I Do and I Don't

by Jeanine Basinger

  Garbo’s outfit, pure white, is a fine example of high-Adrian structure and cut. All she wants to do is wear it and learn about the natives and what makes them restless. When she bumps into Brent, it’s not her fault; it’s her geography. (And her turban.) This was how adultery was presented to audiences in the early 1930s: inside a tale of erotic, exotic escapism. If it took Somerset Maugham to do it, so be it. The Painted Veil lays out an adultery any filmgoer might like to have—one with all the trimmings. It is also presented safely: not in their neighborhood. It’s an adultery happening only on the screen, and it’s happening over there in China. It’s also happening to Garbo, a one-named unreal presence. Everyone knows there’s no one like her around town.

  Brent takes Garbo into a darkened temple, and she has her fortune told. “Radiant happiness follows trouble profound … impatient hands that reach for great love … beside you a great love, consuming as a great fire … but eyes cannot see close, love is too close to see … powerful as an avalanche.” (Any one of these things might have been enough.) When Brent laughs at the statue of the god of fate, Garbo laughs too.14 She and Brent passionately embrace, or as she says, “Things happen.” (He has suggested they could be “unhappy together.”) In case anyone in the audience is sleeping, there is a strategic cut to fireworks exploding.

  After Marshall finds out, Garbo delivers a speech that is important for her character’s right to sympathy. “I fell in love, blindly, madly. I reached for the happiness I could get, and like a fool I stole it … There was nothing cheap about it … No apology. I don’t love you. I never did.” (“Are you speaking for him, too?” asks the dubious Marshall.) When Brent lets her down (“My career … your reputation … if you’re willing to sacrifice everything, so am I, of course”), an appalled Garbo is taken to the interior, where cholera is raging.

  MGM obviously felt the audience for this movie would largely be made up of women, and that sympathy for Garbo needed to be maintained. The movie gives her three excuses: (1) Marshall neglected her. (2) She truly loves Brent. (3) Brent is not a bad man—her judgment shouldn’t be that wrong—just a man who has a different social standard than she does; he will do the right thing if she insists, but he feels it’s unnecessary (his “unhappy together” policy). The 1934 Painted Veil stays true to itself all the way to its finale. After “all this death and destruction” the couple experience in the interior, an exhausted Marshall realizes how “small” Garbo’s adultery really was. He plans to send her back to Hong Kong, but instead they become friends again. Marshall is stabbed by an unhappy peasant whose home is being burned because of the cholera epidemic, so Garbo does not leave, staying behind in the convent to help. Meanwhile, Brent makes his way to them, having changed his mind. “Once I waited for a word from you,” says Garbo, but “I was selfish … we thought only of ourselves.” She sends him packing, because “that’s why I lost Walter … thinking of myself … But his life, his work, everything he does is love.” Brent leaves, Marshall promises to recover, and the marriage is restored. “Don’t leave me,” says Garbo. “I won’t,” says Marshall, and “I love you,” says Garbo. These are the final words of the movie.15

  The 1934 Painted Veil says marriage is love, and if it isn’t, it won’t work. Garbo didn’t understand what love was until she faced “death and destruction” and saw the nobility in her husband. He, too, had to get his priorities straight. (“I went blind in Hong Kong.”) Hollywood, specifically MGM, turned The Painted Veil into a star vehicle that would maintain its fundamental sales pitch for audiences: love. And glamour. And wardrobe. With just a little safe sex thrown in. It’s designed to be an imaginary adultery for lonely women. The wonderful mixture that DeMille had understood—give ’em what they want, then take it back and say it’s naughty, but you can come again tomorrow for a little more—was safely in place.

