The Mysterious Lady (1928)

Originally posted to Facebook on 10/15/2018

The Mysterious Lady was our twelfth film from 1928, and the second we've seen starring Greta Garbo, after 1926's Flesh and the Devil. It is also the second film we've seen directed by Fred Niblo, after the 1925 blockbuster Ben-Hur.

The film stars Conrad Nagel as an Austrian military official, who meets and falls in love with Garbo -- secretly working for Russia. She steals military plans entrusted to him, and he chases her east, posing as a piano player. This is perhaps the first real spy film we've seen, pre-dating the Cold War spy vogue by a couple of decades. Also notable, it takes a fair amount of time showing the relationship between Garbo and Nagel build; there is a long sequence before he knows the truth, in which they simply spend the day together, hiking and enjoying each other's company. This is effective and surprisingly unusual, and in strong contrast to, for instance, Flesh and the Devil, where Garbo and John Gilbert are almost immediately infatuated with one another.

Of course, the kind of intensity of feeling on display in Flesh and the Devil is one of the strengths of silent film, and choosing a more prosaic route gives this film something of the feel and pacing of a sound film -- and it probably would have been just as good or better had it been made a few years later; the scenes with Nagel playing the piano while undercover in enemy territory might have worked quite well in a sound film for instance.

This is the kind of film that I think gets lost in the shuffle a bit. It is not startlingly excellent, but is strong and sure-footed, perhaps verging on slick. It's unlikely to show up on any lists of the great silents, but nonetheless tells a good suspenseful story and presents leads with real chemistry -- a standard which more films should aspire to, and which is certainly an enormous improvement over last week's The Road to Ruin.

Next week we'll watch The Battle of the Sexes, our thirteenth and last film from 1928, and the fifth film we've seen directed by D.W. Griffith, the last being 1920's Way Down East. The list, as always, is here: https://bit.ly/2lZtfmT