August 10 movie: Two Faced Woman. Greta Garbo's last movie is a huge disappointment. She marries Melvyn Douglas on a whim, finds out he's a selfish, philandering dickhead, then poses as her own identical twin to teach him a lesson. He pretends to fall in love with the "twin" to get back at her, it goes on like that for awhile, and then they decide somewhat randomly that they still love each other. There's no reason to think anything will be better between them, or that they'll stop hurting each other. But the movie's time is up and they have to wrap it up.
At the end Robert Osborne said that originally Douglas didn't know about Garbo's ruse, and really thought he was seducing her sister. But the Catholic League got all freaked out, like they do, and the filmmakers inserted a scene where Douglas finds out the truth early on. I don't know which way is worse: for Douglas to be so immoral that he throws himself into an affair with his wife's sister, or for him to pretend to do so, just to mess with her head.
It's kind of sad to see the couple who starred in Ninotchka make a piece of dreck like this. But as Georg said, if they made two movies, and one is a legendary classic, and you've never heard of the other, there's probably a reason.
A couple of bits of trivia: first, there's a play in the movie called "Nostalgia in Chromium." This is going to sound insane, but I could swear I've seen another movie from that era which contains a play with that title. I tried to google it and came up with nothing.
Also, the movie does include this very clever bit of dialogue:
"Will you dine with me tonight?
"I can't dine with you tonight; I just met you."
"How about tomorrow night?"
"Tomorrow I will have forgotten you."
I can think of a counter-example to Georg's proposition, at least in my own experience. The Ghost Breakers, with Bob Hope, Willie Best, and Paulette Godard, has always been a favorite of mine. (I found out recently that it's based on a stage play that's on Project Gutenberg.) A few years back, a relatively unknown movie with the three of them surfaced, having been buried by the studio or some such: Nothing but the Truth, and that one's really good too. These might be the two best vehicles Willie Best ever got, by the way. Hope said he was something like the funniest actor he ever worked with, but most of his other movies give him nothing to do but act scared of spooks -- something he does part of the time in Ghost Breakers, but he also does a lot more, and is presented as Hope's employee, but not very subordinate.