“However, in its own fashion, Wild Orchids is an exquisite movie, in the sumptuous and slightly funereal meaning of some films just at the threshold of the sound era. This is a shadowy game played with refined and changing elegance, where the shadows do mark the key development of the plot: the seduction between Garbo and Asther, a Javanese prince, on a journey, is the brushing of their shadows, or the projecting of one’s shadow over the other’s body; her husband guesses the truth by looking at their silhouettes in the frame of a lit window; and when Garbo dreams of her lover in her restless slumber also loaded of desire, the image of his face stands out on her pillow (if there were here just a single hint of the anarchist sweetness of an amour fou, we could even recall L’Atalante). Charles Affron remarks that Wild Orchids is a movie where every single visual context has been clearly thought and designed in order to make the star’s face and body stand out: either when Garbo dons her Western elegance posing amidst a group of small Oriental maids, or when she bravely accept to wear the Javanese traditional costume (making her look like Valentino wrapped in pearls in The Young Rajah, or the Chinese wife in Wyler’s The Letter, a terrible plaster, bistre and gold scales icon, played by another Scandinavian actress), or when her bare shoulders and back wrapped in a sarong stand out in a door frame. The direction by Sidney Franklin is not really decisive and therefore the coldly kitsch charm of Wild Orchids is the result of the harmony between the skilled light direction by William Daniels and Gilbert Adrian’s costumes, who finds here for the first time the ‘divine woman’ destined to become his muse and fetish.

Paola Cristalli, Cinegrafie, n. 10, 1997