The Luminous Legacy of Greta Garbo

June 7–July 13, 2018

Bask in the radiance of one of cinema’s greatest stars with this big-screen celebration of Garbo’s subtle skill and timeless allure.

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A Woman of Affairs
Ninotchka
Queen Christina
Anna Karenina
Anna Christie
Flesh and the Devil

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Past Films

Two-Faced Woman
- Friday, July 13 6:30 PM
George Cukor
United States, 1941
A wholesome but exuberant ski instructress (Garbo) impersonates her own twin in order to lure her husband (Melvyn Douglas) back from his mistress (Constance Bennett) in Cukor’s frothy comedy.
Ninotchka
- Saturday, July 7 8:15 PM
Ernst Lubitsch
United States, 1939
Severe Soviet commissar Garbo has her head turned by dashing capitalist Melvyn Douglas, and cynicism gives way to about as warm a Cold War comedy as ever there was. The ads proclaimed, “Garbo laughs!” So will you.
Camille
- Sunday, July 1 4:30 PM
George Cukor
United States, 1936
Film to Table dinner follows

Cukor breathes new life into Alexandre Dumas’s nineteenth-century Paris, where an elegant courtesan (Garbo, in an exquisite performance) inhabits a lush and sensual world but is denied “perfect love.”
Anna Karenina
- Friday, June 29 7 PM
Clarence Brown
United States, 1935
Nothing says movie romance like a doomed love triangle, and this is one of the best: Greta Garbo, Basil Rathbone, and Frederic March star in Clarence Brown’s swooning adaptation of the great Tolstoy novel.
Grand Hotel
- Sunday, June 24 7 PM
Edmund Goulding
United States, 1932
Archival Print

Edmund Goulding’s masterpiece of set design and art direction tracks the denizens of Berlin’s Grand Hotel before the rise of fascism. The all-star cast includes Garbo, Joan Crawford, Wallace Beery, and John Barrymore.
Anna Christie
- Friday, June 22 7 PM
Clarence Brown
United States, 1930
A world-weary Swedish girl (Garbo) makes her way back to her father’s fishing barge in Garbo’s sound debut, theatrically directed by Clarence Brown and costarring Charles Bickford and Marie Dressler.
Queen Christina
- Saturday, June 16 7:30 PM
Rouben Mamoulian
United States, 1933
Garbo explores the pains and pleasures of crossing between nations, genders, and sexualities in this loose biography of the Swedish Queen Christina, as infamous as Garbo for being a powerful, cross-dressing, girl-kissing woman.
A Woman of Affairs
- Sunday, June 10 7 PM
Clarence Brown
United States, 1928
Garbo delivers one of her finest performances and a feminist punch in this tale of an English aristocrat who acts out with calculated recklessness. John Gilbert and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. costar.
Flesh and the Devil
- Thursday, June 7 7 PM
Clarence Brown
United States, 1926
Archival Print

The attentions of a countess (Garbo) transform lifelong friends (John Gilbert and Lars Hanson) into bitter rivals in this fine example of the artistic and technical heights achieved by the Hollywood silent cinema in the late 1920s.

Judith Rosenberg on Piano

The Luminous Legacy of Greta Garbo

June 7–July 13, 2018

“It was as if she had diamonds in her bones and her interior light struggled to come out through the pores of her skin.”—Dolores del Río

Enigmatic and elusive, the eroticism and intimacy of Greta Garbo’s film persona made her the object of overwhelming attention both on and off screen. The epitome of cinematic beauty, Garbo’s timeless allure remains the measure by which star power is judged. Her ability to convey a broad spectrum of emotional states with the subtlest motion or facial expression transfixed audiences and helped revolutionize film acting in the 1920s. With grace, gravitas, and an economy of movement, Garbo’s smoldering stillness invites the viewer into the inner world of her characters. The timbre of her voice complemented her elegant and restrained acting style, and helped her—unlike many of her peers—to transition seamlessly into the sound film era. Clarence Brown, who directed Garbo in seven films from the 1920s through the 1930s, attributed her appeal to her capacity to express emotions by thinking them, a skill that was indiscernible while shooting but which revealed itself when the film was projected. “It was something in her eyes, something behind them that could reach out and tell the audience what she was thinking.” Elsewhere Brown remarked, “Garbo does not need gestures and movements to convey happiness, despair, hope and disappointment, joy or tragedy. She registers her feelings literally by radiating her thoughts to you.”

Kate MacKay, Associate Film Curator

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Presented in conjunction with the Greta Garbo Rarities program at BAMPFA on May 30, and the San Francisco Silent Film Festival’s screening of a restored print of The Saga of Gösta Berling at the Castro Theatre on June 2. Thanks to Kristie Nakamura, Warner Bros. Classics; Daniel Bish, George Eastman Museum; Katie Trainor, MoMA; Cassie Blake and May Haduong, Academy Film Archive; Jon Wengström, Svenska Filminstitutet; and Anita Monga, San Francisco Silent Film Festival.