Garbo lends her considerable talent and exquisite beauty to yet another lush MGM vanity peice, Conquest. This splendidly mounted period film opens in 1807 when Boyer as Napoleon Bonaparte visits Poland and becomes enamored of Garbo, playing the beautiful Countess Marie Walewska.





She is asked by the country's leaders to go to Boyer and persuade him to help Poland become independent. Even her aging husband, Stephenson, urges her to go. Garbo goes reluctantly and has an affair with Boyer that causes her husband to divorce her. She becomes Boyer's mistress, has a child by him, and is later discarded when Owen, playing the scheming Talleyrand, arranges a marriage between Boyer and Marie Louise, a Hapsburg princess.





Though abandoned, Garbo remains loyal to Boyer and, following his horrendous defeat at Waterloo, takes their son, Beckett, to see his father just before Boyer's permanent exile at St. Helena. Conquest was Garbo's 25th film and it lacked the verve and majesty of Camille. Moreover, Boyer stole the movie from his costar, even though he appeared only occasionally. His perforance earned him a Best Actor Academy Award nomination, though he lost to Spencer Tracy for Captains Courageous.





This would be the only movie in which the two would appear together. The production was lavish, but director Brown, Garbo's favorite, was sluggish at the helm; the film drags on and on. Much of the lethargy had to do with the script, which was worked on by no less than seventeen writers, including Donald Ogden Stewart, who received no credit.

After the film's release many writers filed complaints against MGM, saying that they had submitted scripts that were used in their entirety for the screenplay. The dialog is stilted and sometimes ridiculous. At one point Boyer says to Garbo, "Are you real, or born of a snowdrift? Adding to the confusion were a bevy of busybody MGM executives agonizing over the title of the movie.





Originally the film was entitled Marie Waleska, and it was released in Europe as such, but studio heads felt that this title would be too much for American audiences to digest, let alone pronounce. For months, dozens of titles poured in from MGM executives. Finally, in exasperation, F.L. Hendrickson chose Conquest, a title already owned by Warner Bros. MGM exchanged its title Man Without A Country for Conquest and this was the final US release title.





The production was a costly, time-consuming affair, where the budget exploded to almost $3 million (only the 1926 silent epic Ben Hur had cost MGM more up to that time). Even the cast and crew grew weary in the five-month-long production, jocularly forming the "Walewska-Must-End Association." Mercifully it did, and, even though audiences in Europe flocked to see Garbo and Boyer, Conquest was a box-office failure in the US. In addition to Boyer's Oscar nomination, the film was nominated for Best Interior Decoration.