The Single Standard

Greta Garbo as Arden Stuart, a San Francisco socialite who decides that the single standard — the one men already live by — should apply to her as well. She takes a lover (Nils Asther), loses him to the sea, and returns to a husband-shaped future she no longer wants. Directed by John S. Robertson for MGM, 1929, from Adela Rogers St. Johns's novel; still silent, or nearly, in the year sound arrived. Garbo's face does the argument. The film is less a scandal than a thesis about what a woman is allowed to want, shot in the last months before MGM would lock her into talkies and a different kind of myth.