Greta Garbo in The Joyless Street by G.W. Pabst (1925) In P.W. Pabst’s film adaptation of Hugo Bettauer’s novel The Joyless Street [Die freudlose Gasse], Greta Garbo (1905-1990) played a poor woman who innocently and unsuspectingly fell victim to a world of violence, oppression, and exploitation. One of the first works in the style known as the New Objectivity [Neue Sachlichkeit], the film reveled in Garbo’s vulnerable modern femininity, which it explored in one intimate close-up after another.