Mata Hari (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). One of the legends about Mata Hari, a Parisian cabaret dancer who was executed for espionage during the War, says that she was unable to break herself of the habit of taking off her clothes at crucial moments and was therefore naked when she faced a French firing squad. This episode is omitted from the Greta Garbo version of the affair, which ends as Miss Garbo, majestic in black, is walking down a long corridor between two lines of soldiers. Her lover (Ramon Novarro) is a blind aviator who has said good-by to her under the impression that her prison is a hospital and that she is leaving him to undergo a minor operation. To reveal its tragic conclusion in no way impairs the effectiveness of this sombre and spectacular fiction. Greta Garbo is to many the supreme tragedienne of the cinema and the picture is a darkly theatrical hyperbole, intent on glorification rather than illusion.
It begins with Greta Garbo dancing, very badly indeed, in leggings and some thing that looks like a pillow on her wiggling rear. The young aviator who has flown to Paris with despatches from Russia sees her, meets her, spends a late evening in her company. The next night he is ordered to return to Russia but by this time Mata Hari finds it expedient to steal some papers from him. To do so, she passes small hours at his quarters, makes him blow out a holy candle burning under the ikon of a madonna. The aviator finally starts back for Russia, but his plane crashes. Miss Garbo, like all female spies in the cinema, sacrifices professional curiosity to I'amour. She kills a Russian general (Lionel Barrymore), but not until jealousy has made him give the information which leads to her painful but ennobled end.
Great actresses, almost by definition, appear in vehicles which are focused on glamour rather than on truth. Mata Hari, brilliantly acted and directed, is no exception. Garbo. in the opinion of her admirers, is the Hollywood Duse, not far inferior to the tragic Eleonora. In this picture her Swedish voice, her awning lashes, her curt gestures are somehow becoming to the abridged and euphemistic story of a Javanese dancer whose real name, according to the best authorities, was Margaret Zelle MacLeod. Good shot: two lighted cigarets in a pitch black room, where Garbo and Novarro are talking.
Ladies of the Big House (Paramount). Almost every program picture contains at least one new idea. In this one the idea is a jail break by women, executed in rough & ready fashion. One prisoner secretes a pair of wire clippers under her pillow. The heroine (Sylvia Sidney) helps her snip at a fence which separates the prison yard from a bay. The jailbreak fails, but since Sylvia Sidney is unjustly imprisoned she gets out before the picture ends. The plot framework which surrounds the prison scenes is diverting and well constructed, but basically improbable. It has to do with a gangster who pays attention to Miss Sidney, gets rid of his old girl by sending her to jail, vengefully shoots a detective because Miss Sidney marries someone else. She and her husband (Gene Raymond) are convicted of the shooting on circumstantial evidence. The gangster's old girl meets Miss Sidney in jail and tries to help her save her husband from the gallows. Ladies of the Big House was written by Ernest Booth, a Folsom convict serving a life term. It is well acted, well directed by Marion Gering, and