Anna Christie

A woman with a past returns to her alcoholic father living on a shabby boat and falls in love with a sailor.

A deliberately grim movie gained fame as Garbo's first talkie (revealing her warm, silky deep voice), and was simultaneously made in Germany - from a well-known O'Neill play. This version now seems pretty stilted and shows the most typical mistakes of early talkies, but full of vivid moments of great power, full-blooded performances (especially the genial interplay between Garbo and Dressler)and the rare Hollywood quality of gritty realism.

Garbo's first speaking line, and it must have been thrilling to have such a tremendous foreign star able to make that transition from silent to sound.

The movie is "Annie Christie," the year is 1930, and it is an adaptation of the play by Eugene O'Neill. It concerns a young farm woman, Anna, from Minnesota who comes to New York to find her father, whom she hasn't seen in 15 years. Molested some time earlier, she hates men and has prostituted herself.

Her father takes her on his barge, and she comes to love the sea. One day, they rescue a young man (Charles Bickford), and he and Anna fall in love. However, neither he nor her father know anything of her past.

Garbo is very beautiful and her command of English is amazing. You can tell that she understands every word she is saying, just as you can tell when some actors have learned their role by rote. She acquits herself very well.

Marie Dressler as Marthy, a friend of her father's whom Anna meets in a bar, is marvelous, playing each scene as a drunk. And you really think she is. As someone wrote, you can smell the alcohol on her breath.

That's the good news. The bad news is that this is a very difficult film to watch. Sound and dealing with the camera when you have sound was all very new. The camera didn't move around so it is a very static movie. The actors have several scenes where they all talk at once.

An acting teacher once said, "Eugene O'Neill was our greatest novelist." The actors don't just talk at once, they talk incessantly. There is no action to be had.

I love Eugene O'Neill, I have seen his plays on stage. This film is 85 years old, and it shows.

Definitely worth seeing, however. After all, "Garbo talks!"

Garbo's first spoken words in this 1930 film electrified audiences and became part of Hollywood legend. Garbo had become a star in her first American film, The Torrent, in 1926. And audiences waited til this film to see if Garbo could make the transition to talkies. She did. And while Pola Negri, Vilma Banky, and Renee Adoree fell by the wayside because of their accents, Garbo sailed on for another decade. Despite the staginess of this film, Garbo is really excellent, especially in the opening scene with the equally great Marie Dressler as Marthy. The two great stars trade dirty looks and sharp words as they size each other up while they have a few drinks and set the tone for the remainder of the film. Garbo was 25; Dressler was 60. Charles Bickford is OK as Matt, and George F. Marion is good as Old Chris. Marion originated this role on Broadway in 1922 and also played it in the 1923 silent version with Blanche Sweet. This Eugene O'Neill play is a true classic yet, oddly, was never filmed again. Anna Christie ranks as one of Garbo's greatest performances. And despite the staginess of the film and the grimness of the story, she is truly a marvel. See this one for Garbo and Dressler!

This early sound era adaptation of O'Neill's "Anna Christie" would be a decent movie worth seeing on its own, but it is Greta Garbo that makes it particularly worthwhile. The rest of the production is solid, and for the most part, its limitations are common to many other sound movies made in 1930. Garbo herself rises well above the level of the rest of the production, and Marie Dressler is also memorable and effective in her smaller role.

It's easy enough to see why a story like this was chosen for Garbo's first "talking" role. It provides a female central character who offers a ready-made opportunity for an actress like Garbo to demonstrate a good range of abilities, from strength to tenderness, from coarseness to elegance. She has good scenes with several of the other characters. Dressler's raucous performance works well, and she has some very good moments. George Marion is very believable as Garbo's father.

The story itself is an interesting one, with some worthwhile themes, though it does not necessarily lend itself that well to cinema. There are a few times when it might as well just be a filmed stage play, but then there are also a number of times when the camera picks up some good atmospheric details, such as the dockside setting or the New York skyline, that make a good complement to the emotional story.

This is an amazingly well-filmed early talkie adaptation of the Eugene O'Neill play. Its major drawback is a static camera, and as a result it comes off much of the time as the filmed play it is, which is a pity, for it's a good piece of primitive moviemaking, made at a time when sound was posing all kinds of technical problems, and as a result most films were experimental whether or not this was their maker's intention. Garbo is as mysterious and charismatic as she was in her silent films, and her entrance is still classic. Her voice is strangely deep, almost boyish, which only enhances her already seductively eccentric persona. As her boyfriend, Charles Bickford is appropriately virile,--he was apparently born craggy--and a perfect counterpart to the divine Garbo. His Irish brogue is not bad at all, and he seems always a natural man of the sea, very O'Neill-like in his independent, brooding nature. As Garbo's (very) confused father, George Marion seems truly from another time. He has the sort of face and voice,--open, unmannered, totally without guile--that has vanished from the earth. Marie Dressler is also in the O'Neill swing of things. Her blank expression and intensity around the eyes speaks volumes, as she plays her boozy character as a woman at times bordering on psychosis. Poetic license, perhaps, as this is not in the script, but we can forgive Miss Dressler's excesses; she is too good at it not to. The story ends with a movement to the next thing, as distinct from resolution, which isn't the author's cup of tea; and those who like their films neatly worked out in the end will be disappointed by the absence of any real surprise. In Anna Christie we are in O'Neill country, a place of sea, storms and fog, a feeling of all-pervading and damnable uncertainty, which we would now call ambivilance, or anxiety neurosis. Rather than analyze this mood the author simply and wisely presents it, as weather, land, ocean and people intertwine and address one another in a unique language we feel priveleged to have heard.