Greta Garbo's first picture with John Gilbert and the first of seven for Clarence Brown, FLESH AND THE DEVIL is a well crafted but creaky vehicle about two men whose friendship is nearly destroyed by a femme fatale. In 1952, Elia Kazan cited it as one of his ten favorite films of all time.
Bosom friends since childhood, Leo (John Gilbert) and Ulrich (Lars Hanson) are now fellow cadets. Leo meets and falls in love with Felicitas (Greta Garbo) at a ball. Assuming she is unattached, he begins an affair with her. One night in her boudoir, he is startled by the sudden appearance of
Felicitas's husband (Marc MacDermott), who demands satisfaction. The next morning, Leo kills his rival in a duel.
Leo's military superiors banish him to a five-year tour of duty in Africa. Before he leaves, Felicitas promises to wait for him, and he asks Ulrich to console the widow of the man he has slain. Knowing nothing of Leo and Felicitas's relationship, Ulrich agrees.
After only three years abroad, Leo returns to find that Felicitas has married the wealthy Ulrich. Leo tries to keep his distance, but, despite his best intentions, is drawn back under the seductive woman's spell. Ultimately, the two decide to run off together. When Leo arrives at her home to take
her away, Felicitas, distracted by an expensive bracelet her husband has just given her, suggests that, instead of fleeing together and starting from scratch, she and Leo carry on a clandestine affair behind her husband's back. Enraged, Leo begins to strangle her when Ulrich walks in. Felicitas
declares that Leo has gone mad, and Ulrich challenges his old friend to a duel.
The next morning, Ulrich's younger sister, Hertha (Barbara Kent), who is in love with Leo, begs Felicitas to tell Ulrich everything before it is too late. Repentant, Felicitas rushes to the island site of the duel, but drowns in the process. At the moment of her death, the entire truth of the
matter comes to Ulrich in a flash, just as he is about to shoot Leo. The two old friends lower their guns and embrace.
Purportedly, a version of FLESH AND THE DEVIL with an alternate ending was also released, briefly, in 1972. This version found Leo wounding Ulrich in the climactic duel, then nursing him back to health. Leo and Hertha pairing off.
Felicitas was Garbo's third role in America and her third temptress in a row. She had no desire to portray yet another seductress in FLESH AND THE DEVIL, but MGM bullied her into it. "Always the vamp, I am," she complained afterwards, "always the woman of no heart!"
Audiences thronged to the movie. They were particularly titillated by the intimacy and intensity of the Garbo-Gilbert love scenes. The critics were almost as dazzled as the public. "Never before has a woman so alluring, with a seductive grace that is far more potent than mere beauty, appeared on
the screen," raved The New York Herald Tribune. The film turned a big profit, Garbo's fan letters grew to almost 5,000 a week, and MGM grudgingly granted her a major salary increase.
Garbo, who would go on to give finer performances in better roles, is quite impressive here, despite an unconvincing fit of hysteria near the film's end. (It's almost impossible to believe that she was only 21 when she made the film.) Ironically, her mature and heartfelt playing lends the movie a
schizophrenic quality. On paper a rather lurid melodrama about a conniving vixen, FLESH AND THE DEVIL became, in Garbo's hands and in the memories of viewers, more of a romantic drama about an opportunistic woman who falls deeply in love with one of her marks.
Although Leo is younger than Felicitas, the ever-underrated Gilbert was almost a decade older than his costar. Consequently, he is not entirely convincing as the young cadet of the movie's opening reels. As Leo's age grows closer to his own, Gilbert's performance deepens; he handles with
particular sensitivity the difficult task of registering Leo's struggle with the great moral dilemma--both personal and religious--that plagues him.
FLESH AND THE DEVIL is widely remembered as one of the screen's classic love stories, but this reputation is a bit misleading--how many great triangular love stories wind up with the woman dead and the two men clinching? Brown's excellent direction brings more to the antiquated story than it
deserves. The lighthearted opening scenes set in and around Leo and Ulrich's barracks are rendered with substantial assurance and brio--Brown manages to elicit laughs even from such puerile sources of fun as obesity and shoveling horse manure. The first duel, brilliantly conceived and photographed
mainly in silhouette and long shot, evokes the delicate cutout films of Lotte Reiniger. Throughout the movie, Brown invokes the weather and the elements--snow, rain, fog, fire--to splendid effect.
Garbo and Gilbert initiated their famous real-life love affair on the set of FLESH AND THE DEVIL. "It was the damnedest thing you ever saw," recalled Brown about the experience of shooting the couple's highly motivated love scenes. "It was embarrassing." (Violence.) leave a comment