Anna Karenina (1935)

During the TCM Spotlight on remakes back in December, they included a day of literary adaptations, which seems like a slight cheat since it's so easy to do adaptations and, since all of them are remaking a book or play, they're not necesarily remaking a movie. But it gave TCM a chance to run two versions of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. Recently, I sat down to watch the 1935 version.

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. So begins the book, and the first of the unhappy families to be presented is the Oblonskys, with husband Stepan (Reginald Owen) having an affair with the children's governess, much to the consternation of Stepan's wife Dolly (Phoebe Foster). Dolly has a sister Kitty (Maureen O'Sullivan), who is going to be part of the general unhappiness, while Stepan has a sister Anna Karenina (Greta Garbo), who will be part of the major unhappiness of the movie.

Anna has visited Moscow to smooth things over between Stepan and Kitty, and while there she meets the dashing cavalry officer Count Vronsky (Fredric March). Vronsky has been toying with Kitty, who in her turn thinks Vronsky really loves her. The one who really does love Kitty is Levin, who lives out in the country which Kitty really doesn't want but winds up marrying him because there's nobody else for her.

Vronsky and Anna meet at a ball although they kind of know each other since Anna and his mother met on the train down to Moscow. Anna, you see, has a husband (Basil Rathbone) and son (Freddie Bartholomew) back in St. Petersburg. Still, Anna and Vronsky fall in love, even though it's bound to be a doomed relationship.

Thanks to Tolstoy's radical Orthodox Christianity, he's going to present a morality tale about how evil it is for a woman to step out on her husband; this is a perfect coupling for Hollywood's moralistic Production Code. There isn't any way Anna's husband Alexei is going to grant a divorce, even if Tsarist Russia had been as open about it as 1930s Hollywood (in real life) was. So Alexei says no, you can't have a divorce, and if you're not going to stop seeing Vronsky, you're out of the house and don't even get to see our son Sergei.

So Anna leaves to think it over and spend more time with Vronsky, who's got problems of his own. There's a war going on between Serbia (part of the fractious area between Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire at the time) and the Ottomans. Russia ought to remain neutral, and the Tsar hasn't joined the war. But there are a lot of folks in the military who see the Serbs as their Slavic brethren against those heathen Mohammedans, so they want to form a volunteer regiment and fight in Serbia because reasons. Vronsky at first wants to spend time with Anna (although I don't understand how he was able to get enough of a leave of absence to go off to Italy with her), but pressure mounts on him to join that volunteer regiment.

You probably know how the story ends although I'm not going to reveal it here. This isn't a bad retelling of Tolstoy's sprawling novel. Tolstoy's novel, depending on the translation, clocks in somewhere between 800 and 1,000 pages, meaning that for any movie, there's a lot that's going to have to be left out. Thankfully, when MGM made this version a big portion of what was left out was Levin, who serves even more than all the other characters as a vehicle for Tolstoy to expound upon his views not just on Christianity, but on treatment of the peasant classes. It makes the novel a slog at times, and not having much of it in the movie makes the movie move at a much brisker pace.

This is also the sort of material that was right up MGM's alley in an era when they still had Irving Thalberg. The lush MGM style works here instead of causing the problems it would in other genres, although I did at times find the movie trying a bit too hard to dollop on Russianness and not always succeeding. Still, it's an entertaining primer to Tolstoy's source material, if you don't want to deal with all of Tolstoy's philosophy.

Several of the versions of Anna Karenina are on DVD, including this one which got a release courtesy of the Warner Archive.