John Gilbert & Mae Murray In The Merry Widow (1925)

Greta Garbo and Constance Bennett in Two-Faced Woman (1941)

Queen Christina (1933)

Greta Garbo c. 1928

🍃75 years ago, in April 1946, British photographer Cecil Beaton organized a photo shoot for Greta Garbo at the Plaza Hotel in New York. This was their first, but far from the last joint work.

All pictures are copyrighted by: «The Cecil Beaton Studio Archive at Sotheby’s»

@allgarbo @itsborhes

Winona Ryder, 1990.

By 1926 director King Vidor and star John Gilbert were one of MGM’s most bankable duos, thanks to the massive success of their WWI drama The Big Parade (1925). They were immediately thrust into the similarly high-minded period piece La Bohème (1926), and were cast in The Glory Diggers, about the construction of the Panama Canal. But MGM had to drop the latter project, and to keep them working swiftly re-assigned both of them to Bardelys the Magnificent (1926) instead, a tongue-in-cheek romantic adventure in the Douglas Fairbanks mold. It was a departure for the duo, but they proved to have the appropriately light touch, and Gilbert flies across the screen as if sprung from a trampoline. Gilbert pokes fun at his “Great Lover” persona, here pushed into a seducer caricature of Casanovian proportions. Once thought lost, an incomplete print was discovered in France in 2006 and restored by Lobster Films. The third reel is missing, with that section filled in with inter-titles and stills. It is this version that is on DVD from Flicker Alley and is now streaming on FilmStruck.

Read More On StreamLine: The Swashbuckling Lover: BARDELYS THE MAGNIFICENT (’26)

So this happened…

Queen Christina, 1933 dir. Rouben Mamoulian