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?"
( You're mad! He's innocent! )
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?"
( You're mad! He's innocent! )
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.
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