A film of and about deceptive appear­ances, The Garden of Eden starts as a Viennese drama but soon morphs into a Riviera comedy. Its script was penned by Hans Kraly, Ernst Lubitsch’s collaborator on 30 films, and was briskly directed by Lewis Milestone in a joyful, light-heart­ed mood.
Corinne Griffith plays Toni, a young woman raised by her baker guardians in Vienna. Unsatisfied with baking pretzels for life, she dreams of becoming an opera singer. She departs for Budapest, under the impression she is auditioning for a serious singing role. However, on her first night on stage, Toni is shocked to discov­er – unbeknownst to her – that she has been dressed in a see-through costume. Further revelations follow: the venue is a disreputable music hall, and its patron­ess offers her girls to wealthy men. Disil­lusioned and pursued by a persistent rich man, Toni finds solace with the theatre’s grandmotherly wardrobe mistress (Lou­ise Dresser). The two women pack up and leave…for Monte Carlo. Even more surprises await: the wardrobe mistress is actually a baroness. They soon check into the Hotel Eden, a playground for the sexual escapades of the wealthy, lav­ishly designed by the film’s art director and Milestone’s frequent collaborator, William Cameron Menzies. The hotel sets the stage for a series of further revela­tions, culminating in the second half of this charming comedy.
The material could have easily been adapted into a screwball comedy in the sound era, and the film is undoubtedly ahead of its time. Milestone elaborates on some of his earlier mise-en-scène ideas, such as characters circling and be­ing circled. Described by Milestone’s bi­ographer Harlow Robinson as the direc­tor’s “most successful romantic comedy,” the original film featured a sequence in colour of which only a few frames have survived.

 Ehsan Khoshbakht

The Garden of Eden, which began life as a German stage play, is an entertaining romantic comedy from 1928, and an important film for both its star, Corinne Griffith, and director, Lewis Milestone. The script by Hanns Kräly, a scenarist of four 1920s Ernst Lubitsch comedies, along with gorgeous production design by William Cameron Menzies, helped give the film an effervescent, “Lubitsch-like” quality. The Garden of Eden was the second film for Milestone working with producer John Considine Jr., who had produced Two Arabian Knights (1927) for Howard Hughes the previous year. Milestone’s Best Director-Comedy Oscar had yet to be bestowed at the time of the film’s release in January, 1928, but he had already managed to establish himself as a solid director of comedy through his previous films at Warner Bros starring Marie Prevost, with whom he would later work on The Racket released in the Fall of 1928.

For many years, The Garden of Eden was available only through a cut down 55 minute “Show At Home” edition. This unique, 78 minute version of the film comes from a 16 mm reduction print that was ordered by film collector John Hampton sometime in the early 1940s.

Jeff Masino