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Greta Garbo was born Greta Gustafsson in Stockholm in 1905. After appearing in a few pictures in her native country, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's powerful boss, Louis B Mayer, happened to spot her during a trip to Europe. He invited Garbo to Hollywood, where her star quickly rose. The fact that Garbo initially didn't understand a word of English was of little importance, as movies in those days still lacked sound. And when she made her first "talkie" in 1930, the film company helped her master the language. They even launched "Anna Christie" with the tagline "Garbo talks".

By now, the career was going like clockwork for Greta Garbo. She was soon the highest-paid actress in Tinseltown (and therefore in the world). But nothing lasts forever. When the film "Conquest" flopped at the box office, Garbo became depressed and travelled back to Sweden. It would be almost two years before she returned to the silver screen. Meanwhile, MGM had prepared a grand comeback for their biggest star. Accompanied by the slogan "Garbo laughs", she was to film her first comedy.

Louise B Mayer realized that the usually aloof Garbo needed to be "humanized" in the new film. And of course, the director Ernst Lubitsch was best suited for that specific task. Together with acclaimed screenwriters Charles Bracket and Billy Wilder, Lubitsch crafted a script called "Ninotchka". In this film, a cold, Russian Commissar (Garbo) arrives in Paris to retrieve some stolen jewelry. But instead, she falls in love with a charming French gentleman, played by Melvyn Douglas.

Luckily, Mayer's gamble paid off. "Ninotchka" was a huge box office success. MGM executives then teamed Garbo and Douglas in another romantic comedy. However, her performance in "Two-Faced Woman" earned Greta Garbo the worst reviews of her entire career. That humiliation, combined with the outbreak of World War II in Europe, led the actress to prematurely end her career. Even though Greta Garbo was only 36 years old, she never made another picture.

Terrence Malick wrote and directed "Badlands" in 1973. Although the film was not a big success at the box office, it was still highly rated by a unanimous body of critics. Despite this, Malick had difficulty finding anyone willing to finance his next project. It was only when producer Bert Schneider guaranteed that he would personally cover all overages that Paramount Pictures was prepared to invest in the production. And with that, "Days of Heaven" was on its way.

John Travolta was initially supposed to play the lead role, but ABC refused to release him from his contract for the television series "Welcome Back, Kotter" (this was more than a year before "Saturday Night Fever" made Travolta an international star). Instead, Malick hired some young, unknown actors for the main parts. Richard Gere and Brooke Adams would play the lovers who travel to the Texas Panhandle for work, and dramatist Sam Shepard the wealthy landowner who hired them.

Terrence Malick started work on "Days of Heaven" in July 1976. For economic reasons, however, the movie was not made in Texas but in Alberta, Canada. Early on, the director realized that his screenplay wouldn't work as intended. So, when he saw the first dailies, he simply discarded the script altogether. In collaboration with Oscar-winning cinematographer Néstor Almendros he then decided to shoot miles and miles of film, hoping to solve the problems in the editing room.

That turned out to be easier said than done. Notoriously indecisive, Malick spent almost two years molding his movie into shape - using most of that time whittling away on the original script. Finally, the director had removed so much material that he had to insert a voice-over to make sense of the story. Unfortunately, few moviegoers cared anyway. "Days of Heaven" performed so poorly at the box office that the producer, Bert Schneider, went bankrupt. And Terrence Malick himself had to move to France to find work. It would be almost 20 years before he made another film.

In several interviews, Alfred Hitchcock has mentioned that "Vertigo" was a personal favorite among his own works. So, it must have been depressing for the director when that particular picture became such a disappointment at the box office. But persistence is the key to success. Hitchcock immediately began preparing for a new production. And this time, he planned to return to a plotline that had worked for him so often before. Hitchcock's new film would deal with the desperate journey a wronged man is forced to make, pursued by various spies and government agents.

James Stewart, who had played the male lead in "Vertigo", was apparently expecting to be in Hitchcock's new movie as well. But as the director prepared to begin "North by Northwest," he declared that the actor was too old for the picture. Hitchcock then gave the starring role to Cary Grant, despite Grant being four years older than Stewart. Something that led many punters to believe that the two men must have had some altercation during their work together.

Alfred Hitchcock usually preferred to make his films on one of Hollywood's primary sound stages. The so-called "Master of Suspense" was something of a perfectionist and, therefore, wanted complete control over his productions. But obviously, the sequence where a single-engine airplane chases Cary Grant over a barren cornfield was impossible to shoot back in the studio. Hitchcock, therefore, had no choice but to take his entire crew with him and go outdoors.

To Alfred Hitchcock's undisguised delight, "North by Northwest" became a smash hit with the audience. Which wasn't really surprising. In the film, the director had been able to utilize his full arsenal of studio trickery. With Cary Grant in the lead role, he also had access to the number-one box office star of the time. However, after "North by Northwest," the master of suspense wanted to take his career in a whole new direction. And he sure did. Hitchcock's next film was "Psycho."