Word: garbos
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...lush decor -- and an androgynous one at that. It suited him to dress her in white tie and tails (and to have her kiss a woman before she embraced Gary Cooper in Morocco). At first Dietrich fit into Hollywood's pantheon of sexual ambiguity somewhere between Greta Garbo and Mae West. Von Sternberg did nothing to soften her exotic sexual challenge or penetrate her masklike countenance, both of which were largely his creations. The studio finally separated them...
...dazzling photographs and sprightly prose, Acting Hollywood Style probes how and why movie stars move us. The author dissects Hollywood acting through discussions of body language, voice and the landscape of the face -- how we read emotions into the luminous but blank gaze of Greta Garbo...
...half-century ago, people perked up when Greta Garbo did the nurturing. Man, woman or boy, they were all frail things, dazzled by her strength and glamour; and she caressed every lover as if he were a child with a fever. Garbo made her last film in 1941, when Hollywood was called the Dream Factory; skeptics said it dressed up lies as art. So why -- it can't be only nostalgia -- do those old films, for all their soft focus and happy endings, seem truer than today's? Because the scale was different, smaller, more intimate. Films weren't fairy...
...unlikely, though, that they signal a return to Hollywood's golden age, when Garbo, Davis, Hepburn, Crawford, Dietrich could sell a film and give it class. That was a more genteel time, one that prized wit, heart and, on screen at least, a sexual equality of emotion and intelligence. Movies were about grownups; the toy-boy heroes stayed in comic books. Maybe audiences were more mature too. These days, Ghost and Pretty Woman are the big-hit exception, not the norm; moviegoers tend to measure heroism in terms of pectorals. Somewhere ! between Rambo and bimbo, between roles for children...
...studios were Jewish immigrants from Germany and Eastern Europe. Writers, directors, designers, cinematographers would make their names in Europe, then stow away to the States. And co-opting like crazy from the start, Hollywood made foreigners its greatest stars: Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford, Cary Grant and Greta Garbo. So it is only fitting that the torchbearer, the sword wielder, the giant of American movies, should be an overgrown Austrian with a face and body out of a superhero comic...