The Temptress (1926)

A brilliant film that helped define a genre

Entertaining from beginning to end, it maintains the spirit of the franchise while establishing it's own seal with a fun cast

Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.

Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

Greta Garbo plays the title role, a beautiful woman who destroys all who come in contact with her. The film boasts a brand new score, written by Michael Picton of New York, winner of TCM's fifth annual Young Film Composers competition.The film begins with Elena (Garbo) meeting and falling in love with Robledo (Antonio Moreno) at a masquerade ball in Paris. They spend the night together in a park, declaring their love for one another, he giving her a ring, before departing. The next day, Robledo calls on a friend, the Marquis de Torre Bianca (Armand Caliz). Evidently, Robledo has been working in Argentina and had just returned to town. The Marquis introduces Robledo to his wife which, to his surprise, is Elena. He is disillusioned and upset. Wanting nothing more to do with her, he leaves.Elena and the Marquis have been invited to a party, thrown in her honor, by a banker named Fontenoy (Marc McDermott). Seated around a large dinner table, Fontenoy (at the head of the table with Elena on his right) stands and proposes a toast. It will be his last, as he launches into a diatribe against Elena, labeling her a "temptress", blaming her for his financial ruin, he drains his glass (which he had previously filled with poison) and collapses on the table.Back at their home, the Marquis, who had encouraged his wife's affair with Fontenoy, informs Elena that he too is overwhelmed with debt. Distraught over the incident and the departure of Robledo, she empties her jewel box, giving all that she received from Fontenoy to the Marquis. Robledo arrives to comfort his friend and tell him that he is returning to Argentina. As he is leaving, Elena tries to convince him that she really does loves him, but he doesn't and departs.When Robledo returns to Argentina, he receives a hardy reception from the whole town, especially associates Canterac (Lionel Barrymore) & Pirovani (Robert Anderson). We learn that these men have escaped their financial troubles, and women, back home by traveling to this remote country to spearhead the construction of a dam. Their efforts are being stalled by a local bandit Manos Duras (Roy D'Arcy) and his men.Low and behold, the Marquis shows up to visit Robledo, and he has brought Elena. He tells Robledo he had no choice since she financed the trip. Elena dresses formally for dinner and every other occasion, showing up the local shoeless women and entrancing all the men. Manos, who observed her arrival, comes to Robledo's one evening to serenade Elena. Though, up to this point, Robledo had shown nothing but disdain for her, he fights Manos to protect her honor. Even though they use whips, with which Manos is a master, Robledo wins. After which, alone with Elena as she tends to his wounds, Robledo denies that his actions were a sign that he loves her. And Manos, still seething from his loss in the fight, returns to shoot Robledo but kills the Marquis instead.Free from marriage, Elena has distracted the men. Robledo's associates Canterac and Pirovani have even forgotten about their women back home. One night, the town throws a party in her honor, during which Canterac kills Pirovani with his sword over Elena. Manos, who had not lost sight of the larger fight of stopping the foreigners from completing their project, chooses that night to dynamite the dam.There are some pretty good special effects, given the year of the film, and some exciting action sequences as Robledo and the men try to repair the damage before it floods. However, they are not successful and a tired, nearly drowned Robledo returns to find Elena. Though at first he tries to kill her, he finds that he cannot and, with his resistance low, he succumbs, declaring that he is beaten and that he does love her. As he sleeps, and though she had insisted to Robledo that she had never used the word "love" with anyone else, she leaves him, with a note telling him that she will not be his ruin.Six years later, the dam is completed and the engineer Robledo is back in Paris being lauded for his success by a crowd of people, his fiancée on his arm. As they are climbing into a cab, however, Robledo sees a women in the crowd that he thinks is Elena. He follows her, finding her in a cafe, where he buys her a drink. He is surprised that she doesn't seem to remember him, and soon leaves. Elena then has a vision, that a man across the cafe is actually Jesus Christ, halo and all. It is then revealed that she has kept Robledo's ring, the one he had given her that first night they met. She gives to the man and the film ends with her walking away, alone down the street.

