Flesh and the Devil

I have always loved silent films, but I don't think I know why. I have some theories, but maybe it's nothing but the magic artificiality of the medium. People talk in silent movies. Some people think Charlie Chaplin never spoke, but he speaks in all of his films. We just can't hear his voice. Early on in my life as a cinephile I was lucky enough to see and fall in love with several great silent films, like Douglas Fairbanks’s The Thief of Baghdad and Rudolph Valentino’s The Son of the Sheik. Such films communicated in a language that is mostly forgotten today: a completely non-verbal language that you had to apprehend with your eyes alone. Although they used intertitles if there was something important being said by an actor and the films were accompanied by music scores sometimes written especially for them, the overpowering impression that a silent film left one with was that they were representations of an imaginary world. That was probably what attracted me to the silent films I saw in my teens – they were products of the imagination.

Among the silent films I saw in my teens were a few starring Greta Garbo, including A Woman of Affairs and Flesh and the Devil. I found them mesmerizing, so much so that my memories of them have remained vivid even after 45 years. I had a chance to watch Flesh and the Devil, made in 1926, again on Monday when it was screened by Turner Classic Movies, and, almost from the very start, my pleasant memory of it was shattered. What I found so intricately alluring then had now become intricately fake. William H. Daniels, who was Garbo’s favorite cinematographer, shot the film. The visuals are flawless, down to the costumes and the settings (although I found a few of the glass shots a tad obvious). As wonderful as the art direction, costume design and cinematography are, the overall effect is of an emphasis on the accuracy of physical details that completely overwhelm the falsity of the characters and their behavior toward one another.

Based on a novel by Hermann Sudermann, the film tries to stake out the same territory well-known to fans of Erich von Stroheim: turn-of-the-century Teutonic Europe, with its handsome military officers in riding boots and beautiful young ladies all married to wealthy old men who meet at balls and fall passionately in love. There are duels in Flesh and the Devil, the first dispatching the old husband. I was reminded of John Gilbert’s appeal as the hero, Leo von Harden (all the leading characters have a “von” in their names), but I was shocked to find Greta Garbo suddenly so uninteresting as Felicitas von Rhaden, the crux of the movie’s love triangle. The central relationship of the story is, unexpectedly, the love of Leo for his boyhood friend Ulrich von Eltz (the names alone are hilarious). After the usual turgid twists in the dime novel romance, the film closes with poor Garbo falling through the ice of an insufficiently frozen lake while Leo and Ulrich throw down their duelling pistols and embrace. A few air bubbles rising to the surface are all that’s left of Felicitas.

Garbo’s performance as Felicitas was beautiful in the incipient love scenes. She is certainly the aggressor, not the least for being more experienced than Leo. But then the film labors to attach the unfaithful wife tag to her, which became so tiresome for Garbo herself that she quit the business in 1940. She doesn’t handle her later scenes well precisely because they weren’t conceived as anything more than romantic clichés. At least half of Garbo’s allure in her films was manufactured beforehand by publicity. Now that the publicity is long forgotten, only the film itself is left for us to judge her by. I’d like to confess that, all these years later, Flesh and the Devil has perhaps something more going for it than Garbo. But it really isn’t very much.

Kevin Brownlow and David Gill did a splendid job, though, dusting off this old relic. Carl Davis’s music is once again memorable. But seeing it again taught me how a memory, especially from one’s youth, should be left right where it is, lodged in the past, untouched by corrosive experience.