Product Description

"Long before the word charisma became a cliché, Garbo was its quintessence" (James Robert Parish and Ronald L. Bowers, The MGM Stock Company: The Golden Era). To generations of fans and critics, Greta Garbo is the screen's greatest actress, greatest beauty...and greatest mystery. The Swedish Sphinx conquered silents and talkies, and Wild Orchids showcases both her astonishing talent and her incomparable beauty. Garbo portrays Lillie Sterling, the neglected wife of an American businessman (Lewis Stone), who journeys into the exotic jungles of Java and into a steamy triangle of husband, wife and dashing plantation owner (Nils Asther). As passion flares, so does jealousy. Then the plantation owner and Lillie's husband embark on a tiger hunt...but the real prey may not be tigers.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #66061 in DVD
• Released on: 2009-06-22
• Format: NTSC
• Running time: 102 minutes

Customer Reviews

MGM gets its money's worth out of Garbo in 1929
MGM had Greta Garbo quite busy making films during 1928 and 1929 as the studio saw the approach of sound film possibly destroying one of their top assets. Nobody knew what the outcome of Garbo's career would be at the time.

Thus Greta Garbo made silents until 1930's "Anna Christie". This silent film is not really silent at all. It has a very sophisticated score for its time, including sound effects, crowd noises, and even singing during musical numbers, with long shots of the singers so you can't see that there is no true synchronization with the singers themselves.

The story is that of 50ish John Sterling (Lewis Stone) and his young wife, Lillie (Greta Garbo). The two are embarking on a cruise to Java so that John can mix business with pleasure. His business is to look over some plantations that he may buy. The pleasure is his desire to hunt and shoot a tiger while in Java. On the boat the couple meet Prince De Gace, played by Nils Asther. John is by no means a neglectful husband, but at age 50 he has largely left his romantic days behind him. This makes Lillie a likely target for the charming prince and his silver tongue. He makes a play for her right off the bat, and continues his chase as the Sterlings remain guests in his home. Lillie is torn, but tries her best to avoid the prince and his advances. One night during their stay, after returning from a day of looking at plantations, John sees the silhouettes of the prince and Lillie on the drawn shade of the house just after the prince has grabbed her for a quick kiss. Whatever will John do about this situation? Mix feelings of betrayal and jealousy with tigers and loaded guns and anything is possible.

The acting in this film is quite well done. Asther comes across well as the slimy but attractive prince, and Lewis Stone was a wonderful silent actor. His surprise when he first sees the couple in an embrace, and his look of both great disdain and knowing when he later sees the prince flirting with a servant girl says it all. Yet, like Garbo, some of his best performances would come with talking pictures where he could both artfully play the cad in the MGM precodes as well as Judge Hardy of the Andy Hardy series fame.

This is a Warner Archive product and is thus a DVD-R with no extra features. There are no chapter stops. You may only go forwards and backwards in ten minute increments. There has been no restoration of this film specifically for this release, but I must say that the film looks very good - among the best quality I've seen of MGM's late silent era films. Highly recommended for the silent film enthusiast.

Kitschy Enough for Three Films, But Garbo is Garbo
Barely turned 23 - Garbo had starred in Mauritz Stiller's "The Story of Gösta Berling" The Saga of Gosta Berling when she was still a teenager - and with ten leading roles already behind her, Greta Garbo started shooting MGM's "Wild Orchids" in the late Fall of 1928. The film is a dreadful concoction of hackneyed plots: the neglected young wife tempted by an exotic foreigner, with Garbo's Swedish compatriot Nils Asther cast as an immoral Javanese Prince! Yet surprisingly, "Wild Orchids" is quite an intimate film with just three roles, the film survives today because the actors - especially Garbo - make it work.

Lewis Stone, playing the December husband to Garbo's May bride, handles his role as Romantic foil with consumate smoothness; Stone's almost too good as the tired, boring businessman who overlooks his young wife. In vivid contrast emerges a Javanese prince - played by another recent Swedish arrival in Hollywood, Nils Asther - who bursts into the movie whipping his servant right outside his steamship cabin door, much to the horror of passing Garbo. One is instantly reminded of Gloria Swanson in von Stroheim's "Queen Kelly". Queen Kelly Seeing Garbo the cruel Prince instantly takes on a different, gentler persona, though his actions do not allay Garbo's disgust.

