It’s hard to know when a cliche starts. The scene that makes us roll our eyes with familiarity today might have been fresh 10, 20, 30 years ago. And cliches come to existence because they’re effective – you don’t rip off failures. However, the cliches in The Garden of Eden come so thick and fast and familiar, it’s hard to believe that any of them could seem particularly new. Not even to audiences nearly 100 years ago, when this came out.
Buy The Garden of EdenThe Girl goes to the big city to find herself. She thinks she’s got a great opportunity, but the people who hire her just want to exploit her. The poor woman she befriends turns out to be a secret baroness. The baroness whirls her away to a resort where she can live in luxury. A man falls in love with her but doesn’t know she’s not of the upper class. And finally, when she meets his family, one of them is a man who tried to seduce her as a poor girl. In some variety, it’s all very familiar.
What makes The Garden of Eden, an American silent film set in Vienna, Budapest, and Monte Carlo, enjoyable are the details. The girl is Toni, who has an opera degree but works in the family business: pretzel making. She escapes that fate by going to what she thinks is an opera house. That turns out to be a burlesque show. The seamstress is the hidden baroness, but the twist with her is she actually is poor. She has a pension from her late husband. She blows all of it two weeks a year in Monte Carlo to live like the aristocracy for a brief while.
And, as in the cliche list above, Toni falls in love (despite constantly sending him away) with a rich songwriter. There are several familiar romantic comedy machinations. They end up at a wedding where all the songwriter’s in-laws want to find some reason to end it. The Garden of Eden is, as I’ve said, a nearly 100-year-old silent movie. There are several remarkable things about it. First, the persistence of these story tropes. We still have movies today with many of these self-same cliches as the glue to hold the story together. But they still work and pull at the heartstrings as much now as when they were new, which was likely long before this film was made.
The story might be cliched, but the direction is not. The film is briskly paced and contains several inventive set-ups and scenes attesting to the imaginative image making of the director, Lewis Mileston. My favorite is the scene when the songwriter introduces his new song to Toni. They sit at the piano. While they’re at the center of the frame, the background pivots so we can eventually see they have an enormous audience, who burst into applause when their intimate performance is through.
Lewis Milestone, whose career spanned nearly 50 years, moved deftly from the silent era to talkies to color film. In fact, The Garden of Eden originally included a color-tinted dream sequence where Toni sees herself as the height of society in her operatic career. That sequence has unfortunately been lost, but this restoration includes a recreation of it from surviving stills.
The Garden of Eden is a well-worn story well-told. For the modern audience, it has the major hurdles of being black and white, silent, and rather broad in its storytelling. There were some bravura sequences, and a couple of genuine laughs from me. But I admired the film more than I was entertained by it. If one is interested in late ’20s romantic comedies and silent films, this has panache and, after a rather slow beginning, some decent pacing as it goes on (though some gags drag). But it’s more of a specialist’s movie than some hidden gem, begging to be rediscovered.
The Garden of Eden has been released on Blu-ray by Flicker Alley. Audio extras include a commentary by Harlow Robinson, director Lewis Milestone’s biographer. Video extras include an excerpt from Syncopating Sue (14 min), a fragment from another film starring this film’s lead actress, Corinne Griffith; “The Inimitable Corinne Griffith: The Orchid Lady of the Screen” (14 min), a video essay on the actress; “Restoration Demo” (4 min) which demonstrates the restoration of the film’s elements; and an image gallery and booklet.
