The Mysterious Lady

Greta Garbo had a day in TCM's Summer Under the Stars this year, and one of her movies that I hadn't seen before and TCM showed was The Mysterious Lady. Recently, I sat down to watch it.

As you can probably guess, Garbo plays the titular lady of mystery; we first see her sitting in a box at the opera in Vienna sometime around World War I, or about a dozen years before the movie was made. Coming to the opera is Karl von Raden (Conrad Nagel), an Austrian military officer who doesn't have a ticket of his own, but is able to get a returned ticket in the same box where the mysterious lady is siting, she claiming to expect a cousin who presumably would have been the one to return the ticket.

This is, of course, a ruse, as we'll learn over the course of the movie, and not too far in to the movie in fact. But not having her cousin present, the woman, named Tania, has no cash on her to get home that night. And since it's raining, Karl kindly offers to take her back to her house, where the two fall in love with each other over the course of the night. This, despite Tania finding a telegram from the other man in her life, General Alexandroff (Gustav von Seyffertitz). He's in Warsaw, which was part of Russia at the time since Poland had been partitioned in the 1790s and wouldn't regain its independence until after World War I. So we learn that Tania is Russian.

And then Karl's uncle, Col. von Raden (Edward Connelly), who just happens to be the head of the Austrian secret police, informs Karl that Tania is in fact a Russian spy. Because who would ever think to use sex appeal to try to get military secrets? Now, at this point, what the colonel should have done is to give his nephew fake military secrets so as to catch Tania out and find out from her how she's getting her information and what-not. What he does instead is to give Karl real military secrets, about the country's defense alliance with Germany, and send Karl on his way alone on the overnight train to Berlin.

Unsurprisingly, Tania finds out about this and is able to get the compartment next to Karl, leading her to be able to get those military secrets. However, she also insists that she's really, truly in love with Karl, and doesn't want to betray him, except that the only way out of spying for her is death. This results in Karl being court-martialed, losing his rank, and sentenced to prison. His uncle, however, just knows that there has to be somebody else in military command feeding information to Tania about the Austrian military. With that in mind, Karl's uncle gets him sprung from prison so that Karl can get a fake passport to go to Warsaw and find who the real mole is.

Now, you'd think that somebody besides Tania would recognize Karl right away. The Russians all suspect him, but they don't quite know yet that he's really an Austrian spy. Tania, meanwhile, is getting increasingly sick of the abusive treatment from General Alexandroff, and sees in Karl a way to get away from being a spy once and for all.

The Mysterious Lady is the sort of movie where it's easy to see why Greta Garbo had the star power that she did. She's the center of attention whenever she's on screen, and she does well with what she's given here, even if some of the material seems unrealistic. Indeed, with a star vehicle like this, one finds oneself not caring so much about the material as much as the chance to watch Garbo do her thing, which she does effortlessly.

The Mysterious Lady isn't Greta Garbo's best movie by a long shot, but it's certainly worth watching as a fine example of a Garbo silent movie.