86 Years Ago, Hollywood Finally Let Greta Garbo Laugh With This Rom-Com About a Government Mission — and It Boasts 95% on Rotten Tomatoes

Anyone who has seen Damien Chazelle's Babylonknows that the transition from silent to talking pictures in Hollywood during the late 1920s was an exciting yet daunting era. While we take sound and dialogue in films for granted now, throwing this seismic new element relatively early in the medium's lifespan was drastic. It would be like if you changed the shape and design of the bat or added two more fielding positions in baseball. Many of silent cinema's brightest stars, including Clara Bow (the loose inspiration for Margot Robbie's character in Babylon) and Gloria Swanson, struggled mightily to transition to sound and became vestiges of past glory, with this archetype of a washed-up relic being satirized by Swanson herself in Sunset Boulevard. The signature silent leading lady, Greta Garbo, maintained her stardom as a speaking star in the '30s, but it wasn't until her 1939 rom-com classic, Ninotchka, that she demonstrated her true depth as an actor.