Wonderful character development!

Funny, strange, confrontational and subversive, this is one of the most interesting experiences you'll have at the cinema this year.

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

Close shines in drama with strong language, adult themes.

For Greta Garbo's second film under her new MGM contract the studio went back to the same source that they got for her first film with them Torrent. Vicente Blasco Ibanez offered up another of his novels for Garbo, The Temptress. Greta's got a whole lot of the men panting after her in this one.Blasco Ibanez also gave us the slightly more familiar Four Horsemen Of The Apocalypse and Blood And Sand which served Rudolph Valentino well during the silent era. Garbo's character of Elena has a lot of similarity with Dona Sol in Blood And Sand. It ends a lot worse for Elena than for Dona Sol.Garbo is married to Armand Kaliz who is not above peddling his wife's charms to get ahead. Right now she's got the wealthiest banker in Paris Marc McDermott in tow, but he means nothing to here but a cash cow for the husband. Who she really likes after meeting him at a costume party is Antonio Moreno, an engineer from Argentina who is looking for investors in a dam he wants to build.After McDermott commits suicide when he's facing ruin and names Garbo as the one responsible, to escape until the notoriety dies down Garbo and Kaliz go to the Argentine Pampas and visit with Moreno. The local bully and bandit leader Roy D'Arcy takes one look at her and likes her and knows she's available in the right conditions. That sets up all the action for the remainder of the film.Garbo's performance in The Temptress certainly assured her of a long career which was only briefly interrupted by the coming of sound where MGM took superb care to see that their investment transitioned smoothly. She is seductive and alluring in The Temptress like she was never before or since, even in her torrid film with John Gilbert Flesh And The Devil or in Mata Hari which calls for seductive and alluring like it calls for breathing.Moreno was one of the first players to be known as Latin Lovers and he was about ending his career in those roles and would be transitioning to character parts. Roy D'Arcy as the bandit chief registers the best after Garbo. He had that Snidely Whiplash thing down pat and the silent screen certainly called for those overacted gestures. His career would continue in sound, but not as successfully. His duel with the whips with Moreno is as savage an encounter between hero and villain as you'll ever see on film.The Temptress after over 80 years holds up well. For Garbo fans everywhere.

Not for or against Garbo but I have no interest to view every minute of one of her films.For the most part I will fast forward her movies only stopping if something of interest catches my attention.While skimming over this film I had to stop and view the entrance of Manos Duras(hard hands)played by Roy D'Arcy.It's really something the way silent films went the extra mile to give visual entertainment.The garb of D'Arcy instantly makes him a villain standout as he swaggers on to the screen.His appearance is somewhere in between Zorro overdressed or Zorro on crack.Along with having a gang he's a one man gang himself ready to use most anything that will cause injury.He and his guitar players are not to be missed.As for Garbo....she says her body is only wanted.That's as accurate as it gets.

Greta Garbo's second Hollywood feature is an irresistible meller, done to a turn by director Fred Niblo at his finest. (Dig those parallel tracking shots; first over a formal dining table laden w/ service & delicacies, and then under the same table, now heavy w/ service & delicacies of a rather different nature.) At this point in her career, Garbo was still playing femme fatale types (watch how she cups her lover's face in her hands) and in this adaptation of a rum Blasco-Ibanez novel, she drives four men to their ruin without lifting a finger. The plot takes us from Parisian highlife (a superb masked ball, a suicide at a banquet, overnight love in a park) down to the Argentine for dam building, a duel of honor played out with whips, sabotage & floods (with remarkable effects), and then back to Paris for our moral. When he's at his best, co-star Antonio Moreno is a bit like Brian Donleavy, alas he usually just looks vaguely surprised. But Roy D'Arcy & Lionel Barrymore get to whoop things up splendidly. Note that Garbo's regular lenser Wm Daniels shares credit with Tony Gaudio. But everyone deserves a prize, including one for the fine newly commissioned score.

"The Temptress" has a lot going for it, but it begins so sloooowly, and contains far too many intertitles.I couldn't help thinking how much better it could have been with, maybe, Ernst Lubitsch or D.W. Griffith directing. This is supposedly a MOTION PICTURE, not a novel.Still the directors gave us some wonderful shots and angles.One particular sequence is told with a shadow! Superb.And some running shots, with horses and a wagon, are worthy of the best of John Ford.Then one particular action scene, a duel, is as exciting, and surprisingly graphic, especially for 1926, as one could hope for.Still, overall, the story is somewhat dull and it's told often dully.If it weren't for the chance to watch movie history, including early Garbo, and the action scenes, and the often interesting direction and photography, it might not be worth watching.But it is, especially the new version at Turner Classic Movies, with a new score by young Michael Picton. Maestro Picton might well turn out to be a new Elmer Bernstein, who has -- it pains me to say -- passed on, but who was one of the greatest composers of the last 100 years.