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We'll all miss him when he returns to school
How beautiful Lew Ayres is in The Kiss (1929) and how glad I am that he grew out of it.
He was twenty years old at the time, a working musician plucked like a Hollywood dream off the dance floor of the Roosevelt Hotel and into the screen tests for Pathé and MGM from which Greta Garbo herself would select him to co-star in her last silent film, his first screen credit. As the smitten adolescent whose determined infatuation with Garbo's Irene Guarry plays fatefully into her husband's jealousy at the risk of the passionate affair of which he is heedlessly unaware, he could have coasted on his prettiness—impossibly fresh-faced yet also feline, his brows like tear-marks, his eyes the narrow silver of black-and-white blue—but despite the actor's characteristically self-deprecating recollection of himself as a "little greenhorn," he leans like a pro into the problematic youth of Pierre Lassalle, a kind of visual grit like the grain of his voice that was always dryer than his naively emphasized intertitles. "You know I'm eighteen years old," he anxiously reminds the object of his affections even as he literally runs to catch up with her, still carrying the racket of his broken tennis date. "I'm passed the age of puppy love." It doesn't give him the maturity to recognize his irrelevance between her ponderous financier of a husband and the debonair lawyer she meets with desolate ardor at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, but he's so charming in his awkward chivalry that Irene can afford to indulge him, if not as a serious suitor, then at least a distraction from her suffocating marriage, her thwarted love. He's unselfconsciously cute with bits of straw mussed into his hair from tending to Irene's pair of prizewinning borzois, but in evening dress for one of his father's parties, watching another man's wife through a covert of pale roses like a budding demon lover, he looks shockingly adult and sure of himself, at least until Irene in his arms for a foxtrot catches sight of her own beloved lingering alone on the terrace and packs the third wheel off to retrieve her vanity case. It's not hard to imagine a version of The Kiss which plays more like Arthur Schnitzler instead of Hanns Kräly and the uncredited scenarist of director Jacques Feyder, sardonically watching its characters chase one another through their own mirages of possession and desire until a crisis forces that immemorial counterpoint of death to enter the scene. Instead, however ruefully it may regard Pierre's self-absorption as the wages of adolescence, the film lets the intensity of his crush suffuse his scenes with Irene as fully as her own searching silences dominate the rest of the action. As good as the kiss has to be for its title billing, even better for my two cents is the tennis match where Pierre attempts to declare himself. His white flannels give him an especially collegiate look, all the more immaturely as he protests in heroic earnest, "You women don't know how love affects a man like me," only to find himself not even unkindly laughed at. As he turns his face aside from her rejection, Irene gently lifts his chin so that she can see the tears brimming on his dark lashes, as shyly trembling as desire, and with the same amused affection tells him, "See—you are only a boy—" It's a queerly lovely moment, not least because even without the transparency of tears Ayres looks like Anakreon's παῖ παρθένιον βλέπων—boy with a maiden's glance—while Garbo with her clean-cut face and her thick brush of hair, striding lankily off-camera in the men's tailoring she was permitted onscreen only for her legendary Queen Christina (1933), has erastes written all over her frank and fond, appraising gaze. She never did get to play the role she more than once in her life mentioned coveting, what would no doubt have been a celluloid-scorching Dorian Gray. He isn't her sensualist's Sibyl Vane, nor even Benjamin Braddock of the nascent Depression; she doesn't even brush his forehead with her lips, as for a beat in his mute submission to her it seems she will. Another player breezes past with a message from her panopticon of a husband and behind them Pierre bending to fiddle with his shoelaces discreetly smudges away the tears. His request when he has recovered his composure, which she answers with unaltered friendliness and a hint of consolation, will send the third act careening from a round-robin of hearts into a murder trial: "Couldn't I have a picture of you—to take back to school with me?"
