“The Torrent is Greta Garbo’s first American film. Separated from Stiller by the studio, the new actress was directed by Monta Bell; MGM, probably unsure how to use her unglamourous exoticism, and maybe remembering that she had played the role of an Italian in Gösta Berling, chose for her a Latin role. In the script adapted by Dorothy Farnum from Blasco Ibañez’s melodrama, and in the cuts of a camera bending to star-system peremptory orders, Garbo was the absolute protagonist: a poor and beautiful girl in manneristic Spain, bleaker than folkloristic, who is in love with a rich boy whose future is in politics according to his mother’s wishes, and therefore her destiny is to be jilted. From the very first frames, in a more direct and less articulated manner than in her subsequent motion pictures, her face seems to dominate the space and mark the plot highlights: the frames are thought in a way as to reflect her inner light; when Ricardo Cortez (one of the many proclaimed and unsuccessful heirs to Valentino) kisses her for the first time, the camera lingers on her luminescence of enraptured sphynx; her beautiful profile, with her head slightly raised, is already been used to point at a haughty purity here plunged into an Oedipal knot. By upsetting social tenets, she is isolated in an aristocracy of gestures and looks, sometimes with crude overlapping: cowardly Cortez, persuaded by his mother, tears up the love letter she has written him and, with an involuntarily Surrealist gesture, throws its pieces to the logs”.

Paola Cristalli, Cinegrafie, n. 10, 1997

“We did read Vicente Blasco Ibañez in the first pocket books published in Italy in the post-war period, the BUR series with their famous grey cover. His most famous novels were Reed and Mud and The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, which acquired further fame with its adaptation for the screen in 1921 by Rex Ingram with Rodolfo Valentino and in 1961 in the long-drawn remake by Vincent Minnelli starring Glenn Ford. I do not know whether it is still possible to read Blasco Ibañez’s novels today, but we are still attached to the memory of a passionate incoherence, an almost planned refusal of any stylistic attempt. He was nonetheless a pleasant figure; born in Valencia in 1867 he soon left home to settle in Madrid, where he made his first literary experiences as a secretary for a serial story writer. Staunch and fiery Anarchist, he founded the Blaquista party and sat in Parliament for a few years, until, tired of politics, he moved to Argentina, where, in between lecturing tours, he found the time to establish a colony on the Rio Negro. After his return in Europe, he emigrated to Paris where he campaigned against Franco until 1938, the year of his death, the day before his birthday”.

Sandro Toni