Anna Christie (1930)

Nominated for 3 Academy Awards:

Best Director: Clarence Brown

Best Actress: Greta Garbo

Best Cinematography

Anna Christie is known as Greta Garbo’s first sound film. She was already a famous silent film actress by then, and one of the most successful ones to make the transition to talkies. They marketed it using the slogan Garbo Talks! 😊 (which is cute)

As with many films from that very early era, it has numerous issues, as seen through the eyes of a modern viewer, 90 years later. There’s nothing groundbreaking about this adaptation of Eugene O'Neill’s play, but it’s not a bad film. It’s simple, following a very familiar template of a girl with a dark past too ashamed to accept love now, but well-acted. It’s stagey, but not drowned in monologues. I, for one, of course saw it for Greta Garbo and, while she’s not as good and mesmerizing as in her later work (Camille, Ninotchka, Anna Karenina) she tries to capture the struggle of the girl and succeeds the most at playing a drunk. Good supporting cast (they didn’t have categories for supporting acting until 1936, otherwise Marie Dressler would’ve surely been nominated).

I give it: 6.5/10

IMDB LINK