Mata Hari
by George Fitzmaurice
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Actor: C. Henry Gordon, Greta Garbo, Lewis Stone, Lionel Barrymore, Ramon NovarroDirector: George Fitzmaurice
Brand: GARBO,GRETA
Cinematographer: William H. Daniels
Producer: George Fitzmaurice
Producer: Irving Thalberg
Writer: Benjamin Glazer
Writer: Doris Anderson
Writer: Gilbert Emery
Writer: Leo Birinsky
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono; English (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); French (Subtitled); English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono
Format: Black & White, Closed-captioned, DVD, NTSC, Subtitled
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 89 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2005-09-06
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: Warner Home Video
DVD Reviews of Mata Hari
DVD Review: Visually Pretty but Shallow
Summary: 3 Stars
Mata Hari, whose name translated loosely as "Eye of the Morning," was an eastern princess who had been immersed in dance from the moment of her birth--or so she said. In actual fact, she was Margaretha Geertruida Zelle, born to a respectable family in Leeuwarden, Holland. In 1895, with the family fortune in decline, she married Rudolf John MacLeod and with him moved to Java. The marriage was horrendously unsuccessful and the couple separated in 1903, when she returned to Europe. After a stint as everything from an artist model to a circus horseback rider, Margaretha reinvented herself through a name change, skimpy costumes, and fairly lacivious dances. Critics regarded her as a lousy dancer, but the public loved her, and she would continue her career as both dancer and courtesan for the next fourteen years, passing between lovers as freely as she passed between the theatres of Europe. During World War I, however, the combination of Mata Hari's lovers and her touring schedule brought charges of espionage. Accused passing information to Germany that caused the deaths of some fifty thousand French soliders, she was found guilty and executed by firing squad in 1917 at age 41. Much argument concerning her guilt or innocence continues to this day.
But you won't really learn much of this from the 1931 MGM film MATA HARI. The Dutch Mata Hari is played by Swedish star Greta Garbo. Mata Hari and Garbo have precisely one trait in common: neither can dance worth a damn. Where Garbo is concerned the film tries to conceal this by a mixture of costuming and "artistic" cinematography that avoids showing Garbo's legendarily large feet and works to dodge the more obvious edges of her lack of dance talent. But Garbo is hardly the only performer who is miscast. Her young Russian lover is played by Mexican actor Ramon Novarro. Her older Russian lover is played by Lionel Barrymore and her German handler by Lewis Stone, both of them very distinctly American, and her French nemisis by C. Henry Gordon--who isn't quite as badly cast, for although American he doesn't scream it.
Given all this, it is startling that the film works as well as it does. There are many exceptions, but MGM seemed to feel it was not necessary to be greatly painstaking where Garbo's films were concerned: she was such a great star that she could survive anything, no matter how commonplace. As such she is frequently the only good thing in the film, often let down by so-so co-stars, silly scripts, and mediocre production values. But this isn't quite the case with MATA HARI. Yes, the casting is odd, but everyone involved was a noted and meticulously professional performer; yes, the script is silly, but it has a consistent internal logic. The cinematography is excellent and Garbo is near the height of her physical beauty--and if the movie tends to treat her as a clothes horse, at least the clothes in question are entertaining in their obvious exoticism. All this said, while the film is extremely hot-house artificial, it does seem to capture something of Mata Hari. Not the facts, of course; those were expendable. But the glamour of the legend, the myth of the glamourous spy who seduced men, betrayed them, destroyed them, using her beauty as a the ultimate secret agent weapon. It is a prototype that would be repeated endlessly right up to present day: Hitchcock's films aside, female spies are almost always presented as beautiful young women of wanton disposition.
Interestingly, Garbo herself may have gone on to become a spy for the Allies during World War II. Noel Coward, who did the same, noted that while Garbo had a reputation for almost pathological reclusiveness before and after the war, during the war itself she was at every embassy cocktail party imaginable, chit-chatting with everyone--and since she was Garbo, the great artiste, many sought to impress her by telling her virtually everything they knew. The word in Coward's circle was that she had agreed to use her celebrity to meet specific persons of interest, talk to them, and pick up loose information that might be of use to the Allies. It was a ploy that Coward was uniquely positioned to recognize: he often did much the same.
GFT, Amazon Reviewer
Description of Mata Hari
Garbo plays the World War I dancer-turned-German spy Mata Hari.Genre: Feature Film-Drama
Rating: NR
Release Date: 6-SEP-2005
Media Type: DVD
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