The Joyless Street

The film that made young Greta Garbo an international star also belongs to “the great, strange Asta Nielsen,” as Pauline Kael called this Danish-born silent film diva. Symbolized by one dreary but bustling street in Vienna—where meat is hard to come by, but souls are cheap—G. W. Pabst’s film is an uncompromising portrait of post–World War I social malaise. Garbo, the daughter of a councillor facing financial ruin, and Nielsen, an escapee from a wretched family, become entangled with the nouveaux riches who frequent the boulevard for fun and whose stock-market machinations toy with lives in the balance.