“It is not yet evident that Garbo was already an actress in Gösta Berling Saga, and the more so in the European roles played by this Swedish girl for Stiller first and Pabst later in two films that the history of cinema would never forget. In Gösta Berling she is as fantastic as she is still, in her white Empire-style dresses, among Gustavian décor, or else when she is silhouetted against a snowy and fiery horizon (the dramatic and figurative focus of the film is a very long scene where Garbo speeds with her sleigh towards the flames to meet her secret love, the funereal dongiovanni Gösta Berling). In his best moments Stiller observed that face as a snowy landscape, another lyric element suddenly offering itself to his camera. Gösta Berling Saga, the exhaustive adaptation of Selma Lagerlof’s great novel, is a complex, overloaded film, called upon to bear the weight of severe narration, aiming at reaching a balance between the unraveling of the stories of many characters, the ghosts of the past, crime, punishment and redemption, moral issues, sacrificed and at last triumphing innocence, “the raging of passion which frantically intermingles with the crackle of fire”, as Jean Bérenger said proclaiming it as a masterpiece. Garbo moves through all this allowing herself to be just barely perceived, sometimes slightly projecting her arms forward as if she had watched an already-forgotten Italian actress, slipping way without batting an eye from an improbable marriage, and winning a happy ending for herself without having suffered too much”.

Paola Cristalli, Cinegrafie, n. 10, 1997