The Kiss (1929) - film review

Irène is a young French woman who is trapped in a loveless marriage with an older man, businessman Charles Guarry.  For some time, she has been pursuing an intense love affair with lawyer André Dubail, but rather than leave her husband she decides instead to end the affair.  Irène unwittingly draws the attention of Pierre Lassalle, the 18-year-old son of a business associate of her husband.  Pierre claims to be madly in love with Irène but she knows that it is merely a passing infatuation.  On the eve of Pierre’s return to college, Irène allows the young man to give her a parting kiss.  The innocent embrace is witnessed by Irène’s husband who, in a jealous frenzy, attacks Pierre.  In the ensuing struggle a gun goes off and Charles Guarry is shot dead.  When Irène is arrested for her husband’s murder she reluctantly allows André to defend her at her trial.   Fearing that she may lose the only man she has ever loved, Irène can hardly bring herself to tell the truth...

It was the success of his daring adaptation of Thérèse Raquin (1928) (a film which sadly no longer exists) which earned Belgian filmmaker Jacques Feyder his ticket to Hollywood to direct his first American film (at MGM studios) and his last silent film.  The Kiss was also to be MGM’s last silent film, as well as that of the iconic actress Greta Garbo.  By the time the film went into production, the death knell for silent cinema in Hollywood had been sounded and it was only MGM’s worries over Garbo’s ability to make the transition to sound (her poor English pronunciation was exacerbated by her strong Swedish accent) which prevented The Kiss from being a talkie.  The film did however have a synchronised musical soundtrack (with much of the music taken, all too predictably, from Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde) with a few special sound effects (the sound of a gun being fired at the film’s two most dramatic moments).  Unlike many of his contemporaries, Feyder was enthusiastic about the switchover to sound and relished the challenges this presented on his subsequent sound features.

The Kiss was the perfect vehicle for Garbo, allowing her once again to play the smouldering object of desire that no man could resist but who was fated to become the tragic victim, redeemed by an act of sublime selflessness.  It was not such a perfect vehicle for Jacques Feyder, whose previous French features had had far more in the way of plot sophistication and character development than this typically trashy piece of Hollywood melodrama.  That the film has stood the test of time so well and rates as one of Garbo’s better films is almost entirely down to Feyder’s imaginative treatment of a pretty banal and well-worn subject.  Carefully orchestrated tracking shots, pans and zooms achieve a balletic fluidity that makes a striking contrast with the comparatively static feel of most melodramas made in Hollywood at this time.  The film’s most inspired sequence - the camera pulling back on a closing door, behind which a single gunshot is heard - has a Hitchcockian elegance and simplicity to it, beautifully setting up the murder mystery that dominates the second half of the film.  The long courtroom scene is made interesting by some equally inventive camerawork and effective use of subjective flashbacks (in which the uncertainty in the heroine’s testimony is graphically depicted).  In contrast to his subsequent American films, which show an increasing sense of frustration with the Hollywood system, Feyder manages to bring a dynamism and auteur sensibility to The Kiss, elevating it way above the standard of the usual Hollywood melodrama.   

Feyder was doubly fortunate in that not only did he have an accomplished technical crew, which included the legendary cinematographer William H. Daniels (who had previously worked on Erich von Stroheim’s Greed (1924) and The Merry Widow (1925)), but also a high-calibre cast, headed by the queen of the screen icons, Greta Garbo, then at the height of her powers.  The 24-year-old Garbo was a godsend for any film director and Feyder does her justice, not only perpetuating the Garbo legend by showing her at her most radiantly beautifully and sensual, but also by allowing her to give what is assuredly one of her finest screen performances.  The lingering close-ups are not content merely to record Garbo’s incomparable beauty; they also reveal the torrent of emotion beneath the surface, the growing sense of hopelessness as the cruel net of fate closes around the flawed heroine and drags her inexorably towards the guillotine.  If only Garbo had been allowed to speak!  How much more devastatingly poignant the film would have been if we could have heard the tortured resignation in her voice when, on the eve of a trial that will surely condemn her, she admits she cares not what becomes of her.  The contributions from Garbo’s co-stars Conrad Nagel and Anders Randolf are equally deserving of praise, and Lew Ayres makes an impressive screen debut, just before taking on his most memorable role in Lewis Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1930).  Jacques Feyder would direct Garbo one more time, in the German language version of Anna Christie (1931), after which he soon became disillusioned with Hollywood and returned to France, to direct three of his greatest films: Le Grand jeu (1934), Pension Mimosas (1935) and La Kermesse héroïque (1935).  By this time, Garbo had found her voice - and what a voice...

© James Travers 2011

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