TORRENT/ IBANEZ TORRENT
US, 1926, 88 minutes, Black and white (tinted).
Ricardo Cortes, Greta Garbo.
Directed by Monta Bell.
Torrent is based on a novel by this popular Spanish author, this Vicente Ibanez, author of The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and Blood and Sand. These were both filmed in Hollywood with Rudolph Valentino. He died in 1926 and this film was made with Ricardo Cortez, a European actor who was given an exotic Hispanic name. But, the film is remembered because it was the first Hollywood film of the imported Swedish star, Greta Garbo.
Ibanez died in 1929 and so saw the silent versions of his novels. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and Blood and Sand were both remade.
Technically, this film seems rather creaky compared with so many of the period. It is very much studio-bound, the initial sequences in a Spanish village, some of the action in Paris, then a return to the village. The scenery and backgrounds appear as very artificial.
The film is about a poor family, with difficulties in paying the rent to the haughty landlady. Her son seems a pleasant young man and is infatuated by the daughter of the family, taking opportunities to visit her and professing his love. When the torrent of the title (special effects of the period) comes down on the town but avoids the house of the family, the father thinks it better to send his daughter away to Paris. She thinks that her suitor will come with her but he is pressurised by his mother to stay, to stand for election in politics and to marry a local woman.
It is interesting to see Greta Garbo as a simple girl of the town, simple, flirtatious, devoted to her family. This is the least persuasive part of Garbo’s performance. But when she goes to Paris, continues her singing lessons, becomes a significant diva in the Paris Opera, changing her name, the complexity that Garbo could bring to a role, haughtiness, simmering passion, are much more in evidence.
It is even more in evidence when she returns to the town and discovers her suitor, an older man, married with a family, respected in the town for his political stances. She tries to revive the relationship when it is revealed, or she reveals by playing a record and then singing the aria without the record, that she is the celebrated singer.
Nothing comes of this possibility of being reunited. The politician ultimately opts for his family and the steady life. Later, they do meet one another, embrace and realise what they have lost.
Interesting as a production of 1926 but more interesting for introducing the wider world to Greta Garbo.
