Love (1927) DVD5 - Silent - The Garbo Silent Classic [DDR]

Love (1927) is a silent film directed by Edmund Goulding and released by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. MGM made the film in order to capitalize on its winning romantic team of Greta Garbo and John Gilbert who had starred in the 1926 blockbuster, Flesh and the Devil.

Taking full advantage of the star power, a drama was scripted based on Leo Tolstoy's timeless novel, Anna Karenina. The result was a failure for the author's purists, but it provided the public with a taste of Gilbert-Garbo eroticism that would never again be matched. The publicity campaign for the film was one of the largest up to that time, and the title was changed from the original, Heat.

Director Dimitri Buchowetzki began work on Love with Garbo and Ricardo Cortez. However, producer Irving Thalberg was unhappy with the early filming, and started over by replacing Buchowetzki with Edmund Goulding, cinematographer Merritt B. Gerstad with William H. Daniels, and Cortez with Gilbert.


    CAST:-
    John Gilbert as Captain Count Alexei Vronsky
    Greta Garbo as Anna Karenina
    George Fawcett as Grand Duke Michel
    Emily Fitzroy as Grand Duchess
    Brandon Hurst as Senator Alexei Karenin
    Philippe De Lacy as Serezha Karenin, Anna's Child


    Directed by Edmund Goulding, John Gilbert
    Produced by Edmund Goulding
    Written by Leo Tolstoy, Lorna Moon, Frances Marion, Marian Ainslee, Ruth Cummings
    Music by Arnold Brostoff (1944)


MOVIE REVIEW:- Love (1927) Silent
Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1877) was re-titled Love when it reached the screen in November of 1927, but it’s possible that any story starring John Gilbert and Greta Garbo would have been given this title by studio executives. What better way to capitalize on the movie magazines, which were breathlessly reporting that Garbo was on the verge of marrying her costar. Love was highly profitable (costing MGM $488,000, it earned more than $1,600,000 in rentals worldwide) with reviews to match. Time wrote in December 1927, “It isn’t Tolstoy, but it is John Gilbert and Greta Garbo, beautifully presented and magnificently acted,” and Variety added, “They are in a fair way of becoming the biggest box office team this country has yet known.”
 
John Gilbert was born John Pringle, the son of stock company parents, on July l0, 1899, in Logan, Utah. He spent most of his childhood backstage and in boardinghouses, lonely and ignored, while his beautiful if unmaternal mother toured with one stock company after another following her early divorce. Because of this itinerant lifestyle, Gilbert became almost completely self-educated — he was a voracious reader. When he was 14, his mother died and he was completely on his own. The future matinee idol was an extremely likeable if near-starved teenager (115 lbs. at almost six feet tall) when he entered films in 1915 as a $15-a-week extra in westerns being filmed in the wilds of Santa Monica. Within a few years, directors began to notice the eager young bit player’s growing photogenic qualities and gradually cast him in featured roles, some of them unsympathetic character parts, which Gilbert welcomed.
 
In 1924, Gilbert rose from leading man to star at the newly formed Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio in its first production, He Who Gets Slapped, starring Lon Chaney and Norma Shearer. One hit soon followed another: The Big Parade (for which Gilbert won Photoplay’s Best Performance medal, a forerunner to the Academy Award) and The Merry Widow in 1925; La Bohème and Bardelys the Magnificent in 1926. Gilbert was second only to Rudolph Valentino as reigning “Great Lover of the Screen” in publicity parlance. Indeed, he was actually better accepted by both male and female American audiences than Valentino and played a wider range of roles, still welcoming opportunities for offbeat or unromantic casting, as in The Snob (1924) and Man, Woman, and Sin (1927). But the “Great Lover” sobriquet was hard to shake and rankled him as it led to roles in increasingly formulaic film stories.
 
In 1925, MGM general manager Louis B. Mayer signed a new European discovery to a five-year contract: 19-year-old Greta Garbo (b. Greta Gustafson, 1905), but the studio was perplexed as to how to best “type” the special quality she seemed to possess. It was on her third film for MGM, Flesh and the Devil, that she met her new costar John Gilbert. He was charmed by her vulnerability, which was reminiscent of his own, and he guided her through the filming. Their mutual rapport was instantaneous and the chemistry was evident on-screen. Garbo trusted Gilbert implicitly, telling Photoplay in 1930, “I don’t know how I should have managed if I had not been cast opposite John Gilbert …. If he had not come into my life at this time, I should probably have [gone] home to Sweden at once, my American career over.”
 