In reluctant honesty, the current between them—so erotically vivid it feels faintly uncommercial of the studio never to have thought to reteam them, especially when his very next picture put him up in the cinema firmament in his own right—slightly unbalances the film. The effect might have been diffused had Garbo succeeded in securing her close friend Nils Asther for the role of her lover, or even if John Gilbert's stock hadn't tanked with MGM after his much-storied dust-up with Louis B. Mayer, but with the distinguished rather than edible Conrad Nagel in the part of André Dubail, whose legal defense of the woman he loves for the murder she may have committed of the husband he had urged her to leave would fit as neatly into a film noir as the unreliable flashbacks in which Irene vacillates in her testimony of the night of the crime, Ayres is left as the only male presence onscreen as sheerly luminous as his leading lady, the only one who seems able to match the voltage she's giving out. Pierre needs to be alluring, but he can't be endgame. He's too callow, too short-sighted with youth and privilege and the limerence through which he misreads his significance to the triangle he's stumbled into. The kiss that nearly gets him killed is not the sensually ceremonious gesture with which Irene allows herself for one unapologetically sexual instant to sample the fantasy of this eager and beautiful boy, but his clumsily misjudged attempt to keep it going, never so forcefully that she seems in any real danger except of wounding his adolescent pride with her laughter all the time she's disentangling herself, but even those few seconds of crossed signals cost him the time in which he could have left the Guarry house before its master with all the calm of a battering ram came home. Even on the other side of the trial, standing over her in the worldliness of his eighteen years which have never looked more masterful or more obtuse, he concludes from the fact that a woman wouldn't let her husband beat a helpless kid to death in front of her that "Irene, you did this for me—you love me!" It is possible from the stiff abrupt silence in which he exits the scene that her incredulity combined with the unthinking intimacy with which she turns to her lawyer has finally given him the reality check in the pants that even a near-miss with murder couldn't achieve. As stingingly as the exceptionally fluid and inventive cinematography by William H. Daniels confirms the irony of events previously occluded by the closing swing of a door and the dull finality of a shot, as hauntingly as one face and another profile are lit and shadowed as if isolated within the same thoughts, Irene's confessional reunion with André should obliterate any second thoughts of her officially less red-hot encounters with Pierre and it is mostly the jolly chorus of charwomen bustling in to clear even true lovers out of a courtroom after hours who stick the landing of The Kiss. Nagel does make one heart-catching movement, reaching blindly out for Garbo's hand in the last second before she leaves him: he holds it between both of his own like a prayer, feeling the flesh and blood of her for a long, lifeline moment before he rises to embrace her like his breath and bones. "I do believe you, Irene—I love you!" Considering that their relationship is written as one of those desperate, annealing passions that drive star-crossed romances and unwise defense strategies, it eludes me what he was doing with all of their previous scenes. Anders Randolf plays the cash-plagued Charles Guarry with a sour-stomached suspicion befitting their luxuriously loveless marriage, his tenderest interactions with Irene more avuncular than uxorious; the brutality of his attack on Pierre is frightening not only because he can whip the bonelessly terrified student around like a rag doll, but because his piledriver of rage is so cold. Ayres' chemistry with Garbo seems effortless, a reaction of their mutual beauty whose age gap exists metatextually in the gulf between her stardom and his rookiehood, since she was all of three years his elder and they played tennis when the cameras weren't rolling on set. Sleeping with Pierre would obviously have caused even more trouble than kissing him, in other words, but at least I would have understood the impetus.
The Kiss was the last silent film released by MGM, although even it contained some synchronized sound effects along with a score heavily cribbed from Tchaikovsky and Wagner—the ring of a telephone, the sound of a shot. Despite its release in the free-fall months following the Crash of '29, it was a hit with audiences who had not tired of silent Garbo and perhaps found something prescient in the impending bankruptcy of the Guarrys. Garbo would go on to make a smash in the talkies with the whisky and ginger ale of Anna Christie (1930), Conrad Nagel and his baritone had already made the transition the previous year with the part-talkie Caught in the Fog (1928), Lew Ayres would find his life-defining role in the anti-war All Quiet on the Western Front (1930). Even by then his face had started to accrete the wounded, cynical, sensitive lines that I associate as strongly with him as his scratchily expressive voice, as if both of them had been kicked around a little, scuffed up a bit, and all the more compelling for it. It puzzles me that glossy MGM never tried to fit him for a matinée idol, but then I would never have seen him steal the broken heart of Holiday (1938). He's stunning as Pierre, not just physically but in his ability to hold a screen with the most iconic star of his era without apparently trying. Given his last call by Irene after he has settled into the comfortably intimate tableau of kneeling by her chaise longue, he darts a disbelieving glance at the clock and then gives himself a little shrug of a shake, his brows raked philosophically and his hands eloquently less assured. "I—I—want to ask you a big favor." I found this gorgeous curio on TCM, which inadvertently seemed to have bundled it with the earlier Garbo vehicle Love (1927); on its hour-ish own it can be watched more fuzzily at the Internet Archive. For those of you who have absolutely no interest in Lew Ayres, it appears to be the source of the immortal phrase "Irene—we can't go on meeting like this." This favor brought to you by my affecting backers at Patreon.
