Word: greta
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...Greta Garbo...
...hotel is well filled. In one room lives a ballet-dancer (Greta Garbo) who is bored by her art and her existence. Conveniently near, so that he can filch her pearls, is an attractive and impoverished Baron (John Barrymore). In a corridor, the Baron makes friends with a pretty stenographer (Joan Crawford). She is waiting to take dictation from a disagreeable textile tycoon (Wallace Beery). The tycoon, named Preysing, is so engrossed in dishonest tricks to escape financial ruin that he fails to recognize one of his own clerks. The clerk (Lionel Barrymore) is incurably ill; he has come...
...subject, rehearsing the familiar milestones in her career. She started life 21 years ago as Harlean Carpenter in Kansas City, Mo. She was married at 16, divorced last year. She got her first important part when Howard Hughes, remaking Hell's Angels as a talking picture, gave her Greta Nissen's role. In effect, Jean Harlow is a shiny refinement of Clara Bow. She is a competent though not a brilliant actress. Her contours are luxurious though slender; her face childish but engaging. Her most obvious and enticing quality is the peculiar pale thatch on top of her head...
...story gets under way with Greta doing a Javanese dance very badly before an Oriental God who seems not to mind. In the audience is the somewhat greasy Ramon Novarro, who, in his Russian uniform, looks like a well-trained barber's assistant at any conceivable Ritz. He falls in love instantly with the glamorous danseurse, which she undeniably is, and spends the night with her. Finding it expedient to obtain some dispatches in his possession, she goes to him on the second night, gets the papers, but loses her heart to him, although how she can is inconceivable. Then...
Regardless of the story "Mata Hari" has a great deal of brilliance and glamour that is not unpleasant. Greta Garbo is always fascinating whether she plays the soiled women of Eugene O'Neil's invention, or the most successful of feminine spies. The movie is worth going to, if only...