Garbo Talks!
In 1930, that was all the promotion you needed. Greta Garbo had only been in Hollywood for five years by that point but stardom came swiftly in the silent movie era, and especially for such a mysterious evocative personality like her. She’d made such a name for herself and her distinctive melodramatic acting style, and being a European export (the first in a line of great Swedish actresses of the silver screen), it was natural that with the dawn of the talkies there was immense curiosity over how she would make the transition, especially given she had no English when she first came to America. How would she fare in this new medium, and what would she sound like?
To meet this anticipation, MGM, and Irving Thalberg specifically, very shrewdly chose for her a new film version of Eugene O’Neill’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play Anna Christie, which already had garnered a reputation for the intensity of its titular role. It had been filmed already in 1923, but a sound version was obviously a better prospect, able to utilize a lot more of O’Neill’s crucial dialogue and fully delivered as intended. Not only would it showcase Garbo’s voice but it would be an opportunity for her to reintroduce herself as a serious, prestige actress at the dawn of this new medium.
And ultimately it turned out to be fairly worthy of the hype. It takes sixteen minutes for Garbo to make her first appearance in the film but when she does she enters fully formed in the persona that would define her career of that decade so strongly, it took until one of he last films, Ninotchka, to change the narrative and her particular typecasting.
Perhaps this character was destined to define her. Anna Christie is a ripe part for melodrama, and has continued to be so in the decades since (I learned a new production is taking stage this year starring Michelle Williams and Mike Faist). The narrative, told in four acts, gradually reveals the sorry biography of this fallen woman, a Swedish immigrant, whom we meet as she has come to New York from Minnesota in dire financial straits to stay with her estranged father who abandoned her in St. Paul with relatives to make a living running a coal barge. Chris Christofferson as he is known (he has sadly never been played by the real Kris Kristofferson) is played by George F. Marion, who originated the part on stage and in the earlier silent film. The story also comes to deal with Mike, a Scottish sailor who Anna falls in love with played by Charles Bickford, and features in a minor though notable role, Marie Dressler as Marthy Owens -Chris’s fellow alcoholic.
Though the story itself has its merits that I will get to, the reason to see Anna Christie is purely for Garbo. And it is interesting to look at it with the lens of this being her first sound film, the first time many American audiences heard her voice. In retrospect, the pressure had to be enormous. Talking pictures were such a new format and not every silent film actor was capable of making the transition -Garbo’s recurring screen partner (and occasional lover) John Gilbert had already faced significant struggles, and his sound career ultimately never took off. For Garbo, there was concern her English would not be up to par, but that proved entirely inconsequential -she had become wholly fluent in five years. What was shocking to many was the deep register of her voice itself, which featured into many contemporaneous reviews of the film, functioning more as assessments of this star than her movie. And in fairness her voice is striking, especially for a woman of her age (she was twenty-four when she filmed it) and relative newness to the language. It too with its resounding natural gravitas comes off as a perfect fit for high drama. Though Garbo doesn’t use it ostentatiously for the most part, her voice evokes very melodramatic classical acting techniques that for the early 1930s were certainly acceptable on film. And director Clarence Brown gives Garbo full licence for it, as though milking the “talking” part as much as possible for this talking picture.
Garbo’s performance is good as well, downcast but spirited. She is introduced with the now famous line “gimme a whisky, ginger ale on the side, and don’t be stingy, baby”, delivering it as though she’s already had them. She plays fairly well this dignified facade that Anna puts on whilst still necessarily alluding to her desperation, poor fortunes, and unspeakable past that has brought her to New York. She is very much absorbed in the character in what almost might pass for the method in some of her subtleties -though these of course do not last for the duration. I can see why Anna Christie is such a compelling character for dramatists to perform -the role asks a lot and Garbo broadly delivers, especially so late in the film when complications arise and the truth must come out.
The story of Anna Christie is a fairly conventional narrative of a ‘fallen woman’ -O’Neill traversing the same ground walked by Elizabeth Gaskell, Thomas Hardy, and George Elliot, with the notable subversion of the survival of his character by the end of the story and her apparent personal redemption -also, O’Neill being a modernist, without apparent religious connotations. Still, Anna’s story is rather mundanely tragic and taboo for its time, involving economic misery, rape, and prostitution immediately prior to her coming to New York -a shameful past she wishes to hide. And while these as major marks of her character are drearily simple, what is interesting is the role by association -or disassociation- that Chris plays in it all. That rather than her being to blame for everything she’s been through, as was unfortunately common of a lot of these kinds of narratives, Chris’s absence and callous abandonment of his family is treated as its root. At the start he has not seen Anna since she was a child, but she points out he had plenty of opportunities. It is offensive that he attempts to insinuate a normal relationship now that they have reunited -something that is addressed in the climactic explosion of pain.
Chris’s penitence is interesting, if he still gets off easy ultimately by the obligation of reconciliation. Much more typical is the reaction of Matt, who is of course horrified by Anna’s history of sex work and not much empathetic towards her sexual trauma, furiously putting an end to their courtship. It was of course the convention to treat sex work and poverty with this intense stigma -often as a device it was implied as a tragedy for both parties. Just as awful as Anna going through it is Matt’s anguish over his love being sullied by this taboo blot (and of course there comes the suggested Catholic exultation of virginity along with these ideas). It’s always a tad disappointing to see such a dull and harmful trope, and especially from a celebrated writer like O’Neill. Garbo and Bickford play it with pronounced anguish though that is entertaining to see. And again in the context of the recency of the sound medium, it is an effective showcase of a more passionate, nuanced kind of acting that didn’t really have a place in the silents. It's vivid too in Marion's performance, though to a less calibrated degree, as his efforts to mimic Garbo's accent while maintaining a sea dog inflection results in an often incomprehensible delivery. He is clearly very comfortable with the material, but in the adjustment of medium, some of his zealousness feels a little off-pitch as well.
The acting is the driver of this film which of course uses minimal sets and little directorial flourish by Brown -though a couple establishing shots of the New York harbour make for a neat time capsule. There is also a decent montage sequence of Anna and Matt's burgeoning relationship, likely one of the first uses of the device to compress time for the sake of dramatic believability. We see them on rides at a fairground, and nine years before Ninotchka Garbo laughs. Place doesn't feel immediately important to the text, but the sense of it is conveyed in the maritime atmosphere, and especially the effect it has on Anna. Garbo's performance of melancholy may be what she is known for, but the relief and rejuvenation she experiences is also tangible. And it gives the threat of her past squandering such a thing for her in the present (through others' perceptions) more weight.
O'Neill thankfully lets things work out for Anna Christie, who is allowed to ultimately triumph over her trauma and scandal -which in its way was significant in a society that broadly took Matt's view of sex work as unforgivably tarnishing. Matt comes back to her and she forgives her father in a tidy resolution that is modestly appropriate. The power of Anna Christie as a dramatic work (on film, though I suspect on stage as well) is reduced with time, but it remains a sterling showcase for Garbo and a fascinating relic from a Hollywood turning point.
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