Anna Christie
Romance
1929-30 – Greta Garbo
Anna Christie / Romance
There was a reason why Greta Garbo is considered one of the superstars of her day. For one thing, she was absolutely gorgeous. Now, I know I shouldn’t put too much emphasis on physical beauty, but right or wrong, it plays a significant part in the concept of the Hollywood Machine. Let’s face it. We all love watching attractive people on the screen, and Garbo was a rare beauty. But more than that, her beauty would have meant nothing if she couldn’t act, and she could.
Now, granted, her acting, while good, was, at times, a bit… melodramatic. Her gestures were often grand, her glances calculated, her smiles practiced. True, she was captivating to watch, and I can understand why people loved her. But every now and then, her acting consisted of barely more than posing and looking pretty. She did love to throw her head back and strike a pose for the camera.
The two movies for which Garbo was nominated for Best Actress were vastly different. In Anna Christie, she played a poor, emotionally damaged woman who thought of herself as trash. In Romance, she played a grand and dramatic opera star. The two characters she played couldn’t have been less alike. Personally, I was more impressed with her performance in Anna Christie, simply because it was a more dramatic part, and Garbo got to dig a bit deeper into her emotional well.
In Ana Christie, she played a woman who had been raped as a child, and became a prostitute to survive. She felt that she was unable to love, and was therefore unlovable, until she met a rough sailor who loved her and stole her heart. And Romance was a dramatic romance. It had a lot of intensity, but only a little depth. The worldly opera singer falls for a priest who is madly in love with her. But neither can leave their different worlds, so the romance is doomed to go unpursued.
Garbo was good in both roles, and of course, she looked fantastic. If there was one thing that bothered me about her, it was that her Swedish accent was, at times, a little thick. There were a few times, in both films, that I had a little difficulty understanding her lines. But I think maybe that had been part of her overall allure.