"Ernst Lubitsch has been credited with jesting that Greta Garbo and Gary Cooper were the same person. To prove his unlikely thesis, he asked the rhetorical question, 'Have you ever seen them together?' Certainly not on film...."
"Whatever the genesis of Ninotchka, its fruition crowned Garbo once and for all not merely as, in the drunken words of Melvyn Douglas's Leon, "Ninotchka the Great ... Duchess of the People! ... Grand Duchess of the People:" but also the Queen of Tragedy and, at long last, Comedy. With Ninotchka, "GARBO LAUGHS" supplanted "GARBO TALKS" as the watchwords of discerning moviegoers. From the moment she steps off a train in her commissar's costume, Garbo's exquisite gravity of expression and the metronomic doomsday delivery of her lines are as profoundly hilarious as anything in the history of talking pictures....
"Garbo herself ranked Lubitsch over even Cukor [Camille] as her greatest director. John Bainbridge (in his Garbo) describes Lubitsch's unusual modus operandi with Garbo on the set of Ninotchka:
In working with Garbo he was a paragon of gallantry, thoughtfulness, and charm. Arriving on the set in the morning, he called at Garbo's dressing room and formally paid his respects. Then he removed his coat and worked in shirt sleeves the rest of the day. At five o'clock, when work was over, Lubitsch again put on his coat and called at the star's dressing room, where he bade her a courtly good evening. This daily routine, as far as anyone could remember, was unprecedented on a Hollywood stage."Near the end of her career as at the beginning, Garbo projected all the elemental choices involved in being or becoming a normal woman. The first flutterings of desire, the perennial fears of betrayal, the shame, the guilt, the joy of forbidden loves. Curiously, she shied away from the roles in which she could have gained in reputation what she lost in control. She was reluctant to play even the very mild and thoroughly enchanting drunk scene in Ninotchka. She was never cast as a mad-woman, or a problem alcoholic, or an addict of any kind. The studio may have been as hesitant as Garbo in exploring more morbid subjects in which their star would have to forgo dignity and decorum.
"Fortunately, Ninotchka demonstrated that Garbo had the talent and instincts to play the most demanding roles of Chekov, Ibsen, Shaw, Pirandello, and any other tragicomic dramatist in the modern repertory. The instant shift in her great drunk scene from light farce to light pathos without missing a beat of conviction is a moment of rare sublimity in American talking pictures...."
The edited version may look like this:
".... From the moment she steps off a train in her commissar's costume, Garbo's exquisite gravity of expression and the metronomic doomsday delivery of her lines are as profoundly hilarious as anything in the history of talking pictures....
"Garbo herself ranked Lubitsch over even Cukor [Camille] as her greatest director....
"Near the end of her career as at the beginning, Garbo projected all the elemental choices involved in being or becoming a normal woman. The first flutterings of desire, the perennial fears of betrayal, the shame, the guilt, the joy of forbidden loves. Curiously, she shied away from the roles in which she could have gained in reputation what she lost in control. She was reluctant to play even the very mild and thoroughly enchanting drunk scene in Ninotchka. She was never cast as a mad-woman, or a problem alcoholic, or an addict of any kind....
"Fortunately, Ninotchka demonstrated that Garbo had the talent and instincts to play the most demanding roles of Chekov, Ibsen, Shaw, Pirandello, and any other tragicomic dramatist in the modern repertory. The instant shift in her great drunk scene from light farce to light pathos without missing a beat of conviction is a moment of rare sublimity in American talking pictures...."
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