“The only survivor of Garbo’s partners – today at ninety he still appears in some TV movies – Lew Ayres was just twenty when he dared ask the kiss giving the title to the film. It was the start of his cinema adventure, the sweet encouragement which he took with him when the following year he started his best interpretation, the young soldier in Nothing new on the Western Front, and later as Doctor Kildare”.

Vittorio Martinelli

“Despite the fact that the star’s name shined in the head credits ten times bigger than the ones of her partners, Conrad Nagel and Lew Ayres, The Kiss is more Jacques Feyder’s movie than Greta Garbo’s. Maybe for the first time since her American debut, Garbo found herself in contexts where she was called to walk through places, to light up frames orderly arranged according to a spatial rationale not entirely dependent on her body. The result is quite interesting: if The Kiss, among Garbo’s American movies, is not the most unforgettable, nor the most glamourous, nor the funniest, it is the best as far as filmmaking intelligence and formal inventiveness are concerned. This is also a bizarre movie, tilting between lightness and tragedy in a French-like audacity, a pochade set in an unexpected field of moral freedom: there is a gunshot, a death, a trial and the killer is acquitted (for self-defence reasons), an infringement of the codes that American cinema moving towards its Hays era would not allow for a long time afterwards. Feyder invents for Garbo a more sophisticated and ironic allure, he never leaves her to the narcissistic vertigo of prolonged and solitary close ups, rather preferring to experiment on possible balances between her face and other shapes, or other faces: the first sequence in the museum is a sort of prospective study and minimal movements of her and Conrad Nagel’s head, languid and impatient lover. As far as narcissistic scenes are concerned Feyder shows that he can do even better. Only once can we stare Garbo directly in her eyes, in a close-up taking up the whole screen and surprisingly we find ourselves being stared at by her, but it is only for a glimpse, the camera falls back and reveals that in reality she is looking at a mirror”.

Paola Cristalli, Cinegrafie, n. 10, cit.

“The last Stand of the silent pictures, the last Hope of those who like ‘em quiet is Greta Garbo. Once again she plays one of these Mysterious women whose heart no man quite knows, neither her Husband, nor her Lover -a pattern performance by Conrad Nagel- nor the green Schoolboy whose first blundering kiss precipitates disaster. Up to that moment the story is breathless with promise. After the inevitable revolver shot the trial follows inevitably”.

Motion Picture, genn. 1930