Camille

Greta Garbo’s magisterial turn as a doomed 19th-century Parisian courtesan in Cukor’s lavish adaptation of Dumas, fils’ The Lady of the Camelias is widely considered one of the all-time great screen performances. The movie revolves around its star’s tossed-off jokes, her sudden displays of passion, her glimmers of coquettishness, her stifled coughing fits, and her final, iconic death scene, but it’s cushioned by some wonderfully effervescent photography and a great deal of attention to period detail. Camille is one of the undisputed triumphs of Hollywood’s Golden Age, a delicate cocktail of, as Cukor later put it by way of Henry James, “champagne and tears.”