Torrent

Three and a half minutes into Torrent, the camera discovers an actress, new to Hollywood, her hands clasped in prayer - and an international screen legend is born. After appearing in only two films in her native Sweden, Greta Garbo starred in this tempestuous tale of the star-crossed romance between a Spanish nobleman (charismatic Ricardo Cortez) and a peasant girl (Garbo) who, even after finding fame as an opera star, can never forget the aristocrat she loves. In its review, Variety spoke for audiences enthralled by the lanky newcomer with the expressive, astonishingly beautiful face: "Greta Garbo, making her American debut as a screen star, might just as well be hailed here as the find of the year." Or any year.

The Vincent Blasco-Ibanez novel ENTRE NARANJOS served as the inspiration for Greta Garbo's first American film, THE TORRENT. Garbo plays Leonora, a full-bodied Spanish peasant girl who falls in love with her landlord's son Don Rafael Bull (Ricardo Cortez). To prevent his son from marrying beneath his station, Don Rafael's father banishes Leonora from his property. She relocates in Paris, where she achieves fame and fortune as an opera singer, while back at home Don Rafael becomes a prominent politician. When Leonora returns home, she spurns his offers of marriage, even during a raging flood in which her life is in Don Rafael's hands. After this spectacular sequence, the film's surprisingly unhappy ending seems anticlimactic. Garbo's lover-mentor Mauritz Stiller had originally been slated to direct THE TORRENT, but at the last minute MGM opted for house director Monta Bell. Whether or not Stiller could have compensated for the script's more ludicrous passages is open to conjecture: Suffice to say that, without Garbo's presence, THE TORRENT would have been just so much Spanish applesauce.