Richard Boleslawski | The Painted Veil / 1934

ordinary sinner to sacred saint

by Douglas Messerli

 

John Meehan, Salka Viertel, and Edith Fitzgerald (screenplay, based on the novel by W. Somerset Maugham), Richard Boleslawski (director) The Painted Veil / 1934

 

What a difference 10 months made in Hollywood in 1934. By July of that year Joseph Breen, as the newly appointed head of the Production Code Administration (PCA) had begun his heavy-handed editing of Hollywood films, ending what was often the Pre-Code period—although actually the Code had existed since the late 1920s, but was not as emphatically enforced—now banning even mention of the popular “pansy” figures and any representation of homosexuality as well as refusing even many portrayals of adulterous heterosexual relationships.

       In February of that year, Greta Garbo had starred in the popular Queen Christiana (listed generally as a 1933 movie), playing her character quite clearly as a bi-sexual figure, in a relationship with her female servant Ebba Sparre as well, eventually, with the dashing Don Antonio de la Prada acted by her former lover John Gilbert. Although I have previously complained over the relatively heterosexual attitude the movie takes when, if it had remained truer to the original King of Sweden (her honorific title) it might have presented the first truly lesbian hero of film, at least there were a few scenes in Queen Christiana that hinted at the actual King’s and Garbo’s bisexuality. And the success of the film had to do, in part, from those sensational possibilities, that a female might actually be in love with a female servant and against the institution of marriage.

      By November 23rd of that year, the release date of her The Painted Veil directed by Richard Boleslawski there was no hope of bringing Maugham’s torrid heterosexual love story to the screen as it appeared in the book. Garbo’s friend (and reportedly, occasional lover*) Salka Biertel, along with John Meehan and Edith Fitzgerald didn’t even attempt to fully play out Katrin’s (Garbo’s character) sexual betrayal of her inattentive husband, Walter Fane (Herbert Marshall), through her affair with the charming but morally empty attaché to the British embassy, Jack Townsend (George Brent).

      What the film does succeed at doing in its first few scenes which celebrate the marriage of Katrin’s sister Olga (Cecilia Parker), is to play off of Garbo’s reputation established in that previous film so quickly that the censors hardly had the time to notice. Not only does Katrin give a totally unexpected gift to her sister—surely deemed by Breen’s supporters as shocking as Katrin and Olga’s mother perceives it to be—a delicate negligee for her wedding night. Ogla’s reaction says everything:

 

Katrin: My present for you. [holds up a negligee]

Katrin: But don't you tell mother! She'll think it's wicked!

Olga: Oh, it's lovely. But isn't it?

Katrin: Wicked? Why, of course, it's wicked!

 

      A few moments later, when you least expect it, Katrin kisses her sister goodbye, four times in a row, not on the cheeks as one might suspect, but fully on the lips. All right, she is her sister, and sisters are certainly permitted to do that even it seems a bit unusual, which is probably why Breen’s men didn’t demand it be cut. But Garbo, in fact, is the actor kissing fully the lips of the other actor, Parker, an act that has not been represented in quite this manner since what I describe as the very first LGBTQ+ incident in a film, when two women kissed on the lips in Eadwearad Muybridge’s 1887 study of female models in motion in The Kiss. Once, even twice might be still somewhat respectable, but as if she were desperately seeking some way to remember perhaps her only confident in a family of an old-fashioned not terribly loving mother and a mostly absent medical researching father. Without her, she recognizes, she will have no one to love. And it is out of the desperateness that we see her steal a third and lean forward into yet a fourth full kiss as if to seal the bargain of love that the two women have had, now being taken away by a quite foolish-looking bridegroom (Billy Bevan).

     It is for this reason alone that commentators of LGBTQ+ movies include The Painted Veil on their lists, making an even weaker case for this film as being described as a gay movie as Garbo’s release of earlier in the year.

     At least this time around we truly do get to see Garbo acting, frankly in a manner that often reminds me of a smart Katherine Hepburn, a woman who you are never sure about what she might say. Alright, we grant, she’s generally playing against one of the most intentionally boring figures of a motion pictures, Herbert Marshall’s Fane, but she often turns his lack of communicate skills almost into an absurd comedy, as when she runs into him again as she races to her father’s study to watch Olga leave. The conversation, in fact, might almost be said to foretell us of their soon-to-be abyssal marriage. Harold Pinter or even Beckett might have written the dialogue:

 

Walter Fane: I was waiting for your father. He’s there.