For Greta Garbo's second film under her new MGM contract the studio went back to the same source that they got for her first film with them Torrent. Vicente Blasco Ibanez offered up another of his novels for Garbo, The Temptress. Greta's got a whole lot of the men panting after her in this one.Blasco Ibanez also gave us the slightly more familiar Four Horsemen Of The Apocalypse and Blood And Sand which served Rudolph Valentino well during the silent era. Garbo's character of Elena has a lot of similarity with Dona Sol in Blood And Sand. It ends a lot worse for Elena than for Dona Sol.Garbo is married to Armand Kaliz who is not above peddling his wife's charms to get ahead. Right now she's got the wealthiest banker in Paris Marc McDermott in tow, but he means nothing to here but a cash cow for the husband. Who she really likes after meeting him at a costume party is Antonio Moreno, an engineer from Argentina who is looking for investors in a dam he wants to build.After McDermott commits suicide when he's facing ruin and names Garbo as the one responsible, to escape until the notoriety dies down Garbo and Kaliz go to the Argentine Pampas and visit with Moreno. The local bully and bandit leader Roy D'Arcy takes one look at her and likes her and knows she's available in the right conditions. That sets up all the action for the remainder of the film.Garbo's performance in The Temptress certainly assured her of a long career which was only briefly interrupted by the coming of sound where MGM took superb care to see that their investment transitioned smoothly. She is seductive and alluring in The Temptress like she was never before or since, even in her torrid film with John Gilbert Flesh And The Devil or in Mata Hari which calls for seductive and alluring like it calls for breathing.Moreno was one of the first players to be known as Latin Lovers and he was about ending his career in those roles and would be transitioning to character parts. Roy D'Arcy as the bandit chief registers the best after Garbo. He had that Snidely Whiplash thing down pat and the silent screen certainly called for those overacted gestures. His career would continue in sound, but not as successfully. His duel with the whips with Moreno is as savage an encounter between hero and villain as you'll ever see on film.The Temptress after over 80 years holds up well. For Garbo fans everywhere.

This silent drama provides an interesting role for Greta Garbo, who was still rather young at the time. It also has some good set pieces created by directors Fred Niblo and/or Mauritz Stiller, which liven up the story considerably. The supporting cast also features a couple of good performances, and all of the strengths help to make up for a rather downbeat story.As "The Temptress", Garbo is certainly believable as a woman who attracts the attention of every man around. What makes it more interesting than most such scenarios is that both the script and Garbo's performance leave some ambiguity about what the character is really like inside, and in any case she has a lot more depth than the male characters. The best supporting performances come from Lionel Barrymore and Marc McDermott, as two of the many men who desire her.Several sequences are filmed very nicely. Fontenoy's dinner party is an effective display of the hollow lifestyle it depicts, and there is some real danger and menace in the fight scene between Robledo and Manos Duras. The pace overall is uneven, and it does have some slow stretches that add unnecessarily to the running time, but the good parts make up for this. At least one DVD version includes a variant ending that changes the tone considerably, so there must have been some uncertainty about how it should close.Garbo's talent and screen presence are both easy to see, and in later features her characters would give her better opportunities to show them. She does a very good job here, and makes her character much more interesting than it would have been with a lesser performer in the role. Overall, it's a movie worth seeing for silent film fans, with some real highlights that make up for the occasional shortcomings.

At 117 minutes this is way too long and ought to have been cut by half an hour. It was Garbo's second MGM film, and like the first, was derived from an Ibanez novel. Ibanez, as a source, proved beneficial for Valentino (THE FOUR HORSEMEN OF THE APPOCALYPSE), but not for Garbo. For most of the film, she just stands around and does what she is good at, enticing men to make fools of themselves over her - and wouldn't you know it, they then blame her! Her weakling husband sells her to a banker, who ruins himself for her and commits suicide. The husband is shot by a bandit. Two friends of the main character vie for her and one kills the other. Our hero keeps vascillating, he loves her but hates her for ruining men's lives. She, like most women of her type, lived as best they could - in a man's world, a plaything, she survived as a courtesan, securing jewelry for her support. Yes, she is weak, but she is not to blame.The second half of the film is set in the Argentine where our hero has gone to build a dam, which the villain blows up, but which our hero rebuilds.Garbo does have one stunning outfit - a slinky black thing, edged in white ermine with an orchid pinned over her right breast.Garbo DOES get to act but only in the last sequence. Back in Paris, a successful architect, Antonio Moreno encounters the fallen Garbo, who drunkenly does not remember him -"I meet so many men." It is of course a lie, but one to make him forget her. Mistaking a fellow drunk for Christ, she gives him a ruby and wanders off into the sunset. Garbo is quite fine in this sequence but it is the only thing of value in the film, which is turgidly and boringly directed by her mentor, Mauritz Stiller (who was fired from the project part way through) and Fred Niblo (who completed it and got sole credit).The cinematography contains two interesting silhouette shots, an amusing "under the table" sequence at a dinner party where men and women's legs and feet engage in some risque flirting - and the ubiquitous MGM long banquet table tracking shot (we'll see it again in ANNA KARENINA, not to mention a number of other MGM films.)This one plays on Turner Classic Movies occasionally and is worth catching for Garbo alone. It has never been released commercially on video (one of only three Garbo silents which have not - we wonder why).