Back in 1965, 24 years after Greta Garbo, at 36, walked away from the most fabled Hollywood career of her era, the historian A.J.P. Taylor judged her the dominant figure in film in the 1930s, but one whose allure had vanished – “a sex symbol who now appears in retrospect astonishingly sexless.” At the time, that assessment seemed astonishingly clueless, yet it always comes to mind when I watch her movies. Taylor was not far wrong, beyond his assumption that sex symbolism and sexiness invariably go hand in hand. Ingrid Bergman and Simone Signoret were sexy without being sex symbols; Garbo epitomizes sexual conflict without the desire to seduce her audience. She was too remote and self-involved to exude salacious promise – the planes of her face too perfect, the angularity of her slope-shouldered body too concealing. Yet as a sex symbol, who can compare? The prolific film chronicler James Robert Parish came closer to the mark when he referred to her “carnal spirituality.”

“All my life I’ve been a symbol,” Garbo’s Queen Christina laments. During the long afterlife of her career, between 1941 – when the disastrous “Two-Faced Woman” suggested that her future in movies might be too ordinary or competitive to suit her own mythology – and 1990, when she died, her very presence furthered the saga of the Swedish sphinx who surmounted Hollywood on her own terms. Hidden among mortals but for rare sightings, she required no public relations to sustain the suspicion that she might be the finest actress the movies ever produced, unimaginable in any other medium.

Garbo reminds us that cinema is the ultimate expression of voyeurism: Her close-ups are her money shots. She rewards scrutiny with actorly gestures and looks of overwhelming candor and acuity, but the primary pleasure she affords is simply that of watching. We feel we are seeing something we shouldn’t, something intimate, because after all, she would rather be alone. Yet, as her best directors knew, Garbo existed to be gazed at, and never more so than when she was caught gazing. Her keeper, MGM, sobered by the Garbo mystique, swaddled her in costume dramas, as though only history and elaborate gowns could contain her. Graham Greene wrote (twice), “A dreadful inertia always falls on me before a new Garbo film. It is rather like reading ‘Sartor Resartus.'”

What contemporary audiences make of her we will soon learn. September 18 marks her centenary, an occasion commemorated by her imminent appearance on a postage stamp, showings throughout the month of her complete works on Turner Classic Movies, and this week’s release of “Garbo: The Signature Collection” (Warner Bros.). This exceptional 10-disc set takes in nearly half her output: three silent pictures, eight talkies, and an illuminating documentary. The selection is admirable (though “Love,” her silent version of “Anna Karenina,” ought to have been included with the talkie).The prints are sharply focused, if occasionally showing scratches and other signs of age.

After the silent triumph of “Flesh and the Devil,” where she is so hot that the film cools her off by drowning her in an ice floe, Garbo became a goddess of transcendent one-nighters. Camille asks, “How can one change one’s entire life and build a new one in a moment of love?” Ninotchka believes so much happiness must be punished. Garbo’s characters are constantly changing their lives and paying for it in spades. Queen Christina abdicates her throne, Karenina throws herself under a train, Ninotchka loses country and principles – all for Camille’s one moment.

With one exception these are not great films. We look to them for Garbo, anticipating her every appearance and marveling at her subtle turns – the look of knowing gratitude when she realizes Gaston has filled her purse in “Camille,” or the one-eyed (the other is shadowed) look of sexual daring as she takes communion in “Flesh and the Devil.”

The Annas – Christie and Karenina – are no better than they ever were, but the others remain entertaining, and “Camille” is more than that, an inspired reworking of 19th-century kitsch likely to last, in this 1936 film, as long as “La Traviata.” In “Camille,” the Mona Lisa of impending doom reaches beyond MGM’s museum glamour. It’s an amazing thing: Directed by George Cukor, this warhorse fabricated in cliche and sentimentality is in the playing-out a credible, insightful fairy tale of obstinate youth, money, and a courtesan with a 14k pumper and TB.

The sets are sumptuously dressed, and Cukor, employing the style he had used in “David Copperfield,” shoots tight so that the frame is full and bustling, implying an equally busy world beyond it. Garbo plays Camille as a whore who chose her occupation as a means of staying aloof and in control. “Too much wine has made you sentimental,” she admonishes Robert Taylor’s Duval, before sipping from the same vine. He’s a pain, but Camille is in charge, whether she is soothing or eviscerating him.

