A not terrible film that’s less about Garbo’s face than it is about her body. As Napoleon’s Polish lover, Maria Walewska, Garbo fucks for freedom. She submit’s to the little man’s humiliating grasp, loses her noble, older husband, and risks shame in her own country, to insure that her “sire,” will protect all that her people have, which is not much. Torn by her eventual desire for Bonaparte–she even follows him into exile, hoping he will escape Majorca dressed in the lady’s clothes she brings along–and her personal honor, Garbo does what any star would do in such a situation: she mimes torment in a serious of physical poses of great visual invention while dressed in Adrian. Lost, as always, in her fantasy about characterization–Garbo wants to “play” someone other than herself, always; more often than not her face wins out unless the part is so great it defeats the intensity and boredom of her self-interest–Garbo actually manages to become Walewska most credibly during her moments of shame, and play–i.e. when her brother, played by Lief Erickson!, chases her playfully around her modest castle. In “Conquest,” Garbo–who Alice B. Toklas once named Mademoiselle Hamlet–uses her hands a great deal to convey distress, and she laughs a great deal, too. Her laughter cracks through her natural propriety as a performer and shakes her beautiful body as it assumes another pose in a story of love no one believes, maybe not even it’s stars. Still, it’s the laughter that stays in the mind after the credits roll; two years later, Garbo would star in “Ninotchka,” where she got to laugh her head off. (Garbo liked to laugh at her own image best. During her silent film days with director Clarence Brown, he would play her rushes backwards; she loved that.) But I don’t think she could have done “Ninotchka,” without having laughed and played in “Conquest” first. Writing about that laugh in his book about the star, Barry Paris quotes Garson Kanin asking Ernst Lubitsch why he thought of Garbo for “Ninotchka,” in the first place. Lubitsch said:
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