  The 1957 version has a different focus, but still maintains a primary goal. It opens with a title card that firmly locates the audience in reality: “Hong Kong 1949.” There’ll be no goofing around with temple gongs and smoke bombs here. Viewers are immediately taken into a close‑up view of erotic objects via a camera movement around a lady’s boudoir. There’s a dressing table with cosmetics, brushes and combs, perfume bottles and jewelry, and as the camera tracks across the carpeted floor—like a dog sniffing a trail—there’s even more. High-heeled slippers, obviously kicked off in haste. A pair of silk stockings, abandoned. A man’s jacket, with his bulky wallet alongside. Cigarettes in an ashtray. It’s clearly an assignation scene, suddenly interrupted by an insistent twisting of the handle on the door into the room. The heroine, this time played by Eleanor Parker, sits up from the bottom of the frame à la Gilda when she hears the sound and says in a hoarse whisper, “What’s that?” so the husband, an unexpected early arrival home, gives up and leaves. Parker, in her dressing gown, consults with her paramour (Jean-Pierre Aumont) about the strange sound. He’s in his shirt with his tie loosened, but smoking the telltale postcoital cigarette. He doesn’t know what it is, but as long as her bedroom door is locked, he’s sure he doesn’t need to know. In case the audience doesn’t know, either, the story of The Painted Veil has been retitled The Seventh Sin.

  It’s an adultery movie, all right, and it wastes no time in establishing that fact. Gone is the meeting of the central couple, their courtship and marriage, their arrival in Hong Kong, her increasing boredom, his immersion in his work, her experiencing the lure of the exotic. Eleanor Parker will not need to put on a turban. “I love being with you, Paul,” she tells her lover. “I never really got very acquainted with my husband.” In fact, she doesn’t even know his telephone number at the medical school where he works while she makes love with Aumont. By beginning The Seventh Sin in flagrante delicto (and giving it a new title), the 1957 version of the story announces itself as a cautionary tale. However, since the heyday of the type has passed, it’s a sort of semicautionary tale, and is willing to pull its punches as necessary. The adultery of Parker is never presented with any suggestion that the audience should care about it, or that it’s a love match. Parker plays a sophisticated woman rather than a country girl yearning for travel. She’s an American—from Baltimore—and she has already adopted an Asian style of dress (an imaginary turban). All her clothes have frog closures, mandarin collars, and silken fabrics. She decorates her hair with Asian hair ornaments, at least until she has to live among the nuns in the cholera territory.16

  Garbo yearned (like her viewers) for true love, travel, and adventure, and was thus entitled to sympathy. Besides, her adultery was with a handsome movie star associated with leading-man roles, George Brent. Eleanor Parker, the lead of The Seventh Sin, is a bored and selfish American woman wed to a stalwart British bacteriologist (Bill Travers). Her affair—and it is just an affair—is with a married man who’s a weakling with a history of preying on married women. And he has children! This is naughty. On top of all that, he’s played by a Frenchman, and he’s a man who is mostly immersed in running the successful shipping business he acquired through marriage. Aumont tells Parker he has great regard for his wife and could never consider living without his children. The affair reflects no sense of love (although he claims he loves her), only sexual dalliance. Travers as her husband is clearly mismatched with Parker’s cool elegance. (Herbert Marshall, a fine actor, was an excellent foil for Garbo’s star power, and could hold his own.) Travers is a likable film personality, but he doesn’t fit well into a world of Asian sexual frustration. He does, however, seem boring; an audience can find sympathy for Parker on that level. His miscasting does much to impair the story’s basic triangular structure. In the original movie (and the novel), the husband is a central force, a key figure in the wife’s learning experience. Travers’s role is to help an audience understand the level of Parker’s frivolous behavior. He provides, through his angry confrontations, the back story of Parker’s character. In this film, unlike both other versions, she is explained as a former belle from Baltimore who ref
used offers of marriage until her “ugly younger sister” suddenly got married, making her look bad. Travers says, “You were desperate to get a husband.” She was motivated to escape her embarrassment by marrying, and he, a sort of catch because he was British and a doctor, came along and liberated her. When he confronts her with her infidelity, he tells her: “I knew you were shallow and frivolous and vain … but I loved you.” She fires back that she’s repulsed by him, and always used “the headache gag” on him because if she had not met Aumont, she would never have known “what love is,” adding, “I wonder how many women wouldn’t.” This statement is at the heart of the primary audience connection the movie hopes to establish: a link to frustrated women, disappointed in their sex lives, using the “headache gag” and wondering if there really was anything romantic out there for them. The Seventh Sin, of course, plans to work the DeMille ploy on them: yes, there is, but it won’t work.

