Wild Orchids

Garbo again, this time as Lillie Sterling, a wife on a business trip to Java whose husband (Lewis Stone) is too busy for her and whose host, a Javanese prince (Nils Asther), is not. Directed by Sidney Franklin for MGM, 1929. The orchids are the title and the threat: tropical, expensive, slightly rotten. Asther's prince is the studio's idea of the East; Garbo's boredom is the real subject. It is a late silent about looking: at a marriage, at a colony, at a star who is already bigger than the plot around her.