TWO-FACED WOMAN

Garbo's early swan-song as a film actress is a frothily entertaining, if kind of bizarre romantic comedy about a couple of two-faced romantics.

Honestly, I thought this film should have been titled Two-Faced Man. Greta Garbo, as Karin, a ski instructor in Idaho, falls for Melvyn Douglas' Larry, a big-shot magazine publisher from New York. They meet cute on the ski slopes when he ends up in an snow embankment while trying to seduce her, and literally the next thing you know, they are married. It seemingly happens overnight in a remote cabin, and unless there was a pastor hanging out there with them, it was kind of head scratching how they could show up back in civilization as newlyweds. Larry claims to want to live a simpler life, and live with Karin on the mountain, but the next morning he is back on a plane with his secretary (cute young Ruth Gordon) and his right-hand man (Roland Young) back to New York City.

Seriously, if I had a man who sent telegrams saying, "Sorry, have to postpone my visit by another week... see you sometime soon..." I'd call that shotgun wedding a sham. But after weeks (months?) of this, Karin decides to surprise her husband with a visit to NYC. However, when she sees she has competition in the form of Larry's catty lady-friend, the playwright Griselda (the scene-stealing Constance Bennett), she comes up with another plan: If Larry wants a worldly city-gal, why, Karin will pretend to be her imaginary slutty twin sister Katherine instead. This way she can really test to see if her guy truly IS a man-whore.

This comedy of hidden identity has a huge amount of talent behind it. Really, the cast is great: You have Garbo and Douglas re-teamed with George Cukor after their hit Ninotchka. There's sassy Ruth Gordon and Constance Bennett, as well as the patient Roland Young, who sweetly falls for slutty Katherine along with everyone else. Though this film is called Two-Faced Woman, Larry's own two-timing attentions are never called into question, nor is the fact that independent Karin seems to get turned-on by her instant new husband bossing her around. Like I said, it is kind of weird.

But at the same time, it was fun to see a 1940s film partly taking place on the ski slopes of happening Idaho. You half expect a scenester like Hemingway to walk through the ski lodge lobby. When you have a film climaxing with a ridiculously drawn-out tumble down a mountain (I'm not exaggerating when I say it lasted at least three minutes), you have to admit that Two-Faced Woman is at least bizarrely entertaining.

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