  After Travers drags Parker off to the interior, they argue about everything, even about whether to eat their lettuce or not (the cholera epidemic from the earlier film is still raging). He forces himself on her in an angry attack—it’s fundamentally a rape scene, with her saying, “Walter, don’t … don’t” repeatedly—throwing some much-needed sympathy her way, but basically throwing everything out of whack regarding any noble finale for him. When she becomes pregnant, he dies. The movie ends before the baby is born, and Parker, no longer a cynical wife, sets out to find full redemption. Needless to say, there’s no positive resolution with Aumont, who disappears after the couple leave Hong Kong, with no more screen time, his purpose achieved.

  In the first remake of The Painted Veil, retitled The Seventh Sin, Eleanor Parker found herself struggling to hold off the unwanted advances of her husband, Bill Travers. (Photo Credit 2.61)

  Unlike the Garbo film, The Seventh Sin is not selling a star (although Parker was a big name and a fine actress). It is definitely not selling love. It is reminding audiences that infidelity is a bad idea—a sin—that will bring no good news to anyone. As a result, this Painted Veil diminishes the exotic lure of the Orient. Times have changed, and the East is no longer the world of beaded curtains to be proffered as an excuse for adultery. The audience of the late 1950s won’t buy the kind of escapist hokum presented so effectively, so visually, so gloriously (so crazily) by Metro in the 1930s. Advertising for the movie put the final stamp on the new approach: “The Seventh Sin,” said the ads, “A Woman’s Mistake.”

  By the time The Painted Veil was resurrected for a 2006 audience, adultery had become passé, no longer a big box-office lure. Thus, the politics of the story were expanded to a more current issue (American involvement in a foreign land), and the exotic is represented by a franker look at the act of sex. When the film opens up, the couple are already in China and already married. Location shooting replaced the studio-designed sets. The movie has the elaborate time shifts back and forth that tart up many contemporary movies, because just having an affair is no longer a big deal. Cinematic tricks are needed. (The story of how the couple met is presented through flashbacks.)

  The modern Painted Veil is a period piece set in China in 1925, whereas both the Garbo and Parker versions were in a “current” time frame. This China is one of heat and dirt, with no air conditioning but plenty of sweat and political unrest, not the former filmed world of exotica. The location work makes China very gritty, very tactile, and very real.

  Once the couple (Edward Norton and Naomi Watts) go into the interior (after her romp with Liev Schreiber is revealed), Norton never looks her in the eye. The husband’s role is now once again equal to the wife’s.17 There is no longer a star caste system with GARBO, or even Eleanor Parker. If anything, it is his story. He’s a man of science, trying to make China healthier, safer, better. When the couple come together again, it’s after a drunken night. It is purely sexual and equally desired on both sides, and she becomes pregnant. After Norton’s death from cholera, Watts returns to England with her little son and by chance meets Schreiber on the street. He opens the door to something more, but she moves on. When her son asks who the man was, she replies, “No one important, darling.” This is an entirely different view of adultery than either of the two earlier films presented. Morality has changed. The movie shifts sympathy toward the man’s perspective; the woman does not need to be overtly redeemed for society, only to find herself and her own sense of self-worth; it doesn’t matter who fathered the child; neither love nor sin is the focus. Infidelity isn’t the main purpose; it’s just one of the elements in a marriage story, as the couple learn to respect each other and find common purpose before one of them dies.

  In particular, the concept of motherhood illustrates the differences in the three films. The Garbo version is about love: romantic, exotic, passionate, escapist love. What would motherhood have to do with that, especially if the mother is supposed to be Garbo in a turban? She does not become pregnant, but Marshall lives. The Parker version is about a woman doing the wrong thing—becoming a bad wife, committing a sin, and having to atone for it. Her baby is never born onscreen, and her husband dies. The modern version easily uses motherhood. It adds drama by raising unanswered questions: How far along is she? And who is the father? (Norton even asks her aloud, “Am I the father?”) Norton dies, but it’s no longer a problem for a woman to raise a child alone. She and her son are seen years later, happy together in the streets of London. Modern social attitudes have been projected onto the filmed “past.”

