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for, or in the way of. Garbo has never lost this, this restless quest ; it is what makes her sometimes tired, which the movies try to turn into languorousness ; it is what makes her dynamic, determined, when she goes out to get what she knows she needs, throwing back her head, or a hand, palm outwards— and the movies try to prove thereby that she is a vamp. But they never succeeded. No one vamped with less enthusiasm than Garbo in her early American films; it has only been later, sure of herself, able to have her own way and having learnt what American ways are, that she has gone in for the game of overdoing whatever she least wanted to do. If a woman like Mata Hari is going to reduced to the level of a brainless Bara, Garbo will fling herself into the fun. If, after Anna Christie, Garbo is made to be " Yvonne, the toast of Paris," impertinent, preposterous Garbo will be, letting only occasionally something of her own cold flame burn up between the naphtha flares of an unreal role. Garbo astonishes people by being alternately strangely careless and suddenh^ precise, right, and assured in her handling of roles, but it is only because she takes a role for one little thing in it it offers her, one chance to express her unconscious Nordic inheritance. The rest she discards — treats conventionally, casually. Only in her last film, ^\ hen she was called upon to be a cabaret singer, did she bother to be one. Then, as Zara, she seemed to enjoy the chance to show all the others that they were not even cabaret singers, but themselves; while she was not only Zara, but all cabaret singers. vShe reached through to a lot of worlds when she said of champagne, " nobody really likes it, but it looks gay." That was the Swedish gift, of seeing through things to what they represent, of knowing the particular kind of bond that champagne implies.
When I began as a critic six years ago, one of the first films I reviewed was Garbo's first American picture. Now, after Grand Hotel and As You Desire Me, I take a temporary farewell of her. I find it agreeable to remember how I said, six years ago, when she was unknown to me, that " One felt that her brain had not been blocked out with her eyebrows. Consequently a mere turning away and angle of an arm were eloquent, in a manner quite sharply cut, but cut on a large scale." I consider the films she has made since then. Wild Orchids, The Divine Woman, The Single Standard. I remember that with her talkies she was allowed to have one serious film to two bad ones — Anna Christie, followed by Romance and Inspiration, and Susan Lennox, followed by Mata Hari and doubtless another, had not she so definitely " tank she go 'ome " and been allowed As You Desire Me. And though one may regret the form her career has taken — remembering what it might have been, after Joyless Street — one remembers that all through she has kept her Swedish integrity, and made it the cornerstone of her career.
Sad as it is to be philosophical, it is true that even in Germany Joyless Streets are not made every day, and perhaps it is true that Garbo, diffusing