Monday Minute
No. 2 | January 4, 2010

Celluloid Heroes

Everybody’s a dreamer and everybody’s a star
And everybody’s in movies, it doesn’t matter who you are

Not very long ago I had an idea about creating this site and a few ideas for weekly themes.  I had no idea, though, where to begin.  Then, driving down the road one day, I heard the Kinks on the radio.  So here we are.

“Celluloid Heroes” is a wonderfully evocative song, one that inevitably gets stuck in my head for hours (if not days).  Years ago, when I first heard it, it had made an indelible impression on my teenage imagination.  I hadn’t seen many of the old movies then.  I didn’t know much about the old stars.  I hadn’t been to Hollywood Boulevard and seen their names written in concrete.  But I knew there was something great about the celluloid heroes that Ray Davies was singing about.  They were big.  They were different.  They had something beyond what normal existence would ever attain.  They had in fact attained the unattainable.  So it seemed.

There was of course more to it than that, which the song captures too.  There was an underside–not everything was greatness and glamour for the big Hollywood stars.  The lives they led were starkly and sadly different from the lives they played onscreen.  There was suffering that went with their striving.  Fame for them, as for others, was elusive, and once gotten, illusive.  “Success walks hand in hand with failure,” as the song goes.

Knowing all that doesn’t change much.  We may see the distance between the illusion and the reality but the illusion still looks rather appealing.  When Davies sings, “Everybody’s a dreamer,” who can say he’s not singing about them?

I wish my life was a nonstop Hollywood movie show
A fantasy world of celluloid villains and heroes
Because celluloid heroes never feel any pain
And celluloid heroes never really die.

Our theme this week
The celluloid heroes of “Celluloid Heroes”

Greta Garbo

Don’t step on Greta Garbo as you walk down the Boulevard
She looks so weak and fragile that’s why she tried to be so hard
But they turned her into a princess
And they sat her on a throne
But she turned her back on stardom
Because she wanted to be alone

The essentials
For those of us who weren’t there at the time, it might not be possible to appreciate fully the magnitude of her stardom.  There is nothing, and no one, comparable today.  People of the day worshipped movie stars as the Greeks their gods, and no star shined brighter than Greta Garbo.

Garbo became a star in the silent era, first in Sweden, then Hollywood, and made several films with one of the great lovers of the silver screen,  John Gilbert, who was her lover too until she left him at the altar.  Garbo starred in the adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s Anna Christie in 1930.  “Garbo talks!” was the campaign slogan, with her first words “Give me a whiskey, ginger ale on the side—and don’t be stingy, baby.”  In the decade that followed she gave some of the greatest performances ever filmed.  In 1932, as part of an all-star cast, she played a Russian ballerina in Grand Hotel.  She starred as the Swedish royal in Queen Christina (1933), appearing with Gilbert again after she fought to have him cast.  Then came Anna Karenina (1935) and the George Cukor-directed Camille (1936), the classic tearjerker adapted from Dumas about a high society courtesan doomed by consumption.  It may be the finest acting of Garbo’s career.  In 1939 she turned in a classic performance for Ninotchka, a comedy set in Paris about a no-nonsense Soviet envoy (“I’m interested in the Eiffel Tower from a technical standpoint”) who is sent by Moscow to complete a jewelry sale but discovers something else.

She made one more movie before she “turned her back on stardom.” She lived a quiet life, alone, in New York, until she died in 1990, leaving behind a legacy of unforgettable performances and the mystery of why she walked away.  Her acting, even by today’s standards, feels remarkably free and fluid, as if she were doing whatever she cared to, while others stuck to the script.  Garbo was an exquisite performer, at times a bit extravagant, and always the one to watch.

Beyond the final credits
“I want to be alone.”  That’s a line of Garbo’s from Grand Hotel, and for many years it came to be associated with the actress herself.  Over the decades many people wondered about that inscrutable decision by the star to leave her Hollywood career at the height of her fame.  “Why wonder?” she would say to a reporter toward the end of her life.  Garbo did comment once, though, about the quote she was most famous for:  ”I never said, ‘I want to be alone.’  I only said, ‘I want to be let alone.’  There is all the difference.”  Perhaps that explains it.

---

Celluloid Heroes
The Kinks

---

Camille (1936)
Greta Garbo, Robert Taylor, Jessie Ralph

---

Quote of Note
“All playwrights should be dead for three hundred years!”
“That would solve none of their problems–because actresses never die!  The stars never die and never change!”
— Actress Margo Channing (Bette Davis) and playwright Lloyd Richards (Hugh Marlowe), All About Eve (1950)

…58…59…60.