Romancefest 20: Camille

Two terminal illness stories in a row! How come everyone has to die in Romancefest? All right, not everyone, but it seems like a lot.

It's 1847 and Greta Garbo stars as party-girl Marguerite Gautier, who frequents the theaters and clubs of Paris in an attempt to snag a rich guy (or series of rich guys) to make a living off of. She competes with the other girls and uses an older sidekick to help scout for royalty. Unbeknownst to everyone, she's terminally ill.

One night, Armand Duval (Robert Taylor) stumbles ass backwards into her box seat at the theater and she mistakes him for a rich guy she has her sights on and engages in some flirting. Soon she realizes she was mistaken, but is eventually won over by his sincerity. She's a little under the weather, and he's the only one who genuinely seems to care.

Taylor's a little bland in the film as a leading man, but the character is interesting. He's so innocent and sincere, as compared to the rest of the hedonistic characters, that it ends up being very sweet. Which, I guess, is why they call this a romance. And, unlike some other matinee idols of old (Rudolph Valentino, I'm looking at you) Taylor still seems to be handsome by today's standards.

Lionel Barrymore shows up as Duval's father, who tells Garbo to back off -- he knows her reputation and doesn't want her messing up his son's life. So, Garbo has to decide whether her last few days of happiness before she kicks off are important enough to potentially ruin the life of the only guy she ever really loved.

Garbo is kind of hypnotic in the lead role -- she's not really traditionally attractive, but she has a slow, thought out way of speaking and moving that draws you in. You can understand why Taylor would be drawn to her, despite her obvious flaws. Even though her whole life is a shallow party, you can sense deep down she's above it, but not in a pretentious way -- the party is the pretension.

I first became aware of CAMILLE as the movie Annie and Daddy Warbucks go to see in the 1982 ANNIE flick. My parents taped it off TV for me when it was on back in 1986, and I used to watch it all the time. But, when it got to the "Let's Go to the Movies" scene, I almost always fast-forwarded through the CAMILLE clips -- it seemed like they showed way too much of a movie that was completely incidental to the plot. And, they showed the ending of the film, so when the final seconds came on screen during this viewing, they were instantly recognizable.

There have been a million adaptations of this story, which was originally an Alexandre Dumas novel, but all of the reading I'm doing is telling me this version, starring Garbo and directed by George Cukor, is the definitive version.

So, now I can say I've seen it.