George Fitzmaurice

(On Cable TV, September 2022) An older film being regarded as respectable and well-made (for the time) doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s going to be fun or entertaining. As much as a film about infamous female WW1 spy Mata Hari was a commercial inevitability, this Greta Garbo starring vehicle often feels like an ordeal to watch. Saddled with early-1930s technical issues and a lack of cinematic flow, it’s a film not helped in the slightest by the decision to tailor the Hari story to Garbo’s persona. The film clearly reflects her famously humourless sensibilities—it’s plodding, overly serious, highly melodramatic and deliberately engineered as a romantic tragedy without really getting into what made Hari so interesting. It’s also neutered by design—maybe even double-neutered considering that the film was shaped not to ruffle critics despite the erotically charged nature of Hari’s accomplishments; and then the film as shown today is missing roughly three minutes of footage cut off during the Production Code era. Put all of this together and you end up with a nonsensical film—an uninteresting movie about a fascinating person. Director George Fitzmaurice spends all of his time focused on Garbo, and misses that Hari should have been the centre of a wide web. Mata Hari was a success back then, and continues to attract attention for Garbo-philes, but it’s often a stupefying bore.