Katrin: Yes, I see him.

Walter: [as he looks out upon the dripping front lawn] It’s raining.

Katrin: [turns to look at him] So it is.

Walter: No, I mean it’s raining, and he’s got an umbrella.

Katrin: [laughing] Not really?

Walter: No, no, I mean it’s open….and he using it.

Katrin: [again laughing] Oh, poor father doesn’t even know it’s raining.

 

      There is a subtle message in this seeming nonsense. Walter, we soon perceive, despite the complete distraction of his research in Cholera, would never become so distracted by other human beings as not to notice the weather or any other natural phenomena around him. And Katrin even realizes this when, a few hours later, she accepts his proposal of marriage. Her reasons are clear: she is terrorized by having to remain behind to serve her loving father and weather the abuse of his mother, is desperate to travel, to see new worlds. And since Walter is about to travel to Hong Kong, she agrees to a marriage completely without love.

       He may be surprised by her willingness to go to China, but she explains it quite clearly: “I like China very much. I like America too. I like all the places I haven't been.” For her marriage is only a way out of the proscribed world of Graz, Austria.

       By the end of this film, we discover that Walter is a man of deep abiding love; but that love is clearly not expressed in terms that come even slightest close to a romantic love of a woman. Like Jack Townsend and all the other “whites” who inhabit the Chinese community, Walter seemingly expects Katrin to play bridge with the embassy wives and watch polo games in her endless spare time. But Katrin has no interest in bridge or the embassy wives, and doesn’t even know what polo is, although she later discovers she is fond of horses.

      Walter imagines, nonetheless, that she will be waiting at home for him whenever he arrives at midnight or even later, sometimes with new Cholera outbreaks throughout the country for which he attempting to discover a vaccine. Night after night, he is simply a no-show for dinner, falling into a desperate sleep, without even trying to imagine what his wife might have been doing with herself during his absence. Although he claims to love her deeply, it’s also clear he hasn’t a clue about what love between a man and a woman is about.

      Although off the screen, Marshall was apparently a notorious ladies’ man, married five times and divorced three as well as having numerous affairs, including one with Gloria Swanson, on screen his high-toned and careful British accent turned him into almost a model of a dislikeable prig which perhaps accounts for his later roles as a Nazi spy in Foreign Correspondent (1940) or the cuckolded husband in The Letter of the same year.

    In a sense, Walter’s treatment of Katrin is basically the model of the patriarchal notion of heterosexual marriage, the wife sacrificing her life to a man who doesn’t even realize that she’s made a sacrifice, or might be in the least a bit troubled by his utter absence.

     Is it any wonder that finding a reprobate like Townsend interested in her, a man who takes his job so nonchalantly that he is able to take entire days off touring her around Hong Kong including chauffeuring her through the famed Sun & Moon dance of the Chinese festival, one of the most marvelous of Hollywood Asian spectaculars that would match the later “Uncle Tom” extravaganza in The King and I, that Katrin may be attracted to him.

    For Jack, as well, Katrin’s curiosity and enthusiasms for nearly all new experiences if something he rarely encounters. At one point he proffers the observation: “Have you any idea how seldom I see anybody getting a thrill about anything?” And at another points describes her “I think you're the most curious curio in all China.”

    For the knowledgeable person, Jack offers the perfect opportunity for a disenchanted woman to go astray. When Jack comes to take Katrin away from her card game to see his ponies, she thanks the ladies, looking directly at his wife, who answers, “What for. My husband?” as he she is very well aware what is in store.

      Walter’s discovery of their “affair” is made through the simple fact that, arriving her one afternoon purposely early, with Austrian magazines in hand as gift, he finds her bedroom door locked and Jack’s hat on the outer table.

      His reaction is cruel, demanding that we will give her a divorce only if she gets a written letter from Jack stating that he will divorce and marry her—knowing full well that the attaché would never permit his reputation to be ruined which would almost mean the end of his career—or follow him inland to an unsophisticated world where the epidemic is raging.

       Here is a world without even the company of other women except for her Chinese servant. The only other non-native people left are a few nuns in a nearby orphanage and a truly self-demeaning and slight crazy alcoholic, Waddington (Forrester Harvey), by this time the last element of humor left this increasingly righteous film, he constantly apologizing for himself at the very meaning of embarrassing others with the truth, like a self-conscious queer that cannot contain himself from saying what others can no longer bear to hear.

