in the opposite direction: in George Cukor’s film, Garbo creates a symbolic image of a camellia rather than a living woman. The metaphor of a beautiful woman as a flower has become so familiar that its meaning has faded. With her Marguerite, Garbo brings it back to life. In every scene, she reminds us that a beautiful flower does not gradually age, but is constantly close to withering. “I always look well when I am near death,” says Marguerite. Throughout the film, she sustains this aura of doomed beauty.
Dumas’s novel is one of those rare great books that few people know. It tends to be forgotten even by those who once read it, overshadowed by many film and stage adaptations and Giuseppe Verdi’s famous opera La Traviata. Yet the novel offers a sophisticated narrative structure and a multilayered portrayal of French society on the eve of the 1848 Revolution. Most adaptations reduce this complexity to a linear story of a courtesan who sacrifices herself for her lover and dies. Cukor’s film is no exception, yet it moves beyond the conventional melodramatic pattern. Instead of a typical cinematic ending, it culminates in one of the longest death scenes in classical Hollywood, lasting nearly seven minutes. (“If you’re going to die on screen, you’ve got to be strong and in good health,” Greta Garbo remarked.) Her Marguerite is so weak she can barely speak; she whispers. She seems less to be dying than to be returning to her original, flower-like form. It is no coincidence that the film is titled Camille, not The Lady of the Camelias.
This print is on 1946 Kodak stock and is likely to have been struck off the camera negative. It has an average of 3 splices per reel and a shrinkage rate of 0.45% to 0.55%.
– Anna Kovalova
This screening is free for passholders of the sold-out 10th Nitrate Picture Show. A limited number of single-screening tickets may be available for purchase in person at the Dryden Theatre box office on a rush-line basis. Rush tickets will be sold only if seats remain after the film’s spoken introduction has begun.