He was twenty years old at the time, a working musician plucked like a Hollywood dream off the dance floor of the Roosevelt Hotel and into the screen tests for Pathé and MGM from which Greta Garbo herself would select him to co-star in her last silent film, his first screen credit. As the smitten adolescent whose determined infatuation with Garbo's Irene Guarry plays fatefully into her husband's jealousy at the risk of the passionate affair of which he is heedlessly unaware, he could have coasted on his prettiness—impossibly fresh-faced yet also feline, his brows like tear-marks, his eyes the narrow silver of black-and-white blue—but despite the actor's characteristically self-deprecating recollection of himself as a "little greenhorn," he leans like a pro into the problematic youth of Pierre Lassalle, a kind of visual grit like the grain of his voice that was always dryer than his naively emphasized intertitles. "You know I'm eighteen years old," he anxiously reminds the object of his affections even as he literally runs to catch up with her, still carrying the racket of his broken tennis date. "I'm passed the age of puppy love." It doesn't give him the maturity to recognize his irrelevance between her ponderous financier of a husband and the debonair lawyer she meets with desolate ardor at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, but he's so charming in his awkward chivalry that Irene can afford to indulge him, if not as a serious suitor, then at least a distraction from her suffocating marriage, her thwarted love. He's unselfconsciously cute with bits of straw mussed into his hair from tending to Irene's pair of prizewinning borzois, but in evening dress for one of his father's parties, watching another man's wife through a covert of pale roses like a budding demon lover, he looks shockingly adult and sure of himself, at least until Irene in his arms for a foxtrot catches sight of her own beloved lingering alone on the terrace and packs the third wheel off to retrieve her vanity case. It's not hard to imagine a version of The Kiss which plays more like Arthur Schnitzler instead of Hanns Kräly and the uncredited scenarist of director Jacques Feyder, sardonically watching its characters chase one another through their own mirages of possession and desire until a crisis forces that immemorial counterpoint of death to enter the scene. Instead, however ruefully it may regard Pierre's self-absorption as the wages of adolescence, the film lets the intensity of his crush suffuse his scenes with Irene as fully as her own searching silences dominate the rest of the action. As good as the kiss has to be for its title billing, even better for my two cents is the tennis match where Pierre attempts to declare himself. His white flannels give him an especially collegiate look, all the more immaturely as he protests in heroic earnest, "You women don't know how love affects a man like me," only to find himself not even unkindly laughed at. As he turns his face aside from her rejection, Irene gently lifts his chin so that she can see the tears brimming on his dark lashes, as shyly trembling as desire, and with the same amused affection tells him, "See—you are only a boy—" It's a queerly lovely moment, not least because even without the transparency of tears Ayres looks like Anakreon's παῖ παρθένιον βλέπων—boy with a maiden's glance—while Garbo with her clean-cut face and her thick brush of hair, striding lankily off-camera in the men's tailoring she was permitted onscreen only for her legendary Queen Christina (1933), has erastes written all over her frank and fond, appraising gaze. She never did get to play the role she more than once in her life mentioned coveting, what would no doubt have been a celluloid-scorching Dorian Gray. He isn't her sensualist's Sibyl Vane, nor even Benjamin Braddock of the nascent Depression; she doesn't even brush his forehead with her lips, as for a beat in his mute submission to her it seems she will. Another player breezes past with a message from her panopticon of a husband and behind them Pierre bending to fiddle with his shoelaces discreetly smudges away the tears. His request when he has recovered his composure, which she answers with unaltered friendliness and a hint of consolation, will send the third act careening from a round-robin of hearts into a murder trial: "Couldn't I have a picture of you—to take back to school with me?"
