OVP: Anna Christie (1930)

Film: Anna Christie (1930)
Stars: Greta Garbo, Charles Bickford, George F. Marion, Marie Dressler
Director: Clarence Brown
Oscar History: 3 nominations (Best Director, Actress-Greta Garbo, Cinematography)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

And we will see this to completion!  All week, in honor of us finally reaching the 2016 Best Actress OVP Ballot, I have decided to declare this week "Best Actress Week" on the blog, and have been reviewing daily a different Oscar Best Actress nominee that I saw for the first time during quarantine.  While we've been kind of all-over-the-board with nominations from melodramas to epic romances to action-adventures to silent war movies, today we're going to stay pretty close to yesterday's The Divine Lady in terms of timeline (just one year after), but unlike Corinne Griffith, today's star did not stay just in the Silent Era, but instead transitioned quite well into sound (in fact she did so with this film), and became a legend rather than an Oscar curiosity.  Greta Garbo was one of the last major players at MGM to transition to talkies in part because they worried about her thick accent being untenable in movies.  Garbo would prove them wrong, and would be a major star for the entirety of the decade, in part due to this film, Anna Christie, which was a big hit in 1930.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is focused on Anna (Garbo), the daughter of a Swedish sailor (Marion) who is returning home to New York after a terrible childhood spent with relatives in St. Paul, Minnesota.  She was sent there by her father who couldn't take care of her, and while there she was raped by her cousin, and eventually found herself working at a brothel.  She comes to New York in hopes of finding a new life, and falls in love with a rough-and-tumble sailor named Matt (Bickford), who wants to marry her, but she's afraid of her past coming out & him not loving her.  In a climactic scene, Anna does tell Matt that she was the victim of assault, and because she had no money, went into prostitution to survive.  Matt rejects her at first, but in the film's final scenes, they unite, realizing that their love will conquer all.

It's a short film, based on a play written by Eugene O'Neill.  The film, I'll be honest, kind of drags.  The movie's plot is pretty thin, even if we adjust for differing sexual politics about assault and prostitution ninety years after the fact-the first twenty minutes of the film have Marion, Garbo, and Marie Dressler (as an alcoholic who has also dabbled in prostitution), drunk out-of-their-minds, saying the same sort of dialogue over-and-over.  It picks up a little bit in the boat scenes, but really the whole movie's point is the climax, where we have Garbo confessing not only to Bickford, but also to her father the disappointments of her youth, and the hatred she has projected on men since they have betrayed her all her life.

This scene basically makes the whole movie worth it, and surely was the reason Garbo got an Oscar nomination.  It's rough to watch-this is pre-Code and while there are certain things that wouldn't have been able to be said in 1930, this is not 1940 where Garbo would have used veiled euphemisms to tell what happened to her, and it's interesting to watch how her character reserves more of her hate for the way that Matt & her father react to her rape & the prostitution that followed, rather than to the actions themselves, giving an understanding to the character that might have been lacking in a less gifted actress.  The ending is sugary and unrealistic, and really other than that one scene Anna Christie fails to intrigue, but as anyone who loves live theater can tell you, one great monologue can wash away a lot of flaws, and that's what happens in Anna Christie.