Anna Karenina

Why only one reviewer, this being the 2nd review from me ?! This harks back to 1961 and that in and of itself is pretty amazing !

Why you may ask is that amazing. ? Because they then were then largest and most revered home television production organisation world wide , They clearly wanted to make this production a show case as proof of their production capabilities,! And this Tolstoy choice was considered an extremely difficult production, thereby proving BBC values ! And thank good ness they succeeded in every one of production departments with an eye for detail in every department,,! Wardrobe,, set design, continuity, , lighting and camera as well as clear audio mix , no boom shadows , camera Close ups, long and short etc etc . So in short they proved that with correctly chosen actors and especially the 2 lead characters.this unknown crew and director could succeed with a high quality rendition of one of the most demanding theatrical brilliantly told tragedies from an equally faultless author , In the eyes of western cultural themes , Russian culture, , atmospheres among many other alien sensibilities, enigmatic daily lives lived in a claustrophobia totally unknown , in 1961 to western hemisphere ( or European cultures) brought all those mysteries starkly to our TV screens ! Ms. Bloom and Mr. Connery were both faultless. That said Ms. Bloom was a known safe bet, whereas Mr Connery was a risk which paid off in spades! He as we know succeeded above and beyond and that unique beauty as always in her long illustrious career, visibly relished in that truly delicious , brilliant narrative....

This film does have some positives - but overall, this is an adaptation of Anna Karenina that has aged really quite badly.

I do not fault it for the changes to the source material. They sensibly cut out Levin (the film is far too short to accommodate his philosophical musings!) and they focus solely on the Anna/Vronsky love story, the tension between Anna and Karenin, and her grieving for Seryozha's absence. Anna Karenina is a long novel - the omissions made to the story are entirely understandable and not the problem at all.

The problem is that to a modern viewer, this production comes across like a parody. Anna's death (the film's very final moment) is so abrupt and unfortunately punctuated by a very unconvincing scream from Claire Bloom. The novel's exploration of violent emotions is smoothed over in favour of pantomime humour: ladies at the opera applauding very exaggeratedly, Matvey the footman being very camp and posh, etc, which could have been quite funny if the film was not also trying to be a Tolstoyan tragedy. And I could not take Sean Connery seriously. His love scenes with Anna - his declarations of devotion and so on - were just dire.

Claire Bloom was okay as Anna. One could certainly see that she was suffering, and her reconciliation with Seryozha is quite touching! But she has not got a particularly expressive face...she was a bit too stoic and composed for my liking. I didn't find her performance especially compelling.

The interpretations of Karenin and Oblonsky are spot-on, and some of the lines from the novel are used to great effect. When Anna tells Vronsky, "it's all or nothing with me," you believe her! You can already see that this relationship will not last and that Vronsky will not satisfy the depth of her passions.

But generally, this is not an adaptation I would recommend.

Anna Karenina was a prestige drama directed by Rudolph Cartier. It was made to commemorate a quarter of a century of BBC television.

The drama was thought to be lost but it always existed in the BBC archives. The BBC just did not know it. It was shown again in 2024.

Good news as it stars Sean Connery, one year before he played James Bond for the first time. Connery did several plays for the BBC, several of them have been wiped.

As Anna Karenina is a complex weighty tome. This is a cut down version, all filmed it seems at the BBC studios.

It starts with Anna Karenina (Claire Bloom) being spooked by an incident at a train station. A person falls in the path of an oncoming train and gave out a piercing scream.

Anna is a beautiful young woman married to a minor politician and they have a young son. Only on a visit to Moscow, she develops an attraction to Prince Alexei Vronsky (Sean Connery.) A minor royalty.

They have an immediate attraction. Her husband suspects of an affair and warns her about it. Anna cannot resist, she has fallen in love with Vronsky.

With her husband unwilling to grant a divorce. Both Anna and Vronsky live together but she is forbidden of ever seeing her son. In fact the husband tells the child her mother has died.

It is the fact that Anna Karenina has been torn away from her son that dooms their relationship.

It does come across as a filmed play rather than a movie. Only purists of the novel would be upset by the story being cut down.

It is marvellously acted by the main leads. Both actors convey a lot of emotional depths. You can sense with Connery, there was a star that was just waiting to burst out.

Even at 1¾ hours long, it's still quite tough to enliven the detail from Tolstoy's story into a television drama - and a black and white one, too. This one tries quite hard but falls just a little short on the imagination front. Clare Bloom takes the lead as the lady going through the marital motions with a junior politician then she encounters "Prince Alexei" (Sean Connery). He's more of a princeling, really, but she falls hook line and sinker for him and pretty soon their temptation is arousing the suspicion of her husband (Albert Lievin) who warns her of the dangers of her behaviour - but there's no stopping them. Next thing, they have thrown caution to the wind and are living in sin. Her husband forbids her to see their son and the story follows her pretty torrid time trying to reconcile the troubles of her past and the joys of her future. Bloom shines here and Connery is energised in a fashion I've rarely seen as both deliver lively performances that illustrate well mid 1800s Russian attitudes, society and mores. The standard of production from the BBC is top notch with super attention to the detail of the costumes and the studio sets. Like many of their embryonic television dramas, the corporation managed to recruit an experienced cast adept at stagecraft. That gives us a sense of continuation as the story proceeds without looking too static. There is plenty missing, a few sub-plots ignored completely, but there's still more than enough of the gist to the story to carry this stylish presentation well enough. Many of the more imaginative elements contained in the book will never readily adapt for cinema, but hats off to Rudolph Cartier for giving this a go.

Seven stars. A reasonably good print is available on YouTube. So I watched it last night. Sean Connery and Claire Bloom are both excellent. That's why it even gets seven stars. After that, things gets a little thin. Jack Watling (Stiva) and Albert Lieven (Karenin) do solid, if unremarkable work. The rest of the roles are played as bad 1-D cartoons. Yes, it's 60-year old TV work. But it's BBC. They could (and did) do better than this. I've never read the novel, but it's obvious that this 108 minute version leaves a TON of stuff out. It has to focus very tightly on the highlights of the Karenina/Vronsky story, and that is executed well. I'm a huge Sean Connery fan -- I'll watch him in anything. And I love watching his pre-Bond roles because there's a quality of innocence about them that he lost after he became a huge star. He was already a significant screen actor in Britain by 1961, but still only an occasional supporting player in Hollywood. Here he shows the elegance and physical power that are the key to making his Bond work so well. And Bloom is radiant as the doomed Anna.

It's a joy, given Connery's recent passing, and his retirement in the early aughts, that Bloom is still a working actor into her 90s. People like her and Peter Vaughn are reminders that time changes our options, but can still allow us moments of brilliance well into our old age. This is very much worth your time if you are a fan of either Connery or Bloom. 1 July 2021.