Word: karenina
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1920-1929
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
From the heroically borne ordeals of Job to the wretched suicide of Anna Karenina, the great stories of the race have been compounded of suffering. Anguish is constant in Ultima Thule, which is already being called great. Though modern critics are hasty with their wreaths, this story of impoverished Dr. Richard Mahony, 49, who began anew in Australia, is indubitably a deep-dug, searing novel. Huddling his wife and three lateborn children within bleak walls, the Doctor felt too poor to entertain. He thus lost contacts, clientele. Then he removed to another town, where one of his daughters died...
...affairs indeed, when a bunch of ignorant movie directors try to improve upon the works of the world's greatest writers and as a result drag their masterpieces down to the level of cheap comedy. Look what they did when they put my father's famous books. "Anna Karenina" and "The Cossacks", on the screen! My part in the production of these pictures was to fight for as little mutilation of the original as possible. I won about 50 per cent of that fight...
Love is certainly a poor translation of the title of Anna Karenina. It would be natural to suppose that the rest of famed Leo Tolstoi's novel would suffer similarly; that it does not, is due in part to the direction of Edmund Goulding and in even larger part to the acting of Greta Garbo...
...story definitely follows the outlines of what has been called "greatest novel in the world." Anna Karenina meets Count Vronsky one snowy day, has an affair with him that reaches its climax when she leaves her husband and its conclusion when she accepts a defeat (which is totally inevitable) by stepping in front of a fast train. That any film producer should begin by calling his picture Love and end it with this necessary but cinematically unconventional tragedy is only one of the many contradictions, which in their sum, make this one of the most striking adaptations yet effected...
There are four moments upon which the focus of the story falls: the snowstorm in which, after an accident to her sleigh, Anna meets Count Vronsky; the steeplechase in which he rides with the gay officers of his regiment; the moment when Anna Karenina, after she has gone away with her lover, creeps into the bedroom where her son is asleep; and the moment when, a vague figure in veils, she vanishes as silently as a bird's wing in the brightness of a locomotive's headlight...