Greta Garbo’s unlikely role in making Clint Eastwood an icon
In the late 1920s and early ’30s, few stars were as famous as Greta Garbo. When the Swedish actor moved to Hollywood in 1925, she instantly became a sensation with her work in silent movies. Unlike many other stars of the era who were forced into retirement with the dawn of talking pictures, she thrived in the new era of sound, landing some of the most successful roles of her career. Films like Camille, Anna Christie, and Grand Hotel helped cement her reputation as a great screen beauty with a distinctly sombre, silent, and occasionally even depressed persona.
It wasn’t entirely an act. Garbo was unhappy with life in Hollywood and despised being a celebrity. In her mid-30s, while still at the height of her fame, she quit the business altogether and moved into a nondescript apartment in New York for the rest of her life, leading a quiet existence. But her mythology lived on, and it ended up helping Clint Eastwood during one of the most pivotal moments in his career.
During an interview with NPR in 1997, the legendary filmmaker discussed his role as The Man With No Name in Sergio Leone’s Dollars Trilogy. When asked what he was thinking about in the many scenes in which he squints inscrutably at the camera, Eastwood said, “The first response would be to say absolutely nothing… [director] George Cukor used to say – he’d tell Greta Garbo, sometimes, to look into the camera and stare and don’t think about a thing.”
That unfathomable expression was central to both Garbo and Eastwood’s appeal as actors, allowing audiences to read into their lack of expression and project emotions onto them. In Garbo’s case, those long close-ups often suggested a sense of emotional depth and complexity or a sense of quiet torment and yearning. With Eastwood, that blank expression exemplified the unshakable stoicism of the character and his wealth of experience that the audience could only guess at.
According to Eastwood, the direction to think about nothing probably undersold the work of the actor, and that they normally did have something on their mind. “You think about what the demands are of the plot,” he explained. “Usually, because this character, though he wasn’t saying a lot, he was plotting a lot, and so you just thought about what your next moves were.”
In general, he said, actors are always working in two worlds. There’s the inner monologue, which is saying one thing, and the outer character, which often presents something entirely different.
Aside from the acting in these scenes, close-ups are one of the most distinct and important techniques in cinema to communicate certain things to the audience without the use of dialogue. Any time the screen is filled with an actor’s face, the audience is invited to read into their expression. The less the actor’s face gives away, the more the audience is intrigued by the character. With all the close-ups in their respective films, it’s no wonder Garbo and Eastwood remain two of the most alluring and mythical screen presences of all time.
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