Greta Garbo Los Angeles on their own, but another five weeks passed with no contact from the studio. On the verge of returning to Sweden, she wrote to her boyfriend back home: "You're quite right when you think I don't feel at home here… Oh you lovely little Sweden, I promise that when I return to you my sad face will smile as never before." A Swedish friend in Los Angeles helped out by contacting MGM producer Irving Thalberg, who agreed to give Garbo a screen test. According to author Frederick Sands, "the result of the test was electrifying. Thalberg was impressed
Greta Garbo and box office triumph and became the highest-grossing film of the year. The movie, however, met with controversy upon its release; censors objected to the scenes in which Garbo disguised herself as a man and kissed a female co-star. Although her domestic popularity was undiminished in the early 1930s, high profits for Garbo's films after "Queen Christina" in 1933 depended on the foreign market for their success. The type of historical and melodramatic films she began to make on the advice of Viertel were highly successful abroad but considerably less so in the United States. In the midst of the