Other than phony-looking rear projection, the film has a fussed-over perfection: from the watery reflections of Camille and Duval as they happily cross a bridge to the precision editing (Margaret Booth wielded the razor) in Garbo’s three great encounters, each a lesson in film acting. Her encounter with Duval’s father (Lionel Barrymore, underplaying for once, at least by his grumpy standards) is a play unto itself, and Cukor’s impeccably timed close-up when she says, “Make no mistake, monsieur,” is studio filmmaking at its best – melodrama cracked on the spine of her realism. Her death scene is too famous to belabor, but perhaps not as gripping as the duet with villain Henry Daniell. He plays piano, the two speaking at loggerheads but somehow rising to the same crescendo. Daniell, a gifted scene-stealer limited by his chiseled voice and his bearing of ominous contempt, was never more textured than here.

After “Camille,” Garbo made only three more films – the stiff, Napoleonic “Conquest”; the modern-day comedy “Two-Faced Woman,” where she is outscrewballed by Constance Bennett (neither film is included in this set); and, inbetween, the Ernst Lubitsch comedy “Ninotchka,” which was advertised with the phrase “Garbo Laughs!” As she had already laughed uproariously in “Queen Christina” and for exactly the same reason (her future lover’s mishap), and laughs throughout “Camille,” the catchphrase might be interpreted as shorthand for “Garbo allows others to laugh at her.”

She had had comedic moments before, playing in drag in “Queen Christina” and parodying herself in “Grand Hotel,” but as the deadpan Soviet envoy who says of Stalin’s show trials, “There will be fewer and better Russians,” she discloses novel subtleties of timing and timbre. Ninotchka succumbs to Melvyn Douglas, stands up to Ina Claire (who, before they meet, says, “I guess one gets the face one deserves”), and then ceases to be funny as the film trades Lubitsch’s pained farce for screenwriter Billy Wilder’s heavy-handed satire. “Ninotchka” has the director’s touch, but is neither as moving as “The Shop Around the Corner” nor as funny as “To Be or Not To Be.”

The gem of Garbo’s pre-“Camille” talkies is Rouben Mamoulian’s “Queen Christina.” If Lubitsch is the poet of seduction and foreplay, Mamoulian, in this 1933 film, has the last word on postcoital afterglow: His camera trails Christina as she walks around her room in an inn, committing it to a memory she expects to rekindle the rest of her life. The three-minute scene, silent but for music, closes with a 15-second close-up, a harbinger of the celebrated unblinking divinity with which the film ends – itself presaging Garbo’s abdication from the movies – and a cinematic oil painting in its own right. The film is predicated on the preposterous idea that when Garbo dons britches, everyone thinks she is a boy (a conceit made worthwhile by her demure, patient expression as she removes her doublet and waits for John Gilbert to notice her breasts) and is overwrought with rabble. But Garbo was never more mesmerizing, and the superbly baroque opening scenes anticipate the claustrophobic interiors of Eisenstein’s “Ivan the Terrible.”

The individual DVDs are not big on extras, though the stand-alone documentary obviates the need. Two significant additions greatly augment this collection. “Camille” includes the 1921 silent version starring Alla Nazimova, whose initial appearance suggests an emaciated clown with seriously bad hair. Though “Camille” is not considered one of her better films, the chance to see Nazimova in her prime is irresistible, as is the affecting performance by a pre-“Sheik” Rudolph Valentino.

Far more rewarding is the German version of “Anna Christie,” shot on the same sets and on the same days as the Hollywood version, but directed by Jacques Feyder instead of Clarence Brown. The 1930 American film, Garbo’s belated entrance into talking films, is a bore, her performance as uninteresting as the nailed-to-the-ground camera shots. Garbo preferred the German film, and now we can see why – from the moving camera in the opening shot through the expressionistic lighting to the romance with a young, handsome Burke, who generates genuinely sexy eye contact with Anna, something not possible with crusty Charles Bickford in the Hollywood film.

In the U.S. film, when Anna recalls her rape, Garbo looks down at her cigarette, tossing off the lines; in the German version, she stares at the camera, seething with fury. It’s still “Anna Christie,” a bad play with Swedish dialect (“Dot vhisky gat kick, by yingo!”) and folksy musings about the sea – “Camille” with a happy ending – but Feyder’s film gives it life and adds another telling character to Garbo’s luminous if abbreviated gallery.