Susan Lenox (Her Fall and Rise)

Maybe the novel had substance, but as boiled down by a team of MGM hacks the script comes off as silly women's-magazine stuff. Garbo escapes an arranged marriage to a brute, meets Gable, is forced to run away and join the circus (!), is spurned by Gable through a misunderstanding, swears revenge on him but still loves him, just happens to run into him again in a hard-drinking south-of-the-border backwater... you get the idea. There's never any doubt as to the outcome, but surely they could have come up with more of an ending than the one here, where both characters give in to each other more out of exhaustion than anything else.

Garbo is, as expected, faultless -- intuitive, honest, and at the peak of her beauty. Lovingly lit by her favorite cameraman, William Daniels, she's magnetic even when forced into hackneyed situations and purple dialogue. The director, Robert Z. Leonard, plays some interesting Freudian tricks -- the shadows are deep and symbolic, and most of the male characters seem to be carrying sticks of one sort or another. Without Garbo it would be typical early-talkie MGM junk, but she lends dignity and distinctiveness even to boilerplate stuff like this.