The MGM adaptation of Anna Karenina was originally conceived as a project for Lillian Gish before it was given to Garbo as her first sympathetic role, and even then filming was begun twice; first as Anna Karenina with Ricardo Cortez as Vronsky, then scrapped and relaunched as Love with John Gilbert and director Edmund Goulding. Despite these reshufflings in cast and crew the studio decided to safeguard the new film’s box office appeal against even the threat of Tolstoy: two alternate endings were scripted and filmed — one happy, one tragic — and exhibitors were given their choice, with the result that the East and West coasts opted for Tolstoy, while most places in between opted for the happy ending concocted by screenwriter Frances Marion. Both were successful. Gilbert and Garbo appeared in one more silent together, A Woman of Affairs in 1929, and one talking picture, Queen Christina, in 1933.
 
One of the regrettable and erroneous legends surrounding the end of the silent era concerns John Gilbert’s failure in sound films: that his voice was “high-pitched.” This rumor continued to circulate over the years as few of his sound films were available for reappraisal. His voice was a perfectly adequate light baritone and was quite skillful when put to use in a good film, such as the brilliant dark comedy Downstairs (1932), which Gilbert wrote. He was in the preproduction stages of the sophisticated jewel-thief comedy Desire with Marlene Dietrich when he died of heart failure in 1936. He was 33 years old.
 
In 1985, Leatrice Gilbert Fountain, daughter of John Gilbert and silent actress Leatrice Joy, wrote a compassionate and admirably researched biography of her famous father: Dark Star. The definitive biography of Greta Garbo to date is Barry Paris’s equally insightful and recommended 1995 Garbo.


SYNOPSIS:- Love (1927) Silent
During a blizzard, Russian count Alexis Vronsky, aide-de-camp of the Grand Duke, meets a mysterious woman on the way to St. Petersburg, Russia. When they are forced to stop at an inn for the night, Vronsky attempts a seduction after she lifts her veil, revealing a beautiful face. She rejects him coldly.

Some time later, at a reception at his place for Senator Karenin, Vronsky is presented to the Senator's wife, Anna, the woman at the inn that cold night and he tries to ask forgiveness for his transgressions. This she finally grants but then he visits her in her home and kisses her passionately and she scolds him again ordering him to leave.

Anna has a young son, Sergei, with whom she has an almost incestuous relationship which is thawed as a fiery passion develops between Anna and Vronsky. This is noted by the aristocracy of St. Petersburg, to the displeasure of her husband. After a horse race, in which Anna makes a spectacle of herself and all but announces her love for Vronsky, she deserts her husband when he finds the two lovers in an hotel room. They go off to Italy together.

Anna cannot forget her son and suffers because she left him, Vronsky realizes this and even though he is jealous of her, returns to Russia with her. She plans to visit Sergei on his birthday, but Karenin prevents it, having told their son that his mother is dead. She overcomes her fear and goes to the house in any case but is found out by Karenin and ordered out of the house.

To make matters worse, the Grand Duke plans to have Vronsky removed from the army because he is cohabitating with Anna, who seeks to prevent him from losing his social position as she has lost hers. She goes to the Grand Duke and is able to reinstate Alexis, on the condition that she leave him, and St. Petersburg, forever.

Alternate ending (European version)
As a result of losing the right to visit her son and now having to leave Vronsky forever in order to save his reputation, she commits suicide and leaps in front of a train. This variant complies with original work of Leo Tolstoy.

Alternate ending (American version)
For three years the lovers do not see each other but Vronsky searches frantically for Anna. By chance, he reads in a newspaper an item on Anna's son, who is finishing at the Military Academy in St. Petersburg and will return for his visits.
On this occasion, he learns that Karenin has died and that Anna visits her son daily. They met again when Sergei invites Vronsky to his home, and are reunited.

TECHNICAL SPECIFICATIONS:-
Video Codec: MPEG-2
Video Bitrate: 4999 kbps
Video Resolution: 720x480
Video Aspect Ratio: 1.333:1
Frames Per Second: 23.976
Audio Codec:  AC3
Audio Bitrate: 192kb/s CBR 48000 Hz
Audio Streams:  2
Audio Languages: Silent
RunTime 82 mins
Subtitles: English Intertitles
Ripped by: Trinidad [DDR]
Duration: 82 mins