Anna Christie

"Gimme a whisky, ginger ale on the side, and don't be stingy, baby," is the first line spoken by Greta Garbo in a talking picture. It was 1930, and the film was Anna Christie, an adaptation of Eugene O'Neill's Pulitzer Prize-winning play. The film had been advertised with the triumphant "Garbo Talks!" tag line.

Over the next couple of weeks I'll be taking a look at the major films of Garbo. I've only seen a  few: Ninotchka, which I will be taking another look at, and Grand Hotel. There is a set of Garbo films that I'm Netflixing (sadly, her version of Anna Karenina, said to be definitive, is not available).

Anna Christie is set mostly in dockside bar in New York and a coal barge. The captain of the barge is a drunken Swede, George Marion, who lives with a lush (a wonderful Marie Dressler). He receives a letter that his long-estranged daughter, Anna, is coming from St. Paul. He is excited, as he feels guilty about abandoning her to relatives.

She arrives, and is clearly no innocent. She and Dressler have a few drinks and then Marion arrives. Garbo wants to crash with her father, but when she learns it's a coal barge she's not so sure. But she ends up liking life on the sea, and when her ship rescues some sailors from a sunken ship, she falls in love with the super macho Charles Bickford, who wants to marry her. But she has a sordid past, and resists his overtures.

Though this film is historically important, it's not very good. Directed by Clarence Brown, it doesn't seek to hid its stage bound source, with only a few scenes set outside the bar or the barge. The acting is still in the silent-film style, with overly dramatic line readings. Garbo, who was a huge silent star, had been held back by MGM from talkies until her English improved. Her English is great, but she gives some bizarre line readings, as if she were speaking phonetically, which she is not. Only in a dramatic speech at the end of the film, when she implores Bickford to love for who she is, does the electric nature of her presence come through.