Wednesday with Greta Garbo

“The Painted Veil” (1934)

Oct 05, 2022

This is an evocative film about a woman’s desire and redemption. It’s not an essential Garbo picture, however. Miss Garbo improves the flat screenplay with another considered performance. The male leads (Herbert Marshall as an epidemiologist husband and George Brent as the aroused other man) are equally enticing, passionate and erotic, playing off Garbo’s magnetism. Look for Charlie Chan actor Warner Oland as a Chinese general in this 83-minute film, which Robert Gottlieb reports was shot in 59 days for under a million dollars. It earned a small profit of $138,000.

The Painted Veil is based upon the novel by W. Somerset Maugham. Watch opulent Chinese rituals on lavish sets with Adrian’s flamboyant costumes and fire-breathing dragons as half-naked men and women tease and pose while Greta Garbo gets hot under a white turban as her illicit suitor in a white tuxedo salivates over her. There’s more to this version, which deviates from Maugham’s fiction as other cinematic versions do, than pre-Communist China exotic displays.

Garbo in white echoes the movie’s redemptive, Catholic contrition theme. Maugham read Dante during his first trip to Florence and decided to adapt an infidelity theme, basing the story’s infectious disease doctor-husband character on his older brother, whom he did not like, according to Maugham biographer Ted Morgan. The doctor’s simple act of retribution—the husband punishes his adventurous wife (Garbo) during an outbreak of infectious disease—makes The Painted Veil a light-headed tale of the uniquely bitter elixir of sexual want and that which is driven by higher romantic love.

Wednesday with Greta Garbo

Flesh and the Devil