Lars Hanson

100 Years of… Flesh and the Devil

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Close up of Garbo and John Gilbert

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 … Read more

Erotikon

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Tora Teje as Irene

What else did the director Mauritz Stiller do, apart from discover Greta Garbo and take her to America? Erotikon is one answer, a cult silent movie remarkably triumphing in a genre that usually needs dialogue to succeed. It’s a farce and Stiller gets it up and running in two opening scenes sketching his two main characters. In one corner Leo Charpentier, a professor of entomology who can wax lyrical about the sexual proclivities of the male beetle – how it likes to put it about a bit, in short – without ever realising that the same might apply to a) the female beetle, b) a human subject and c) most pertinently, his wife. We … Read more