Flesh and the Devil was Greta Garbo’s third Hollywood movie after arriving from Europe aged 20 in 1925, and it’s the one where everything suddenly clicks. She has the right director (Clarence Brown), the right director of photography (William H Daniels) and the right co-star (top-billed John Gilbert aka The Great Lover).
Originally it was meant to be Lillian Gish in the lead, but Garbo got the job because she was cheaper. The massive success of Flesh and the Devil made Garbo bigger than Gish, Swanson and all of the rest of them, bigger even than any studio. From this moment on she could write her own ticket. With total total control she becomes the Garbo of legend.
It remains a fabulous and madly impetuous film full of big characters and with an enigma at its centre. Depending on how much value you put on the idea of love, Garbo is either a wanton gadabout who winds up getting her just deserts or a tragic victim of love and fate.
The story it tells is of two childhood friends who grow up and become soldiers in the German army: laddish ladies man Leo (Gilbert) and dutiful, solid Ulrich (Lars Hanson). While on leave, Leo falls for pretty young Felicitas (Garbo). This time it’s different. Love at first sight. Not realising that she is already married, Leo is surprised when caught in flagrante by Felicitas’s husband. Why hasn’t she told Leo she’s married? Good question. Leo ends up fighting a duel with the husband and the husband ends up dead.
Banished for five years, Leo eventually returns, only to find that Ulrich has married Felicitas. And it starts all over again, a mad romance neither Felicitas nor Leo can control, until the film ends pretty much as it began, on the Isle of Friendship where as children Leo and Ulrich first plighted their troth as blood brothers,. Now, in the same spot, the two grown men fight a duel over Felicitas.
There is more to it than that, side details that give the story real weight and depth – Ulrich didn’t know about his friend’s feelings, for instance, so married Felicitas innocently. Ulrich’s sister Hertha (Barbara Kent, touching), who has a secret passion for Leo, also figures fairly prominently.
It’s a case of the institutions of friendship and marriage butting heads, with Felicitas – which doesn’t mean “Easy” in Latin (that’s Facilitas, close) – as the agent of collision. Is Garbo the flesh or the devil? At one point it’s suggested by a pastor (George Fawcett) that all pretty young women are Satan in disguise. A shot of Felicitas fixing her lipstick in church suggests at least a cavalier disregard for religion. Later, when Hertha prays for Felicitas, urging god to make her see the mess she’s making of everything, Garbo flings her arms about as if being exorcised.
Garbo and Brown made six more films together. He was her favourite director, as Daniels was her favourite lighting guy – they made 21 films together. In key moments you can see why. Take, for instance, the famous shot of Felicitas and Leo’s first kiss. Brown has filmed their first dance together like something out of a dream, the camera high and floating about the room. He follows them out into the garden, where soft light flickers through the trees. “Who are you?” Leo asks Felicitas. “What does it matter?” she replies – a highly Garbo-esque response. And as he leans forward to light her cigarette, the flame illuminates them and turns them into a pair of angels. They kiss. The music surges (Carl Davis’s score is magnificent). It’s a cinematic orgasm.
There are plenty more visually astonishing moments. The first duel, for example, between Felicitas’s first husband and Leo, shot entirely in silhouette. Brown also loves to zoom in for a dramatic climax, the camera dollying in giddily in a way that was unusual in 1926.
Brown shoots Garbo as an arrangement of features perfectly suited to black and white – stark eyes, lips, eyebrows and nostrils – most often in languid repose, clothes draped over her long limbs.
Gilbert takes some getting used to but what looks like over-acting early on does eventually cohere – he’s playing a long game and was clearly more than just a good, solidly masculine movie star. (The big tragedy of the switch to sound, Gilbert is the one being referenced as a tragic case in both Singin’ in the Rain and Babylon.)
The back stories embellish the legend but the film stands entirely on its own merits, big and wild, sexy and violent, an example of how textured the silent era could be, and how perfect Garbo was for enigmatic roles like this.
Flesh and the Devil (as part of the Garbo Silents Collection) – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
I am an Amazon affiliate
© Steve Morrissey 2026
