(1921. dir: Ray C. Smallwood) June Mathis wrote the script the same year her breakout hit the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse emerged, the one that made her protege, Valentino, an overnight sensation. He's here, as well, playing Armand, but anyone hoping for a Valentino Movie would have been disappointed. This is very much directed and choreographed towards showcasing the talents of the women. Nazimova was a massive star of the theatre, beginning at Stanislavski's Moscow Art Theatre before immigrating to New York where she was the Liv Ullman of her day, bringing Ibsen and Chekhov to the yanks. (According to Wikipedia, Dorothy Parker called Nazimova the best Hedda she'd ever seen.) Today she may be best remembered as the proprietrix of the infamous "Garden of Alla", a sort of sodom-and-gomorrah pleasure-den which has become an architectural fixture in the Classic Hollywood which resides in our collective unconscious.
Camille was to be a bold production, set in the modern day, photographed very much to emphasize Nazimova at the expense of her co-star, with a strong focus also placed on Rambova's striking art deco production design. Its Parisian scenes may be, in retrospect, the most stylistically "'20s"-looking pieces ever caught on celluloid. Rambova, Valentino's future wife and very much Nazimova's protege (and possibly her lover), was never well-liked among the Hollywood elite, but she owned a forceful artistic vision. Here, she's created spare sets designed around circles, amongst which Nazimova can bend her graceful body into expressive arcs and esses.
The script itself, alas, is no great shakes, giving us long scenes we don't need and far too little time spent with Marguerite and Armand together. Once she makes her decision to leave her lover for his own good, the movie falters and crawls to a slow finish, both actors hamming it up, and we never do get the scene we really want, which is la dame dying gracefully in her sweet boy's forgiving arms. The only times Valentino's star appeal comes apparent are when his eyes shine with sorrow; all else is either bland, predictable, or overplayed. It doesn't help that what we expect from a Valentino character, the strong, forceful lover, is instead a submissive, grasping Marguerite around the knees and offering to be her dog, and signing a gift for her not with love, but with "humility". Granted, nobody ever watches any version of Camille for Armand, but there are hints in Valentino's biographies that the relationship may be a sort of mirror image of his love affair with Rambova, who was most definitely a domineering powerhouse thrusting up through the center of his short life and his career, reshaping both; he was devastated when she left him.
More generally, it is a fascination to look back on the power these women had in those early Hollywood days: Rambova, Nazimova, and June Mathis, all three, and wonder, where did it all go, that female forza on the backlot?
In the end, this Lady of the Camellias seems flat and uninteresting in her virtuousness, with none of the fascinatingly layered sense of conflict we glean from Garbo's later rendition. Even Paris manages to feel claustrophobic, as if all of Parisian night-life is one roomful of pretentious humans who travel from a restaurant to a party to a casino. The most beautiful scene may be when Marguerite's car, headed to Paris on a night of Biblical rains, passes the car in which Armand is enjoying his last moments of happiness, on his way back to find a house empty but for betrayal.
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