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Beautiful enigma: Garbo’s mystery lives on

15 January 2022

9:00 AM

15 January 2022

9:00 AM

Garbo: Her Life, Her Films Robert Gottlieb

Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, pp.437, 32

‘We didn’t need dialogue’, glares Gloria Swanson’s crazed silent picture star midway through Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard. ‘We had faces!’ She had a point. Even those of us who believe the movies weren’t really the movies until they had snappy dialogue (and no dialogue ever snapped the way Wilder’s did) have to concede that Swanson had a face that could stop a train.

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