A Woman of Affairs / The Kiss

Live musical accompaniment by Cliff Retallick.

A Woman of Affairs

U.S., 1928

Greta Garbo and John Gilbert share one of silent cinema’s most exquisite kisses in Clarence Brown’s A Woman of Affairs: she, sinking into a divan, he, standing over her before collapsing, himself, into her arms as she confesses her love, her hand falling away, her wedding ring slipping off onto the floor. Loosely adapted from the generation-defining novel The Green Hat (with significant changes required by the censors), A Woman of Affairs finds Garbo at her most modern as a woman who indulges the sensual excesses of the age to conceal her sacrifice for the sake of lost ideals — honor, decency.

35mm, b&w, silent, 91 min. Director: Clarence Brown. Screenwriter: Bess Meredyth, Michael Arlen. With: Greta Garbo, John Gilbert, Lewis Stone.

The Kiss

U.S., 1929

Greta Garbo stars in this ripping modern courtroom thriller as an unhappy wife drawn into scandal by an obsessive young man (Lew Ayres) when he clashes with her domineering husband. A potboiler take on the sacrificing woman that Garbo excelled at in period dramas, The Kiss would be her and MGM’s final silent film with Belgian director Jacques Feyder ringing the era out with a bang of visual inventiveness and sensitive framing. Of his star’s working method, Feyder would later remark: “Garbo is exactitude incarnate.”

35mm, b&w, silent, 91 min. Director: Jacques Feyder. Screenwriter: Hanns Kräly. With: Greta Garbo, Conrad Nagel, Anders Randolf.