The story quickly becomes Garbo's struggle to find some connection with her boring and unobservant husband who is preoccupied with business matters, and the wicked but quite aroused with interest Prince. Viewed today Garbo's internal dilema, with its endless circling enticements and temptations, seems purest melodrama, but despite this Garbo still evokes for us a wonderful shared intimacy and in her candor wins us over to her authenticity. And what sublime grace exits between the three principals as they move about aboard ship, with Stone deftly managing his part to understated perfection, even as Asther's Prince assaults his wife Garbo's defences. At times this fluid graceful sense of musical motion becomes so insistent that Garbo and Asther find themselves dancing. Asther's archness is forgiven, both by us and Garbo, as the story of her romancing takes on a living breathing force.

Many small wonders exist in the filming by William H. Daniels, but I must mention the mirror shots taken in Garbo's stateroom. They in particular capture her in a pantomine of feelings and shifting thoughts so unobtrusively its nearly supernatural. The ease with which Daniels and Garbo work together - almost outside of the director's orb as they add one visual epipahny after another - will only grow in later films to moments of unsurpassed perfection. Perhaps because there's really so little going on - the big and sole event in the film, a tiger hunt - comes at the very end - along the way Garbo is free to tighrope lightly from side to side of her conundrum - finding her own sense of self as actress between the understated acting of Lewis Stone, as her much older husband who represents stuffy familar security, and the wild and heavily theatrical Nils Asther, as Javanese Prince, tugging and pulling her fascination with the exotic and unknown.

Master cinematographer Daniels captures so many of Garbo's slightest nuances, her astonishing gift for telling tiny gestures and shaded emphasis we can almost forgive the ghastly storyline and average direction. Cinematographer Daniels visuals enrichen the film in innumerable ways. The mere act of a character walking down a corridor becomes a statement. Garbo's haughty disdain on meeting Asther's Prince formally through he husband is completely subverted by the huge orchid she wears on her left shoulder, the film's symbol of exotic love. But Garbo is made into a actual flower by Daniels presenting her all aglow in a bath of moonlight, and his filming Garbo in her stateroom as dressing she elegantly streches and curves like a flower in a rippling breeze. Daniels' subtle adjustements of distance and marvelous lighting gives even the most common of the many tete-a-tetes a lightness common to only the best silents, a sense of freedom of movement largely lost with the coming of sound. Combined with the acting the cinematography rescues "Wild Orchids" from what could easily have been a deserved oblivion. To what extent one accepts these elements succeed in saving "Wild Orchids" is a purely personal estimate, and will vary widely among viewers today.

Among numerous small points - the steamship Garbo travels on with her husband to Asia sails through the Golden Gate - several years prior to the building of the bridge. People today, even native San Franciscans, rarely seem to realize that long before the famous red superstructure of the twin towers emerged in the gap between San Francisco and the Marin headlands, the expanse of water leading to the Pacific was named the Golden Gate. "Wild Orchids" also flaunts one of those superb long tracking shots so dear to silent film buffs - this at a Javanese banquet, the camera pulling back and back as the full length of the table is revealed. Sadly, for the most part director Sidney Franklin rarely finds much poetry in his film.

One dinner scene at the Princes has a company of Javanese dancers, local color brought in for the filming as half documentary, half dream sequence. At the close of the dance one sinuous woman dancer, arrayed in a stunning sensual costume twisting her limbs to kitschy pseudo-Asian music added to the silent score perfectly conjures up the voluptous world of the Prince. A short time later Garbo tries on a similar dress, a wildly exotic silk lame Javanese costume, complete with gilded headdress, ropes of carmine necklace beads, flared pointed shoulders, and golden slippers, all presages Garbo's famous outfit for "Mati Hari". Mata Hari Attempting to get a rise out of napping husband she's hugely disappointed. At this moment even the densest member of the audience realizes things are only going to heat up.

Though far from her best films, "Wild Orchids" offers up more than enough of Garbo to make the film a solid recommendation for her fans. I certainly much prefer watching a film like this, with all its flaws, to more 'successful' films that really leave nothing lasting. Garbo's presence in "Wild Orchids", as it name suggests, lingers in the memory like a rare perfume, one of those rare, impossible to describe haunting fragances only found in the rarest of wild orchids.