Toni Le Brun (Corinne Griffith) is tired of her life of drudgery working in her aunt and uncle's Viennese bakery. She escapes to Budapest where she's been promised a position as an opera singer at the Palais de Paris.

But the "opera house" turns out to be a girlie show and the "singing" position a showcase for her curvy figure. With the help of a sympathetic, motherly wardrobe mistress Rosa (Louise Dresser), Toni escapes grim Budapest for glamorous Monte Carlo and the posh Hotel Eden. There, Rosa escapes her life of seamstress drudgery for two weeks of luxury every year by using her dead husband's pension to bankroll her glamorous vacation. Her husband left her his pension and the title of baroness which Rosa, serving as a kind of "fairy godmother," also bestows on Toni by passing her off as her daughter. Toni soon attracts the attention of a rich Parisian bachelor, Richard Spanyi (Charles Ray), and his uncle Henry von Glessing (Lowell Sherman), who both attempt to woo her, with the expected race to the altar at the film's climax.

The Garden of Eden (1928) was a spin on the "Cinderella" story with a witty, risque Ernst Lubitsch flair (and in fact written by one of Lubitsch's favorite writers, Hans Kraly) in which the innocent beauty is helped to find a mate by her fairy godmother.

Lewis Milestone's fourth film was yet another illustration of the director's versatility which would be affirmed two years later when Milestone won a Best Director Academy Award for All Quiet on the Western Front (1930). The Garden of Eden was hailed by Variety for "beauty of star, beauty of production and human appeal set this one in as a winner from the getaway."

Dubbed "The Orchid Lady" of the silent screen, Corinne Griffith was a noted film beauty whose career took a dramatic downturn with the coming of sound. More a charismatic beauty than an actress, Griffith eventually retired from the screen in 1932 after a succession of failed films. Griffith perhaps justified her early retirement by asking, "Why should I go on until I am playing mother roles?" But Griffith's exit from the spotlight was hardly a failure for the multifaceted woman. She ended her film career a wealthy woman thanks to her clever real estate investments. And she later went on to write a successful memoir of her childhood, which became the film Papa's Delicate Condition (1963). Co-star Charles Ray's career also took a downturn in later years, when his uniformly goody two-shoes turns in a number of films led to his typecasting as a superficially bland, one-dimensional actor. The Garden of Eden was in some ways an effort to topple his wholesome good-boy image, by having Ray play a smooth European sophisticate.

All three leads in The Garden of Eden, including Louise Dresser, struggled with their onscreen images. Though she ran away from her Indiana home at age 16 to join a traveling stock company, Dresser was never able to completely lose her flat, Midwestern accent, considered by some to be a liability in the movies' transition to sound. Others have suggested her retirement was not brought on by the transition to talkies, but by the simple fact that her glory days in silent cinema were just slowly fading. Upon her retirement in 1937, Dresser worked to raise money for the establishment of the Motion Picture Country Home and Hospital in Woodland Hills, California.

Director: Lewis Milestone
Producer: John W. Considine
Screenplay: Hans Kraly, from play "Der Garten Eden, Komodie in vier Akten" by Rudolph Bernauer and Rudolf Oesterreicher
Cinematography: John Arnold
Production Design: William Cameron Menzies
Cast: Corinne Griffith (Toni LeBrun), Louise Dresser (Rosa), Lowell Sherman (Henry von Glessing), Maude George (Madame Bauer), Charles Ray (Richard Spanyi).
BW-78m.

by Felicia Feaster