  In the 2006 version of The Painted Veil, Edward Norton and Naomi Watts lead separate and unconnected lives under umbrellas on location in the very real Asia. (Photo Credit 2.62)

  Besides the main trio in each of the three different versions of The Painted Veil, there are two other main characters from the novel. When the couple go out to the “interior” to face death and the problems of their marriage, they encounter two people: a nun and the British district commissioner. The nun is eliminated as a major character in the 1934 Painted Veil, and the other two versions of her (Françoise Rosay and Diana Rigg, respectively) don’t differ much. A nun is a nun; they’re out there to cluck, and act as a sounding board for Parker and Watts. Waddington, the commissioner taking up his life away from England, does reflect a difference that helps define the changes in each film. In the 1934 version, the character is played by a minor actor, Forrester Harvey. He’s a friendly comic relief, and his role is very small. He has no personal life developed, no Asian wife or paramour. With Garbo as the film’s central focus, his only job is to interact briefly with her. In The Seventh Sin, George Sanders undertakes the role and becomes a supportive friend to Parker; he’s as cynical as she is. (When asked about his love life, he tells Parker that “there was a girl in Hong Kong I gave a hot plate.”) Sanders plays an important role in helping Parker fill her time. He will guide her toward working at the convent to help the nuns with their orphans. (The nuns won’t take her unless her husband okays it, so Parker begs Travers, asking his forgiveness for her “silly woman’s infidelity.”) Sanders is also frank with Parker about Aumont, whom he’s known for years, telling her that “some men need a lot of women … He never lets these little romances interfere with his marriage.” Because George Sanders was at the time a bigger star name to American audiences than Bill Travers, he gets more screen time and almost becomes the leading man. He’s also the source of the second major difference between this version of The Painted Veil and the other two (the first being the shift to emphasize the concept of “sin”). Sanders, after knowing Parker long enough to find he likes her, tells her he’ll take her to tea “at my place.” “My place” turns out to be a lavish and exotic home, well run by an Asian wife whom Parker didn’t know he had. Sanders’s wife speaks no English, obeys his orders, spoils him totally, waits on him hand and foot. She wanted to commit suicide when he tried to leave her and, as he tells Parker, is a person that “no Western woman could ever understand.” His wife is happy to be his wife and nothing more, and the movie
suggests that, as a result, he himself is happy. “You are too liberated, too American,” Sanders tells Parker. Made in 1957 and set in 1949, this marriage movie is intended to reinforce women in their roles as wives and mothers, and to help them see that straying from these tasks will bring only misery. The Asian woman is set up as a kind of model, the perfect doll wife. (When she gives Parker a gift of a pair of her own slippers, Parker’s feet are too big.)18

  In the final version, the Waddington character is portrayed by the successful character actor Toby Jones. Jones presents Waddington as strange, alienlike, and enjoying life with a young Asian mistress. He provides a deeper level of meaning regarding a Westerner’s acceptance of Asian culture, and a wiser, more sympathetic companion to the heroine. These three versions of the characters shift from insider to outsider-by-choice to outsider-by-type, and their acceptance of the Asian world goes from not at all, to respectable, to total (so much so that it ceases to be a main point). They reflect the changes in the films: the first version a typical romance of its time, with exotic overtones, the second a story that reaffirms mainstream society’s values (you must be faithful in marriage), and the last trying to tell the original book’s story, since today there are no censorship restrictions and no need to reshape events for a mass audience that might be offended by certain elements. The 1934 Painted Veil is about love, not infidelity. The Seventh Sin is about infidelity, not love. The 2006 Painted Veil, an independent film, is about faithful literary adaptation. Connecting to a large mass audience is no longer a prominent goal for a marriage movie’s use of adultery. With different shadings about the importance of love, the need for sex, the issues of motherhood, obedience, couples working together, reputations ruined by affairs, The Painted Veil offers options to each generation, and each era can make the Painted Veil it needs.