capricious_nature Review of Anna Karenina

Anna Karenina (1935)

Who would leave Basil Rathbone for Frederic March?

[9/10 · 1 May 2005]

This version of Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina" is quite well-done, despite obvious flaws. I did miss the parallel romance of Levin and Kitty, but one can only fit so much into a two-hour film and director Clarence Brown chose to focus on the title character, which isn't exactly surprising. Garbo is wonderful--beautiful, yes, but also strong on the one side and vulnerable on the other...just the way I imagined Anna. Her death scene is profoundly moving, as is the scene between her and her son, Sergei (Freddie Bartholomew). Unfortunately for the film, while all the supporting actors are marvelous, the most important supporting player comes up distressingly short. I cannot for the life of me understand why Anna would leave Basil Rathbone's exciting and strangely attractive Karenin, for Frederic March's commonplace and genuinely boring Vronsky. They needed another actor (Errol Flynn springs to mind) to play the role of Vronsky, who is supposed to be the sort of man a woman would leave her husband, her family, and her entire social existence for. March just isn't all that interesting, and it makes the movie more disappointing than it should have been. Rathbone, on the other hand, is wonderfully repressed, with just enough passion lurking beneath the surface to make the viewer ask the inevitable question: why would anyone leave Basil Rathbone for Frederic March? You get the sense that a simple conversation between husband and wife would have solved all the problems. 9/10 stars for the sheer brilliance of Garbo, Rathbone and supporting cast, with the loss of one star for the forgettable March.