This splendidly mounted period film opens in 1807 when Boyer as Napoleon Bonaparte visits Poland and becomes enamored of Garbo, playing the beautiful Countess Marie Walewska. She is asked by the country's leaders to go to Boyer and persuade him to help Poland become independent. Even her aging husband, Stephenson, urges her to go. Garbo goes reluctantly and has an affair with Boyer that causes her husband to divorce her. She becomes Boyer's mistress, has a child by him, and is later discarded when Owen, playing the scheming Talleyrand, arranges a marriage between Boyer and Marie Louise, a Hapsburg princess. Though abandoned, Garbo remains loyal to Boyer and, follow...
Released: 1937 Rated: NR Length: 115 mins
Garbo's career (along with her Sapphic sisters in Hollywood throughout the last century and today) disprove the common stereotype that lesbians are usually frumpy and unattractive. You just have to pay them to spend the time to get themselves done up. Garbo happily made a lot of money before income taxes existed, and salted it away in real estate. As McLellan recounts, she and other gays and lesbians in Hollywood were also the prey of Communist Party front groups that forced them to donate to leftist causes or be outed.
Ms. Garbo died on April 15, 1990.
