Camille

George Cukor’s direction breathes new life into the cluttered theaters, bustling boudoirs, and shining hypocrisies of Alexandre Dumas fils’s nineteenth-century Paris, where the classy courtesan inhabits a lush and sensual world but is denied “perfect love.” Garbo herself comes dangerously close to perfection in this enduring classic; many critics consider her portrayal of Dumas’s tragic heroine, Marguerite Gautier (“la dame aux camélias”), to be her finest moment. As Village Voice critic Andrew Sarris noted in a reappraisal of Camille, “It is hard to imagine that even Sarah Bernhardt could have come close to Garbo’s delicately self-mocking and playfully romantic Lady of the Camellias. . . . Among the distinguished cast,” Sarris adds, “Rex O’Malley, as a hanger-on with a heart of gold, provides one of the subtlest characterizations of a homosexual in the ’30s.”