Pin-drop silence, even the usual subway rumble absent or unnoticed. Darker- and curlier-haired, rounder of arms and chin, teeth less regular, and bigger and more awkward than memory holds, She is there in the horse-carriage well into one of the earlier of many adroitly integrated flashbacks, eating the remaining Italian food and intertitle-introduced as Greta Gustafsson -- Elisabeth Countess Dohna. The rest is history. Or legend.

 “My talents fall within definite limitations. I am not as versatile an actress as some think.” Hindsight exaggerates, but, actress or Presence, how could Garbo ever not be the star? She is that indeed, the magnet for the Museum of Modern Art’s two-film-and-three-short-short Garbo Centenary selection. Fresh from department-store clerkship, an abbreviated publicity film for that employer and another for a bakery, then the 1922 slapstick comedy Peter the Tramp and a stint at Stockholm’s Royal Dramatic theater, the nineteen-year-old is actually “second lead” in 1924’s Gösta Berling’s Saga/Gösta Berlings saga aka The Legend, Atonement, Story or Saga of same.

Playing the title’s “defrocked” dipsomaniacal Evangelical Lutheran pastor, Lars Hanson has infinitely more screen time, but, assuming one can get that woman who would become the “Swedish Sphinx” out of mind for a while, the true attraction here is director Mauritz (Moshe) Stiller’s compelling if sprawling third adaptation from a Selma Lagerlöf epic. Not so curiously, that novelist, the first woman awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, hated this film from the earliest of her Värmland novels.

Pygmalion to Garbo’s Galatea, Beast or Svengali to Beauty or Trilby, over Louis B. Mayer’s “American men don’t like fat women,” Stiller insisted his discovery also be signed by MGM when Hollywood came calling only for him. Along with those of director-actor Victor Sjöström (Seastrom in the U.S.), Hanson and others, his defection ended his homeland’s great golden age of cinema preeminence. However, whereas the actress’ mythic success was electric from day one with The Torrent (1926), her homosexual mentor clashed violently with Mayer, was replaced on set, switched to a Paramount where he fared no better, and sailed home to die at forty-five, fruitlessly begging the later guilt-ridden protégé to accompany him.

Prints of Gösta Berling run ninety-one minutes on up to the three-hour partially tinted one scheduled for DVD release by Kino. To live piano accompaniment by Donald Sosin and simultaneous voice translation for Swedish titles, MoMA’s hundred-sixty-five-minute, two-part showing is filled with memorable, usually location, scenes and techniques that with time would become imitated benchmarks. Among them are the early splendid night shots, back lighting as in the halo of Garbo’s hair, side lighting out of masters of Dutch painting, visible breath in the cold, the escape-rescue from and fire-gutting of Ekeby (amber-yellow toned in a few versions) which rivals the burning of Atlanta, and the furious sled pursued by wolves across snowy ice that no subsequent Eliza-crossing-the-Ohio ever matched.

Again, one reads back the legend into the film. Despite some moving pieces, there is no denying that the acting here is at times leaden, face powder and lipstick too heavy (note hero Hanson), and emotions and outcome melodramatically predictable. Worse, though simplified the plot is still confusing enough that viewers conferred afterwards to fill in and straighten out what they could.

One of two Swedish titles translates as The Cavaliers of Ekeby, and Berling is now such a cavalier, one of those carousing privileged hangabout retainers at that mansion and grounds belonging to Samzelius and wife Majorskan/Margaretha (Otto Elg-Lundberg, Gerda Lundeqvist). A minister stripped of his post, not so much for his drunken ways as at a crucial moment upbraiding his parishioners for theirs, he had become tutor at Borg. Things are not crystal clear in this Giant-esque sprawl, but it appears he was hired to lead astray daughter and heir Ebba Dohna (Mona Mårtenson), so that the inheritance will pass to stepmother Märthe (Ellen Hartman-Cederström) and her foppish son Henrik (Torsten Hammarén), the latter now returning with virtually dowerless Italian bride Elisabeth (Garbo). She and the tutor avoid facing their mutual attraction, he leaves, and Ebba conveniently dies, anyway. Near suicide over her death, he is dissuaded by tough, unhappily married Majorskan, whose own true love will be revealed, forcing her into banishment and bridge-repairing with her estranged mother.

Family member cousin Marianne Sinclaire (Jenny Hasselqvist) has also fallen for Berling, coquettishly defies him while they perform onstage a pseudo-Carmen, is disowned by her father Melchior (Sixten Malmerfelt) though mourned by mother Gustafva (Karin Swanström), loses her beauty to smallpox but is nonetheless carried to Ekeby by the honorable man she loves enough to renounce. That estate impulsively ceded to the cavaliers by Samzelius, cast-off temporarily deranged Majorskan returns in the snow for vengeance.

In a conclusion which betrays Lagerlöf’s in keeping with the great amplification of Garbo’s originally rather minor rôle, love and Ekeby and other rewards rise from the ashes, thanks to good hearts and a correctable if helpful oversight by Italian officialdom.

Gösta Berling is the center start to finish among a rich cast of characters, but it is the females who come off as the stronger sex; ringleted out of Jane Austen’s Regency, they are mostly wise and self-sacrificing like Willa Cather Midwestern Lutheran heroines. The film is theirs. But the applause at the end is Stiller’s.

(Released by Svensk Filmindustri; not rated by MPAA.)