Anna Karenina (1935)

Anna Karenina
Directed by Clarence Brown
Written by Clemence Dance and Salka Viertel from the novel by Lev Tolstoy
1935/US
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
IMDb page
First viewing/Amazon Prime rental

“If you love me as you say you do,’ she whispered, ‘make it so that I am at peace.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

This is my favorite novel.  No film could match the images in my mind or do it justice, IMO.

Anna (Greta Garbo) is married to the much-older Count Alexis Karenin (Basil Rathbone), a pedantic bureaucrat.  They have a little son Sergei (Freddie Bartholomew) who is the light of Anna’s life.  Anna’s brother Stepan has been caught in an affair by his wife Dolly.  Anna travels from St. Petersburg to Moscow to make peace.  She shares a carriage on the train with the mother of Count Alexis Vronsky (Fredric March), a young soldier who has been courting Dolly’s younger sister, Kitty. (Maureen O’Sullivan).

Anna is successful in reconciling her brother and sister-in-law.  She goes to a ball where Kitty is expecting a proposal from Vronsky .  But Vronsky wants only to dance with Anna and the die is cast.  He follows her to St. Petersburg.  Kitty, who had the same night rejected a proposal from Count Levin, grows ill from humiliation and heartbreak. The Kitty-Levin story, which makes up about half of the novel and provides a needed counterpoint to the Anna-Vronsky affair, is dropped almost entirely by the movie at this point.

The lovers cannot resist temptation.  Karenin is remarkably tolerant, seeking only to avoid scandal.  But Anna reveals the depth of her feelings in public when Vronsky is thrown from his horse and Karenin seeks a divorce.  In revenge, he also asks for sole custody of the son.  Although extramarital affairs are common in St. Petersburg high society, they are strictly recreational.  By openly defying the rules, Anna becomes an outcast.  Things go downhill from there.  Then Vronsky announces that he is going to rejoin his regiment to fight the Turks, building to the well-known climax of the novel which I will not reveal here.

The chemistry between Garbo and March isn’t great and Garbo’s acting seems particularly like posing here. Of all the adaptations I have seen, I would suggest Anna Karenina (1948) with Vivien Leigh, Ralph Richardson, and Kieron Moore. The Russian adaptation
Anna Karenina (1967) is lavish but I found it lackluster. This one has all those great MGM production values and Garbo would make any man lose his heart.