In reluctant honesty, the current between them—so erotically vivid it feels faintly uncommercial of the studio never to have thought to reteam them, especially when his very next picture put him up in the cinema firmament in his own right—slightly unbalances the film. The effect might have been diffused had Garbo succeeded in securing her close friend Nils Asther for the role of her lover, or even if John Gilbert's stock hadn't tanked with MGM after his much-storied dust-up with Louis B. Mayer, but with the distinguished rather than edible Conrad Nagel in the part of André Dubail, whose legal defense of the woman he loves for the murder she may have committed of the husband he had urged her to leave would fit as neatly into a film noir as the unreliable flashbacks in which Irene vacillates in her testimony of the night of the crime, Ayres is left as the only male presence onscreen as sheerly luminous as his leading lady, the only one who seems able to match the voltage she's giving out. Pierre needs to be alluring, but he can't be endgame. He's too callow, too short-sighted with youth and privilege and the limerence through which he misreads his significance to the triangle he's stumbled into. The kiss that nearly gets him killed is not the sensually ceremonious gesture with which Irene allows herself for one unapologetically sexual instant to sample the fantasy of this eager and beautiful boy, but his clumsily misjudged attempt to keep it going, never so forcefully that she seems in any real danger except of wounding his adolescent pride with her laughter all the time she's disentangling herself, but even those few seconds of crossed signals cost him the time in which he could have left the Guarry house before its master with all the calm of a battering ram came home. Even on the other side of the trial, standing over her in the worldliness of his eighteen years which have never looked more masterful or more obtuse, he concludes from the fact that a woman wouldn't let her husband beat a helpless kid to death in front of her that "Irene, you did this for me—you love me!" It is possible from the stiff abrupt silence in which he exits the scene that her incredulity combined with the unthinking intimacy with which she turns to her lawyer has finally given him the reality check in the pants that even a near-miss with murder couldn't achieve. As stingingly as the exceptionally fluid and inventive cinematography by William H. Daniels confirms the irony of events previously occluded by the closing swing of a door and the dull finality of a shot, as hauntingly as one face and another profile are lit and shadowed as if isolated within the same thoughts, Irene's confessional reunion with André should obliterate any second thoughts of her officially less red-hot encounters with Pierre and it is mostly the jolly chorus of charwomen bustling in to clear even true lovers out of a courtroom after hours who stick the landing of The Kiss. Nagel does make one heart-catching movement, reaching blindly out for Garbo's hand in the last second before she leaves him: he holds it between both of his own like a prayer, feeling the flesh and blood of her for a long, lifeline moment before he rises to embrace her like his breath and bones. "I do believe you, Irene—I love you!" Considering that their relationship is written as one of those desperate, annealing passions that drive star-crossed romances and unwise defense strategies, it eludes me what he was doing with all of their previous scenes. Anders Randolf plays the cash-plagued Charles Guarry with a sour-stomached suspicion befitting their luxuriously loveless marriage, his tenderest interactions with Irene more avuncular than uxorious; the brutality of his attack on Pierre is frightening not only because he can whip the bonelessly terrified student around like a rag doll, but because his piledriver of rage is so cold. Ayres' chemistry with Garbo seems effortless, a reaction of their mutual beauty whose age gap exists metatextually in the gulf between her stardom and his rookiehood, since she was all of three years his elder and they played tennis when the cameras weren't rolling on set. Sleeping with Pierre would obviously have caused even more trouble than kissing him, in other words, but at least I would have understood the impetus.
The Kiss was the last silent film released by MGM, although even it contained some synchronized sound effects along with a score heavily cribbed from Tchaikovsky and Wagner—the ring of a telephone, the sound of a shot. Despite its release in the free-fall months following the Crash of '29, it was a hit with audiences who had not tired of silent Garbo and perhaps found something prescient in the impending bankruptcy of the Guarrys. Garbo would go on to make a smash in the talkies with the whisky and ginger ale of Anna Christie (1930), Conrad Nagel and his baritone had already made the transition the previous year with the part-talkie Caught in the Fog (1928), Lew Ayres would find his life-defining role in the anti-war All Quiet on the Western Front (1930). Even by then his face had started to accrete the wounded, cynical, sensitive lines that I associate as strongly with him as his scratchily expressive voice, as if both of them had been kicked around a little, scuffed up a bit, and all the more compelling for it. It puzzles me that glossy MGM never tried to fit him for a matinée idol, but then I would never have seen him steal the broken heart of Holiday (1938). He's stunning as Pierre, not just physically but in his ability to hold a screen with the most iconic star of his era without apparently trying. Given his last call by Irene after he has settled into the comfortably intimate tableau of kneeling by her chaise longue, he darts a disbelieving glance at the clock and then gives himself a little shrug of a shake, his brows raked philosophically and his hands eloquently less assured. "I—I—want to ask you a big favor." I found this gorgeous curio on TCM, which inadvertently seemed to have bundled it with the earlier Garbo vehicle Love (1927); on its hour-ish own it can be watched more fuzzily at the Internet Archive. For those of you who have absolutely no interest in Lew Ayres, it appears to be the source of the immortal phrase "Irene—we can't go on meeting like this." This favor brought to you by my affecting backers at Patreon.