     Suffering a sort of break down, even she announcing that she can no longer think straight, Katrin finally forces her husband to see how he has tortured her, bringing her to a god-forsaken place in order to die, almost as a punishment for the few kisses or whatever else she might have enjoyed behind doors with Townsend. Certainly, one cannot imagine she and Walter ever having sex.

        And the film, accordingly, turns them both soon after into saintly lovers of mankind in general without any individuals involved. Planning to go yet further inland, Walter arranges to send Katrin back to Hong Kong. But when he leaves, she gets the brilliant idea to begin working as a nurse at the orphanage, at least having something to do with her days. Her beneficent love for the children helps her to perceive the deep love of Walter for mankind and to realize how selfish the love she and Jack sought. Certainly, Katrin is no longer curious and original in her speech. The rest of Garbo’s lines sound like she was quoting from a marital pledge of allegiance.

       So deep is his love, that upon Walter’s return he orders the local Chinese commandant to burn the old section of the city, causing major riots to break out. Stopping by the orphanage to check up on an ill boy patient, he hardly notices that the nurse with whom he is now working is his wife.

    Returning to the melee in a fruitless attempt to explain to the people whose homes are being destroyed the necessity of the action, he is stabbed, Katrin rushing his side, hoping to tell him before he dies that she does now truly love him for his special kind of caring.

      In the novel, Maugham kills him off—as he should be for his total lack of any feeling about anything but the most abstract notions of love. But the new Hollywood, created, in part, by the censors, lets him live, with Katrin babbling on about her admiration for his ideals as they both collapse in exhaustion.

       Throughout the work, neither of them seems to be able to sleep, Katrin even before she leaves home staying up for all hours of the night, coloring them both with a slightly vampirish aura. They both, after all, maintain their energy through the tainted blood of others. Maybe now they can both sleep; but surely they will never again truly share a bed. These are pure spirits, without any bodily functions left. The hand-flapping, scolding, and gushing gay boys and the disdainful, dishing dykes are all gone, leaving us with empty symbols of spiritual love, without even the possibility of impulsively kissing other human beings quickly on the lips.

 

*Beginning as an actress, Viertel was among the wave of Germans and Austrians who escaped the growing fascist climate by emigrating to the US and moving on eventually to Los Angeles. There she became a friend and mentor to Greta Garbo, writing several of her scripts, including Queen Christiana, The Painted Veil, Anna Karenina, and Two-Faced Woman. The Viertels’ Santa Monica Canyon home eventually became the center of the German émigré community of European intellectuals, particularly at their Sunday night tea parties. Her guests included Sergei Eisenstein. Charlie Chaplin. Arnold Schoenberg, Christopher Isherwood (who moved into Viertel's garage apartment with his boyfriend in 1946, causing even Viertel some consternation for their vast age difference), Hanns Eisler, Bertolt Brecht, Max Reinhardt, and Thomas Mann, as well as Hollywood stars such as Charles Laughton and Ava Gardner.

     Not only was her home the center of the diverse émigré community, but she herself played go-between Hollywood and the noted members of her soirees. She actively fundraised for Eisenstein’s Que Viva Mexico! project. She introduced composer Franz Waxman to James Whale, whose score of Whale became his first Hollywood film. And she helped actor Charles Boyer to enter the Hollywood scene.

     Throughout the 1930s and 40s, while fighting against Hitler’s National Socialism, she continued to aid those who remained trapped in Europe by helping to found the European Film Fund, working with her contacts in Hollywood studios. Through the Film Fund, artists such as Leonhard Frank, Heinrich Mann, Alfred Polgar, Walter Mehring, and Friedrich Torberg received emergency visas that enable to escape Nazi Germany. Writing on the “Exodus: The Haunted Idyll of Exiled German Novelists in Wartime Los Angeles,” Alex Ross argued that “Weimar on the Pacific might never have existed without her.”

     During the McCarthy era, Viertel was among the many Hollywood writers suspected of being communists, and she was blacklisted, denied a passport to even travel to Europe in order to see her dying husband.

      In 1953, she left the US, moving to Klosters, Switzerland to be near her son Peter and his second wife, Deborah Kerr.

 

Los Angeles, July 25, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2023).