A Woman of Affairs

A Woman of Affairs is a 1928 American silent drama directed by Clarence Brown for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, starring Greta Garbo as Diana Merrick and John Gilbert as Neville Holderness, and loosely adapted from Michael Arlen's controversial 1924 novel The Green Hat.^{1 • 2} It was the third film to team Garbo and Gilbert, and it became a notable case study in Hollywood self-censorship: the Hays Office forced the studio to rename every character, delete the novel's references to venereal disease, and drop the original title.^{1 • 2}

Censorship and the transformation of The Green Hat

By the late 1920s Arlen's novel had already been turned into a hit stage play, but the film version faced the industry's censoring board, the Hays Office. According to Leatrice Gilbert Fountain's biography Dark Star, the office at first blocked production because of the novel's explicit references to venereal disease and its overall "immorality." MGM responded by changing the names of all the characters, deleting the venereal-disease material, and retitling the film. Even then, the Hays Office would not allow the credits or advertisements to name the novel; the film could only be billed as "from the story by Michael Arlen."²

The changes altered the story's meaning at several points. In the novel, the heroine's husband kills himself because he has syphilis; in the film he is an embezzler, a switch some critics thought made later plot points seem contrived. Diana's affair with her former lover is downplayed, so that, as Frank Miller wrote in Censored Hollywood, less aware audience members might think the former lovers spent the evening talking. Her later hospitalization, which in the novel follows the birth of an illegitimate child, becomes in the film a mysterious illness brought on by grief. Douglas Fairbanks Jr. noted in his autobiography The Salad Days that because Prohibition was still in force, his character, who was supposed to die of drink, could never be shown with a labeled bottle.²

A 2016 study by the film scholar Carmen Guiralt Gomar, published in Film History, argues that the result is a film with two separate and contradictory story lines: the narrative revealed by the images, through which director Clarence Brown conveyed the novel's full content, and the official speech supervised by the censors in the intertitles written by Marian Ainslee and Ruth Cummings.³ The source novel's objectionable material, which one survey describes as including sexually transmitted disease, suicide, and abortion, was thus displaced into what the images could suggest and the intertitles denied.⁹

Production

Production began on 31 July 1928, according to a directory chart in Exhibitors Herald and Moving Picture World. After a week of exteriors around Southern California in mid-September, Brown returned to the Culver City studio for interiors. The film was copyrighted on 10 December 1928 and released on 15 December 1928.^{1 • 4} It was a Vitaphone release, silent with intermittent music and effects, and carried the song "Love's First Kiss" by William Axt, David Mendoza, and Raymond Klages.^{7 • 4}

Garbo and Gilbert's off-screen relationship was strained during the shoot. Fairbanks recalled that when the couple argued, Gilbert asked him to carry scribbled notes between them, and the atmosphere on set turned chilly for days at a time. The two split for good shortly after the film; Gilbert married the actress Ina Claire in 1929, and Garbo never married.²

Reception and legacy

Contemporary and later responses have been mixed. Dennis Schwartz gave the film a C, calling it "an hysterical and an overacted soap opera story," while other viewers have praised Garbo's performance as one of her best silent work.¹⁰ On the aggregate site Rating Graph the film holds an average user rating of 7.1 out of 10 from 1,854 votes.¹¹ A BAMPFA program note credited the film with "a feminist punch that was lost altogether in later Hollywood romances."¹²

The film has remained in circulation. A 35mm print was screened at the 10th TCM Classic Film Festival in Hollywood on 14 April 2019, and prints exist in the holdings of Turner Entertainment and the George Eastman Museum.^{1 • 4} When William Axt's original piano-conductor score was located in the Turner Vaults, the film was presented with live orchestra at the Cinema Ritrovato festival in Bologna.⁵ Arlen's novel was filmed again by MGM in 1934 as Outcast Lady, directed by Robert Z. Leonard and starring Constance Bennett and Herbert Marshall.¹

References

1. A Woman of Affairs (1928), AFI Catalog of Feature Films
2. Deborah Looney, "A Woman of Affairs," Turner Classic Movies (2005)
3. Carmen Guiralt Gomar, "Self-Censorship in Hollywood during the Silent Era: A Woman of Affairs (1928) by Clarence Brown," Film History 28(2): 81–113 (2016)
4. A Woman of Affairs (1928), Progressive Silent Film List, Silent Era
5. Cinema Ritrovato 1997 catalog notes on A Woman of Affairs
6. A Woman of Affairs (1928), The Film Examiner
7. A Woman of Affairs. 1928. Directed by Clarence Brown, MoMA
8. A Woman of Affairs, GarboForever film page
9. Thesis chapter on self-censorship and A Woman of Affairs, CORE
10. A Woman of Affairs, Rotten Tomatoes
11. A Woman of Affairs (1928) ratings, Rating Graph
12. BAMPFA program notes, Jon Wengström's Greta Garbo Rarities

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026

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